swap to chronological order of most recently modified
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(crossposted from my tumblr)
some left-handed gouache studies from the past week, after taking a couple months off thanks to the arm surgery and a deep fear that being bad at it would take all the fun out of it for me. painted on 12×16 paper, so I can get less mad about my wobbly left hand and focus more on larger marks and color and composition. good news! I’m not quite as bad at it as I had worried I would be, and it is mostly still very fun. bad news: not being able to draw a straight line continues to be a legit problem.
I don’t know if this arm recovery stuff is interesting to anybody besides myself, but not talking about it would make me crazy, so allow me to update you on all of the weird side effects of being able to partially but largely mostly not use my dominant hand:
- as expected, I continue to attempt to use my dominant hand for things despite the fact that it: cannot hold any weight, it cannot get my fingers out of the way when I go to grab something, portions of the back of my hand and fingers are completely numb and don’t notice when they bump against things, and despite the fact that I get weird nerve pain if I attempt to manipulate anything smaller than a tennis ball for any length of time
- I am most likely to thoughtlessly switch to my dominant hand in the middle of drawing or painting, in the middle of brushing my teeth, and while eating. apparently these are the three things I do where I get into a flow state.
- I am starting to confuse right and left, not so much as absolute directions, but as used to determine which way to tighten or loosen the lid on a jar or similar rotational acts that it turns out I absolutely do not have a logical structure for solving for anymore.
- I am starting to think of using my dominant hand for any purpose as “cheating”, which is definitely counterproductive, but that’s the ol’ internalized ableism for you.
- I am more convinced than ever that our entire society has been designed to be subtly infuriating to deal with using your left hand, and there is no way anyone who is left hand dominant needs to hear my opinions on the matter, but wow. gosh. geeze.
- I oscillate wildly between being deeply deeply grateful for adaptive tools and being deeply deeply angry about their limits. again, there is nobody out there who has been using any of these adaptive tools for more than 2 months who needs to hear my thoughts on the matter, so this message is just for able-bodied people: you cannot call a tool a successful replacement for abled usage methods if it does not allow self-determination in how you use it. Microsoft, I’m looking at you and the many useful swearwords you censor when i try using your speech to text tools.
I do still really love painting, and drawing, and writing, even though they are all now very much new challenges all over again. I suspect mostly I’m just speed running the same experience many people will go through as they age of having to modify and realign their approach to their usual modes of expression and interaction and creation, which is something people have been doing for as long as society has existed, which just means I’m going to be better at it, obviously, thanks to getting this Head start
and maybe a year from now I will have the ability to hold things in my dominant right hand for more than 30 seconds, and definitely a year from now I will have a lot more precise control over my left hand, so I guess there’s lots to look forward to 👍
in the meantime I will continue to paint my favourite things!
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Since moving apartments, I’ve been feeling a kind of spring cleaning urge for all of my things physical and it turns out, digital. Since my physical belongings are an unmanageable mountain of family heirlooms in the form of bankers boxes full of loose photographs, and artifacts from my grandmother’s childhood that nobody can identify but also nobody ever threw out, I’ve been feeling like I should try something a little bit more manageable first.
By that I mean, my digital life. I have maintained a personal website on the internet since 1997; for the majority of that time, my personal website has served primarily as a portfolio of my artwork. However, that’s not necessary right now, for a couple of reasons:
A) Careerwise, I’m working as a salaried, permanent art director at a videogame company. I’m not only not currently looking for a job, but my prior approach to jobhunting, having a collection of examples of my concept art and illustration, probably isn’t the best way to find another salaried art director job in future. While it might be one part of that hunt, I suspect I will also need examples of the finished games, as well as all the other things people use to get real jobs like references, etc. This means that a personal portfolio site won’t be the make or break in my future job hunt at this time.
B) Perhaps even more importantly, though, I don’t know that a portfolio of my prior work is going to be a particularly accurate demonstration of what my work going forward is going to look like. Since my arm surgery, I’m learning to draw with my left hand, and since I don’t have anywhere near the physical control over it that I did over my dominant hand, my approach to making art is being forced to change. And it’s very early days, right now I’m still teaching myself to write legibly, and building the muscles it takes to do that. Line control and mark making with appeal are simply not on the short-term schedule. So much as I am proud of, and attached to my prior work, my prior style, and my prior process, it feels dishonest to promise those to future clients. Or to myself, really. So a portfolio format just asks a lot of questions I have no answers to at this time.
Other reasons for having my work on the internet include selling it, which I certainly love to do, but between moving and my arm and paperwork, right now I’m just selling PDFs in a pay what you want capacity on my gumroad store. I do hope to get back into designing products and selling playmaps and so on, but it’s the right choice right now to keep that on hold.
So I’m a bit at a loss for what to do with my personal website, is the TLDR of all this. I really got out of the habit of blogging or writing personal thoughts on the Internet when we entered the everything is problematic phase of cultural conversations; I would like to reclaim that but it might be safer to do so in the less personal/more anonymous space of cohost or tumblr or such. I’m certainly curious to hear people’s thoughts on that!
One angle I had thought of was approaching my website as an archive, as opposed to a portfolio; I can be a bit obsessive about tracking the chronology of things, why not take advantage of that? But I don’t know if that has any interest to anybody aside from myself, though I guess that’s reason enough to do it. I had considered blogging about the process of learning to use my nondominant hand/retraining my dominant hand once we know what its final capacity will be, and I have been keeping personal notes on all of this, but I don’t think this is something I can share publicly in real-time. It’s a bit intense. Maybe years down the road I’ll be able to condense it into a simpler narrative that I’m comfortable sharing?
Unfortunately all of this is tied up in my process of relearning to create right now; I’m not sure that I really need outside help figuring this out, as much as I need just the space to dump thoughts out of my head. But if you do have thoughts, or stuff you’d like to see from me, or questions, certainly let me know!
Thanks for reading this hot mess!
(dictated but not read)
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I have had this wooden ikea tabletop box for decades, and since it took a beating in my last move, I decided to sand it all down to clean wood and paint it up decadently, in hopes that it delights me whenever I look at it, and I feel comfortable saying it sure does!
I sanded the wood down, painted directly onto the raw wood to let the watercolour run into the grain, then sanded it all, lightly sealed it with transparent watercolour ground, and added much more opaque paint to detail the terrain, rivers, etc. Then I used my finetec copper paint to add metallic detailing on the drawerfronts and around the top edges of the drawers to class things up.
Not pictured: the interiors of the drawers are all pastels from the general palette.
Process shots:
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Well-worn warrior queen. Painted in procreate with my non-dominant hand.
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So I caved and bought Dragon naturally speaking professional 16. It’s the most supported and most recommended dictation software; and it’s been around for decades. So, I naïvely thought that it would be a straightforward and professional experience purchasing installing and setting up the software but no, absolutely not, it’s incredibly infuriating to deal with their website their online store customer support just the works. There are no built-in user facing notifications of any kind for failed purchases due to inaccurate credit card information, there is multiple versions of the site that all require their own login, and it turns out they haven’t even updated pages that offer deprecated add-ons. So you just sit there trying to figure out why the button doesn’t work, because there is no visible reason it shouldn’t.
Anyways, once I do get it purchased downloaded and installed, I’m reminded that to use full functionality in a browser I need to install that browser’s Dragon extension. About a year and 1/2 ago I took the time and switched my entire Internet life professional personal etc. over to Firefox. Fun fact! in July this year, Nuance who created Dragon, and Mozilla who created Firefox, had big breakup where neither supports the other any longer.
So right now my options are turn off Mozilla’s add-on block list and use the glitchy and deprecated extension file that other users have mercifully uploaded online; use Firefox without the extended support for verbally navigating and editing text; or switch everything in my life back to Google fucking chrome.
Infuriatingly I suspect that I will be back in chrome by the end of this, because however glitchy and deprecated this extension file is now at four months old, it’s going to only get worse.
I’ve already gone far enough to call and find out what’s going on which is how I found out that Nuance officially does not support Firefox-I have yet to find anywhere in their web documentation that would tell me that ahead of time- and as far as I can tell there is no intent to change that situation. The vicious little rage being in my head assumes that because Microsoft recently bought nuance, I should be grateful that it even works in chrome.
Anyways this is not a call for help or advice, I just needed to share this absolutely infuriating update with people who also care about what browser they use and spend a lot of time setting it up carefully just for themselves.
RIP my Firefox life; it was great while it lasted.
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practicing writing and drawing with my awful terrible no good left hand moodboard
posted:
updated:
posted to: life
i’m gonna relearn how to enjoy this if it kills me.
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Hey cohost I could use some help or some referrals to people who might actually be able to help or even like a really helpful YouTube video
So I’m down to one hand for typing and mousing and everything which as you might expect is making me twitchy with frustration, just constant ongoing frustration
I’ve been learning how to touch type with just my left hand on a small keyboard, the logic tech K480 – so ask number one is if you have a recommendation for a good quality mechanical not just compact but legit smaller keyboard or intentionally designed for left hand one hand only typing keyboard, but specifically one that still uses the QWERTY layout.
I enormously do not want to learn another layout. I was a very fast touch typer averaging 90 words a minute and in a flow state 130 a 140, and I know that layout very literally like the back of my hand. Before all this happened I had relearned that layout on a variety of other ergonomic keyboards, from ones that were just different proportions, to ones that were split entirely apart. I know I can relearn that layout in a different proportion, and I I don’t want to learn another layout.
The thing is I have to use keyboards other than the one keyboard I have at my desk, right? Like I have to be able to use a keyboard at the library or on my phone or my iPad or literally any other keyboard in the universe. It makes sense to me to get better at using my left hand on a universal keyboard layout instead of re learning something even something like door Jack that maybe isn’t completely unknown but still not reliably available.
I’ve been using typingclub.com training and it helps, but it’s clearly limited, y’know?
Anyways why I’m asking for help is because I really can’t find what I’m looking for right now and I could really use some help locating it.
If you’re noticing some weird errors in this post it’s because I’m using Windows dictation to write it because I’m tired. Windows dictation is not great, it has a lag because it’s using stuff on line and, because it’s using stuff on line, it just glitches out some times. I would also really really like to learn good reliable trainable voice to text software. I don’t need to operate my whole computer with it, mousing is certainly still fine, but I would love to be able to edit my own text as well. Especially I would like to be able to correct the software when it mishears me so that it can learn. Also, fun fact, windows dictation ******* sensors me.
(….switching to typing after that last sentence fully glitched out windows dictation)
so if you have any tried-and tested recommendation (please don’t just google, i am still capable of googling tyvm) please please pass them along.
sorry for the brutally irritable tone, it hasn’t even been two weeks and i am really having a Time whenever i sit down to my computer, a thing i once took immense pride in being very comfortable using.
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