The irony is that it is 33ºC as I type this. But for the second summer in a row temperatures have stayed low enough and we’ve had just enough precipitation to stave off the appearance of those FIRE WARNING signs that appear on the Brunette River trail and at Burnaby Lake.
A few years ago we went an entire calendar month–July–without any official rainfall. Grass was turning yellow in May. I thought, “Well, climate change is slowly turning southern BC into a desert, whaddyagonnado?” But the past two years things have tracked more normal, with no long stretches of nice weather, just days of nice weather punctuated by clouds or some shower, then sun again and back and forth until The Rains of the fall start in earnest.
I’m not complaining, exactly. Some precipitation in the summer also means no out of control forest fires and the sky has not turned a hazy amber that lasts for weeks on end, either. These things are nice and good. I guess we’ll see if extremely dry summers return next year. Based on current events, I don’t think humans are going to do much to stop or even slow climate change.
This is the second book in Austin Kleon’s trilogy of motivational books for creative (and other) types. I read it after the other two, but they can easily be read in any order.
Much like the other books, Show Your Work is peppered with Kleon’s quirky illustrations and art as he provides insights and tips in easily digestible bites. The advice is sound, smart and simple, with each piece built around its own chapter.
This time the focus is on getting your work seen, your presence known and to push aside some long-held conceptions, such as how selling art leads to the corruption of it. One example Kleon points to is how Michaelangelo was commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel).
The advice ranges from sharing some small part of your process with your audience every day (usually on the social media outlet of your choice) to dispensing with the notion of keeping everything secret, openly sharing how you work, how you do things, so that others can benefit from your knowledge as you may have benefited from the knowledge of others. Kleon is big on community, basically.
This is a good book and a short book, so it’s easy to dip back into it when inspiration or motivation is lacking, or when you feel you are drifting and losing focus.
This one leans more toward creative types, people who make stuff for others to enjoy, but I think anyone who can appreciate the same is bound to get something out of this book.
I came across this video on YouTube last night from Struthless, in which he discusses the drawing advice given to him in 2016 that changed his life.
Leaving aside how quaint the world seemed in the long ago time of January 2020, I found this advice resonant, especially when I look back at my creative shenanigans when I was younger. Here are some of the things I did:
recorded audio plays/skits
acted, directed and wrote skits in school; acted in school plays
worked with clay (and plasticine)
painted
sketched
wrote short stories, started several novels
wrote and drew multiple comics
learned to play one song on acoustic guitar
played the recorder in music class (to be fair, I had to do this)
That’s a pretty extensive list. And for a kid, it’s actually okay to be scattered. I was trying stuff out. Looking back, I enjoyed pretty much all of it, too. I was a Renaissance Lad.
But as an adult, with much more limited time to not just do stuff, but to learn to do stuff, I need to focus. I can’t do everything.
I kind of still want to, though.
But with my fiction writing currently in a comfortable coma, blissfully unaware of the hellscape that 2020 has become, I have decided to focus on drawing and sketching, first by honing my analog (pen and paper) skills, then moving into the digital realm of pen and tablet. I’ll occasionally tell myself, “But I could learn acoustic guitar, like, actually learn it this time” and then I have to remind myself, “No, stay focused. Do one thing well, not ten things using 1/10th of your ass on each” (ass analogies have been popular ever since that one episode of The Simpsons).
This video makes that point and goes even farther, by showing how he (Struthless) initially focused on not just drawing over other creative outlets but drawing just one thing–ibises. Many, many ibises. By narrowing his focus, he was able to do this one thing really well, and used it as a means to expand beyond, creating more elaborate tableaus around ibises.
It’s a good way to approach art.
I am not going to draw ibises.
But I do have my own thing: Gum Gum People.
And now I own the domain for them. This will eventually become my home for all art, not just GGP-specific stuff.
We’ll see how it goes. For now, I am putting writing on the backburner, guilt-free. If I get drawn (ho ho) back to it, it was meant to be. If not, well…hopefully I’ll have settled onto something even more rewarding. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life watching cat videos.
I have walked by a house under construction in the neighborhood* many times and only today noticed a sunflower growing on the boulevard in front of it. How weird.
* Why do I use American spellings? Conservation of letters, and it makes it easier to sell my writing to American markets, which makes no sense in context of this blog, but it just became a habit after awhile.
On July 14, the second official day of my summer vacation, I went for a walk around Burnaby Lake. The weather was nice, I felt good. It was a long walk, around 19 km in total. At around the 17 km mark my left heel began to hurt for reasons unclear to me. Some possibilities that I came up with later:
Pulled muscle
Bruised bone
Broken or sprained bone
I managed to walk so wrong I damaged the heel
ALIENS
It is now August 12 as I write this, nearly a month later.
The left heel is still sore.
Is it better than before? I will say it is better than before, yes. And it may in part still be sore because I keep going for walks, almost every day, though the distance has shrunk from 19 km to 7-9 km. And I walk aggressively. The heel actually doesn’t feel too bad on these walks, as if I am limbering up the muscles and they feel better as a result.
But I’m not a doctor, so who knows. It could be ALIENS.
If my left heel is still sore when my doctor is back from his vacation (hopefully he does not hurt his heels), I will arrange an appointment to discuss possibilities, like resting the heel or getting a bionic replacement.
This concludes my August 2020 heel update. There may be a Part 2.
I should probably have been mentioning here that I ended my last week of vacation by going on roughly hour-long walks down the Brunette River trail in lieu of running (exciting heel update also coming soon). The weather has been fairly good for these brisk walks and I’ve resumed listening to music. I am now doing the walks immediately after work and they serve as a nice way to unwind from the day–and help get ye old blood circulating after spending most of the day sitting.
Normally I will listen to a specific album if I’m in the mood or just shuffle all songs and skip any that come up that I’m not in the mood for. Or just kind of suck, because let’s face it, not every album released is filler-free.
The last three walks I have done something different. I started listening to songs in alphabetical order. My song library consists of over 3,600 titles so it would take awhile to get through the entire alphabet (10 days if iTunes is right). That’s a lot of walking.
I am still on the letter A and it’s actually not a bad way to listen to music. I sometimes hear songs with the same title from different bands, I’ve discovered a lot of songs start with the word “All” and I’ve mostly not skipped any songs.
I may move to the B’s early, though, because I’d like to hear some other letters without having to necessarily commit to 240 hours of walking.
Tonight, I finally started doing actual exercises and actual drawing. Woo!
Specifically, I began Drawabox’s Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes and then started the homework. Much like in my school days, I did not finish my homework in one sitting.
The first section is on Lines and I did not quite make it through because I started late and don’t want to rush. I did finish the first two of three exercises on lines.
Superimposed lines
Two pages of lines where you start with a base line and then draw over it eight times, trying to achieve even, confident strokes that overlap as much as possible. My results are not exactly exact. I also noticed the copy paper I was using tended to almost create grooves, so if I got the pen tip into a certain groove, it was hard to get out of it. I switched to different printer paper after the first page.
Page 1:
Page 2:
The second exercise is Ghosted Lines, in which you trace out how you are going to draw a line connecting two points before committing to drawing the actual line. This is supposed to improve muscle memory, among other things.
Some of the lines are decent but I have a tendency to arc a little and overshoot the end point. The lesson addresses both of these things, so I am a bit of a noob here.
A few things I noticed:
The exercises are designed to get you to draw from the shoulder, not from the elbow or wrist. My worst lines were when I forgot this and drew from the wrist.
I often found I was gripping the ultrafine marker too tightly and would take a few moments to relax my grip before drawing. This definitely helped, but it is something I will need to keep on top of, since my natural tendency is to grip the marker like I must CRUSH IT TO DEATH.
Next up is the final Lines lesson, Ghosted Planes. I did a few as a finale for the night and my planes were not exactly air-worthy.
I need to better arrange my desk for drawing, too. Things are a little tight. I shall do so before completing the current lesson.
I have been delinquent in posting the past few days. I have no good explanation for this other than general laziness, so on with the lessons!
Having completed the Intro to Digital Painting 101 on https://www.ctrlpaint.com/getting-started I moved onto the series of videos on traditional drawing, in which Matt Kohr explains the tools to be used (mainly HB pencils and a combo of vinyl and kneaded erasers) and a few basics. The confusion came when he started referencing things in videos that I had clearly not seen. This made me check the user comments and for some reason, the videos are posted out of order. It wasn’t a huge thing, but it did not instill confidence in the rest of the material. I watched the following:
For those playing drawing along at home, the correct order as noted by a user, seems to be:
Welcome to Traditional Drawing
Crtl+Paint Unplugged road Map
The Pencil
Visual Measuring
Unplugged: Pencils and erasers
The first actual exercise is to draw soft, loopy ovals in pencil, to help train the use of shoulder movement and get away from the tight grip used when writing–and rarely for drawing.
After the confusion of these mis-sorted videos, I went over to https://drawabox.com/ and started their lessons. They take a different approach, swapping in ultrafine markers for pencils, with the notion that this is easier because it lessens the urge to fix mistakes (no erasing) and just focus on the exercises, and the pen produces a single thickness of line that requires no pressure (one of the things they emphasize is to not mix different pen sizes). With pencils, the pressure will affect the stroke, as will the tilt of the pencil. Pens keep things simple and presumably easier for the beginner.
I have completed:
Lesson 0: Getting Started, an explanation of the lessons and tools needed, along with an overview of the non-technical skills that will be needed and refined through the lessons (patience, spatial awareness, etc).
I have read through but not yet finished:
Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes. This includes the first actual drawing bits (homework, as the site calls it), requiring a total of five pages for the three subjects. Repetition is a key component here–getting better by doing.
I have not yet taken pen or pencil to paper, because I am pondering the following:
Try doing both sets of lessons together (potentially confusing/overwhelming)
Do one set of lessons first, then the other
Stick to one set of lessons, then only do the other if I feel it’s needed
I don’t want to turn this into an excuse for not diving in, so I will likely start doing both and see how it goes. It’s easy enough to drop one and go back later.
And by “great” I mean they do not have soothing, melodic voices or are obviously not professionally trained, but I love ’em anyway, because their voices have…yep…character.
You may disagree on the alleged vocal greatness of some of the people on this list, either thinking them good enough to not be on this list or maybe bad enough to not merit inclusion. I also did not set out to make an exclusively male list, but every female singer I like has a genuinely awesome-sounding voice. Women are just better.
Stephin Merrit (The Magnetic Fields). Merrit has this wonderfully rumbly bass that often feels like it’s on the verge of going off-key but never quite does. “Papa Was a Rodeo” from the album 69 Love Songs is a great example of it.
Roger Waters (Pink Floyd). I compare Waters’ vocals to the dialogue of David Lynch’s Dune, where everyone seems to either shout or whisper. Waters is very good at the shout/whisper thing. The period around his second solo album, Radio KAOS, is the “highlight” of this where he seemed to be especially struggling to just sing in a normal tone. But he is very good at getting across venom and anger.
https://youtu.be/l5MigxIKovI
Robert Smith (The Cure). I went to a Cure concert in 1987 with a couple of friends when they played at the Expo Theatre (RIP). At the time I had no idea who the band was, confusing them with The Cult. The show was pretty good, though I was not entirely sure why girls (and some guys) kept throwing themselves at the lead singer, an unimposing man who looked a bit like Edward Scissorhands minus the scissors. Smith’s vocals are well-suited to the goth dirges the band is famous for, but I especially like his takes on their lighter material like “Why Can’t I Be You.” The video below has a bit of everything, from the regrettable use of black face to Smith dressed as a proto-furry.
Bob Dylan. I’m not even going to explain this one. Everyone knows Bob. That said, his vocals on the two Traveling Wilburys albums are strong and he clearly had fun with the material. “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” remains a favorite of mine.
I am treating my art lessons as if I am a beginner, as my last instruction was in high school, which was…awhile back
I have chosen to start this particular adventure with Ctrl+Paint, a site featuring copious free lessons provided by freelance artist Matt Kohr. It helps that Matt has a really calm, soothing voice in the videos, as opposed to say, Bobcat Goldthwaite’s.
I have completed the first set of lessons, Digital Painting 101, which comprises six videos. It introduces you to some key functions, features, and handy shortcuts in Photoshop.
The Ctrl+Paint videos highly recommend using Photoshop for ease in following the lessons, so I have temporarily renewed my subscription. I also dusted off my Intuos tablet and so far things are working as expected.
In time I will drop Photoshop, and transfer what I’ve learned to Affinity Photo and Procreate on the iPad. For now, I am following dem rules to keep things simple.
The initial lessons are traightforward, but the next set is where it will get interesting, as it goes back into traditional drawing instruction–using pen, pencil and paper. I have all three, so I am ready to start scrawling. I never practiced much in school because my attention was split among a bunch of stuff (as I mentioned in a previous post), so I may get somewhat better results this time. Or at least know sooner when to give up and go back to writing haikus.
I plan to start the next lessons tonight, so another update should arrive soon™.
