Category Archives: Reflection

Getting Better at Art

I mentioned in a previous post that I’d explore the topic of what it means to “get better at art.”

Each of us has a different definition of what better means.

I believe it helps to define what better means. If I look at the art I’m making and I’m thinking, “I can do that better. ” Or, “I don’t like that.” I need to figure out why I don’t like the piece or why I think it needs to be better.

For instance, I have felt like my landscapes were off, and it was easy for me to look at them and label them as stiff and boring. Around 15 years ago I looked at my portraits and thought, “I’d like to do those better.” Initially with portraits that meant doing them realistically. Then I realized I wanted them to be more about the personalities than fully realistic. Vibes not realism. So I set about getting looser with my portraits.

As for my landscapes I’m making a lot of landscapes. I’m forcing myself to look at values and contrast and I’m making myself work loose.

I’m using chunky materials on toned papers and attempting to be loose. I’m looking at the values. I’m making values studies. I’m trying to work fast. I’m trying to get the idea down and then go back and add in more contrast and value. I’m worrying less about details and more about the vibe of the landscapes.

In just a week of concentrated study my landscapes have gotten better. (IMO)

It’s back to basics but it is also defining what I mean by getting better. I could have just made a few dozen landscapes without a goal in mind, but without that goal I flounder. Without a goal I make image after image and get frustrated about why my art isn’t getting to where I want it to be. I go in circles.

With a goal I can try different things with different materials.

Currently I’m feeling better about my landscapes in the kid’s tempera sticks but I attempted a landscape in watercolors and it was stiff and lacked the fun of the landscapes in the kid’s tempera sticks. So my new goal is to work on landscapes in watercolors but to explore making them feel loose and spontaneous and fun.

The importance of Support and NOW

Leave a reply

My grandfather told me he’d always wanted to be an artist, specifically an oil painter, but as a poor kid from a poor family he joined the Coast Guard. Mostly because it was the only branch of the military where he could guarantee that he would never get on a plane. This was back in the late 40’s so I guess that makes sense.

He served until he was injured falling from a ladder. I’m not sure exactly what happened with the injury but I do know it hurt his back and his hip. He had a lump that he was told was scar tissue. In the early 90s the lump grew and started to be painful. The doctor’s did a biopsy and found that it was still benign and just scar tissue but in the exams they found that he had lung cancer.

He died at 67, never having picked up a brush.

This has always been a driving force behind my art making and encouraging others to make art. Part of me wonders what kind of art my grandfather would have made, had he ever gotten the encouragement to pick up a brush. Especially if his family had the means to encourage him to pick up a brush.

I imagine him making paintings of forests and fields, things that celebrate the home and life he had made. Maybe he would have painted cars and trucks- the things he repaired as part of his job as one of the head members of the maintenance team at the local University.

I wonder.

One of the big things I wonder about is what would happen if we were all given support around the things we love and care about? I’m thinking about Karen Faulkner.*

If you don’t know the story, Karen Faulkner is a Harvard grad venture capitalist who started to ride a bike for enjoyment and exercise in 2017. She made the US Olympic team as a replacement. She quit her venture capital job in 2021 to ride full time. She won gold in the women’s olympic cycling event at 31.

There’s a lot to unpack here. She went to Harvard, most of the reports I read failed to mention that she rowed for Harvard and holds rowing records. So she was already fit. She was a venture capitalist** so she made a fair amount of money.

What does this have to do with art?

Nothing really, but it goes to show that if you have support and systems and money you can quit your job and follow your dreams.

Many of the kids I work with are born into poverty and part of where I work, works to break the cycle of poverty through gaining scholarships and other financial help to send them to college.

I’ve been wondering how I can better support the people in my life and the people reading this with their art. How do we break generational poverty thinking and encourage more art making for art’s sake.

Throughout my life I’ve seen art and art making as an essential form of communication that reaches across boundaries and increases connection between people with differences. Art communicates. Art connects. Art heals.

Imagine if we all had just a little bit of the money a venture capitalist has and the art that would be made.

*forgive me for delving a little into my other love- cycling. I don’t follow races or even road cycling, but this story captured my interest.

**I have some serious ICK issues with venture capital. Look what they have done to NING and other companies.

links:

Olympic reporting

NBC Reporting

When the Internet Began

Leave a reply

Remember when the internet was a collection of people doing interesting things and sharing them? It was always a little weird and fun. Now I sometimes feel like the internet is a bit of a cesspool of hate and fear mongering. In an effort of rejuvinating the weird and fun I present to you these little videos:
https://vimeo.com/darenjannace/10946?ref=tw-share

Worth the effort to click that link. A guy made a video by animating 30 post it notes a day for one year. 30 frames= 1 second. Amazing and just under 7 minutes long. Fun. Weird. Old school internet.

Back in the day I used to troll EDC groups with my EDC Spork*. Some hated me, some loved me. This guy made a great video about a tactical wooden spoon. I love the send up of tactical EDC culture. Hilarious.

*I really need to start to carry my spork again. I’ve gotten out of the habit since my workplace has 2 full kitchens for use, but often I just use disposable stuff available from the places where I often buy my lunch. UGH.

Drawing from Life Informs the Imagination

Leave a reply

I don’t design my pages. It has never been a thing that I do. I just draw and fit it to the page, occasionally I’ll put some text into a bare area and call it good. In a way the lack of design is design.

As I was working on a video about drawing cartoon faces I stated (paraphrasing here) that when I create a cartoon face I am drawing on all the experience I have drawing faces from photos and life.

The kids I work with complain about drawing from life, arguing that they need to work on their manga style rather than drawing stuff from life. They hate to hear that all the greats drew and still draw from life on the regular. Every time we put pen(cil) to paper it changes and alters our ability to render for the better.*

I did a vibey realistic drawing of a face today with pen and ink wash, a favorite technique. Then I went on to draw 7 different version of him with a few different materials. It was and is a great exercise in character design but also in seeing exactly how drawing real but with a focus on vibes and from “life” really informs my cartoon faces. Those characters can feel more REAL because I draw vibey realism.

I tested it with a fude nib, 2 types of gel pen, and a brush pen. Each gives a different feel to the cartoon face.

As a further test I’m definitely going to test this idea out with the drawing tablet in Krita.

* We can discuss what I mean by better in a future post.

Vacation Planning

Leave a reply

Some of you may know that for years I worked a retail gig, and even when I had worked my way up into the admin office and eventually the regional office, I still worked the holidays. Expectation in retail is that all hands are on deck.

Part of my reason for going to grad school was to not have to work the holidays. I missed seeing my family on the important days. Also, nothing will make you hate the holidays like working retail and dealing with how awful some people are.

I’m taking the whole week around Turkey Day off. Why? Because I can. I’m also taking about a week and a half off around Christmas and New Year’s. Why? Again, because I can.

Turkey day is the last time we visit my family until warmer weather.

Every time we visit I overpack art supplies and think I’m going to make all sorts of art and spend a lot of time journaling. Instead, I watch movies, YouTube, and generally relax.

I’m about to go through this process again.

I have decided to take with me:

My current ETEWJ
My small square journal
A pocket notebook with ideas for videos and zines
Waterbrushes- assorted
Mungyo Watercolor Crayons reviewed here
Handful of Paint Pens and Markers
The Caliarts watercolor set I reviewed here
Various Pens

My laptop
My new drawing tablet
Camera and mic set up, though not sure which and I won’t likely record any art making. Also a tripod and a neck/chest mount just in case I go somewhere and I do want to draw.

Because I know that I won’t make that much physical art what I am hoping to do is to get some time in on the drawing tablet and get more comfortable on it. I’m feeling more confident but still awkward.

I also hope to get more of the journaling zine ready to go. I’ve got a lot of typing to do on it before I can do the hand drawing I want to do. I’ve wanted to scan and reprint some of the Useful Journaling and make them into a download and printable.

As for Christmas, I really want and need to get some real stuff done around the house, plus really dive deep into the zines I’ve had churning in my brain for the last few years.

I’ve been really enjoying my morning spreads and pages that I’ve been doing and I’ve got to scan a bunch more of them. It’s been quite cathartic to think about art in the face of difficult times.

During Tangerine Mussolini’s first term I spent a lot of time making zines, but also I spent a lot of time in those first COVID lockdown months feeling very flat and strange. Looking back much of that time was very surreal and I realized how much I prefer being able to GO SOMEWHERE on the regular. Even if that is work. I turned half my yard into a garden, which I have not continued to maintain… We’ll see about this spring.

Anyway, I have memories that seem very surreal, but this go round I want to make sure I’m making more art and connecting locally and further out.

Anyway, I’m going to go make art. I hope you do too.

The Video Making Process and Upload

Leave a reply

My video making process is pretty straight forward, and there are 2 styles when it comes to my art videos- talk while I art and voice over. I prefer the talk while I art despite it being a little more garbled and often make a little less sense. The voice over is a lot more work.

The videos are both shot in the same way. I have an overhead rig that I created out of mini lightweight light stands for creators or influencers (ugh). I then have a pole that goes across and over my art making area that is made up of a leg from an old broken tripod. I have a lot of lights mounted because the office where i work is so dark. This is the one downside of this house- the light in the rooms where i have had my workspaces has terrible light. It’s always been this way. I miss our old apartment and its’ amazing light filled rooms.

The camera lives on a mount above the space. It is always ready to go. I make sure that the batteries in the mic and the camera are always charged and that there is a card in the cam.

I make it so I have no excuses to not turn on the camera when I sit down to make art. I don’t record everything, but I am now recording A LOT.

I do have to remind myself to turn the mic on. It is the one thing I really do struggle with.

It doesn’t take long to fill up a terabyte drive when you shoot high quality video.

Basically I record in the morning before work, or occasionally after work. On Saturdays I transfer a week’s worth of video to my laptop and also move already completed videos to an external hard drive. Currently I’m saving the videos I used to make the videos but I think I’m going to only keep the finished videos, though part of me wonders if that is a mistake. Especially considering how cheap SSD and SD cards are.

Once the files are on my laptop I open up CapCut. Yes, I taught myself Davinci Resolve and used Adobe Rush and use a cheap online editor. Why? I can auto make YouTube thumbnails with it and once i figured out how to edit the audio it works fine.*

It’s robust enough to do what i need since I shoot everything consecutively or in chunks that make sense.

Anyway, I pull the video into CapCut and process the audio first. I level the audio- push a button that brings the lows up and squashes down the peaks where I speak too loudly. Then I push another button that separates the speaking from the background noise. This is helpful when I have a lot of trucks tearing up the road in front of my house. It does leave a bit of a hollow artifact that I think I could fix in Davinci or Rush. sadly my new laptop can’t run Rush.

I then go through my video and remove the spots where I use a heat gun, fart or make other unpleasant noises.

I decide if there are areas where I want to speed up the video. I have found that most people want to watch the video at close to or at real time speed. I have decided that the most I’ll speed up my video is 2x for instructional videos and if I’m doing a voiceover of an art making, then I’ll use whatever speed make sense for the video.

If there are areas where I don’t talk, I add in cuts, full silence then and add music over those areas.

I then add in titles, text and end credits.

After all that I click another button and create the YouTube thumbnail. This involves finding a still in the video and adding text to it. this is where i think about the title to the video and the almighty algorithm and how search might find my video. I try to make something catchy but I fail at things people click on.

I am currently testing out “Getting Loose in Your Sketchbook” and “Fill Your Sketchbook” which seem to be the god awful click bait titles that are working. UGH I hate it.

This has been a bit of extra work as I play around with a glitch effect on the title. It’s fun but I think makes the title hard to read. I’ll probably quit using it for some of the stuff CapCut suggests in a colorway I like.
After all this I do a final check to make sure the title in the video and episode number is correct.

The episode number is really only there so I know what order I intend them for upload. I have and frequently upload them in a different order if the chosen order makes them fall on the wrong day of the week.

For instance, I don’t schedule review videos for Saturdays, those are for Tuesdays or Thursdays. I try to load a longer art making video on Saturdays because they seem to do better on those days. as for reviews, it doesn’t matter what day i load those, they always seem to get the same number of views no matter than day I post them.
Anyway, i’m writing this to avoid watching the election results roll in and it’s worked kind of.

* Though there are times when there is an echo that comes from the noise cancellation on the mic. It only happens when there is a lot of really loud ambient sound- like the construction happening on my street. Those are times when I record a voice over because the audio is trash.

Always Someone There to Remind Me

Leave a reply

When I was a pre-teen my Dad bought a beat up Ford Ranger. It had a tape deck that the previous owner claimed had a tape stuck in it. That tape was a copy of Naked Eyes Burning Bridges. I managed to get it out of the tape deck and then proceeded to listen to it on repeat.

Pre-teen me loved Brit synth pop. I think I wore that tape out.

Also I wanted that truck.

The title I used for this post is a riff on one of the songs on that tape- the actual song was “Always Some THING There to Remind Me” and apparently it has been recorded by quite a few artists.

Anyway, after that intro…

I was reminded today of how there is always someone there to remind me about what they think about me, my art, and how they think I should also feel about all that. And generally they don’t rate me or my opinions very highly. There is always some fool out there ready to tear me down.

And frankly it’s really hard to weather that storm.

Their garbage opinion always seems to rain down when I’m at my my fragile. When the scaffolding of my self esteem is constructed but don’t have the support braces installed yet.

These people, they are jealous of success. When they sniff out success they want to take a dump on it. When they see my joy they want to dump on it. This pic has a fun little glitch in it. The wheels do not look like that IRL! I wish I knew how to make it happen again!

These are the worst kinds of people. They just dump on everything and everything. They don’t really care who they dump on, they simply want to tear down people in a misguided attempt to build themselves up.

I use a generic THEY here because we all have a dumper in our lives. I’ve referred to these people as Dream Dumpers before. These are the people when you tell them about your favorite new cheese/ TV show/ art material/ movie/ hobby/ etc… they just dump on it.

Their capacity for finding the worst in everything is mirrored by how awful they feel about pretty much everything- they hate their boss and their job, as well as just about everything else in the world. But mostly they hate themselves.

I write this not to find empathy, though I do have empathy for people who hate everything. I write this because it helps me to think about the hate that these folx spew outward, they also spew it inward.

Imagine how horrible I/you feel about what these folx say to you either in person or in a social media comment. Then imagine them saying it back to themselves over and over and over again.

How awful.

Garbage in. Garbage out.

It gives me some perspective. But also it helps me to see that the Dream Dumper, their perspective is skewed. They can’t see the joy because all they have is hate. They dump on good happy things out of jealousy, even if they don'[t know they feel jealous, how can they actually know how they feel when everything is shrouded in hate?

Dream dumpers suck the joy out of pretty much everything.

Re-post from my Ko-Fi page, get my posts much earlier there.

Blog Updates

Leave a reply

I just spent some time performing a lot of behind the scenes updates to the blog. a lot of things were broken and frankly I did not have time this spring or summer to do these updates.* I decided to buckle down and do those updates today. So apologies for the many posts in one day.

You will see cross posts from my Ko-fi account happening here. Posts occur on my ko-fi page first and then a week or so later are posted here. There are supporter only posts. Depending on the nature of those posts, they may or may not be cross posted. I like to make sure that the people who support me get a lot of benefit for doing so.

I am working REALLY hard to remonetize my youtube channel. So please click any links to YouTube and watch some videos, even if all you are doing is letting it play in the background as you work.

Also, I use Amazon affiliate links in these posts and on Amazon. If you are thinking of doing ANY shopping on Amazon, click one of my Amazon links even if you aren’t going to buy that particular item. I’ll get some small portion of your purchase if you do that. ** he affiliate program really helps to keep this blog and my YT channel going. I don’t make a lot from it (usually around $25-50 a month.) But it is enough for me to pay for the occasional art supplies and for all the hosting fees I use to keep this blog up.

I’ll make sure to announce my YouTube videos here the best I can, but if you are interested in art making and art journaling head over to my channel and his subscribe. I post videos about art journaling, making art and some reviews of budget conscious art journaling products.

*i.e. I did not find the time to do the updates, I am working on work-life-and own work balance, my health has become a priority for the last few years which means I have to lean my balance to life.

**Do this for any of your favorite creators, it helps us immensely.

6 Months Later…

Leave a reply

Well, shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

It’s been just under 6 months since I last posted anything here. Between work and working on my health and wellness (more about that over at LessISMoreHealthy on YouTube.) I haven’t had time to make art other than for work and certainly not to write up dedicated posts about it.

I’ve learned a lot about balance over the last few months and the balance had to shift toward taking care of my health, else, in the words of my nurse practitioner, I die young after living with a reduced quality of life. She was kinder about it than that, but still. This is not my place to directly discuss my health, but I’m now significantly healthier- my numbers during bloodwork are better and most of all, I FEEL better.

It’s dramatic, but I’m going to lean into it, walking and riding my bike has changed my life.

It’s funny, I had to pick up a few things at Wally World and Tarjaaaay when I spotted the Back to School display and decided it was time to make a return to writing a bit about stationery. So I picked up a few gel pens and, you guessed it, composition notebooks. After making this decision and sitting on the tools to be reviewed for a week, I received a DIRE warning from my hosting company. Fix the spambot problem with my blog or get it removed from their servers.

Yikes.

So I spent this morning, updating all the wordpress plugins that I had set to manual, which was fine when I was regularly updating and looking at the admin panel of this blog on the regular. Now, all the important anti-spam stuff is set to auto-update and I can breath a little easier.

I also realized that NONE of the comments and feedback had gone to my email as it’s supposed to, so if you have reached out to me after February of 2023 and I didn’t get back to you, well, it’s not you, it’s me and my obstinate need to control all aspects of my blog until I ignore it completely for 6 months and never update stuff so things end up disappearing… Yeah. Sorry about that.

No promises here, but as my health has improved (I still have to majorly focus on it for at least another year to get my numbers back where they need to be, but progress is progress and should be celebrated) I realize I also need to focus on the MANY other things in my life that bring me joy and happiness. Which of course, includes art and writing.

As an aside, as I write this, and reflect on a work email I had to draft yesterday, WOW is my writing out of practice. That email I wrote yesterday read worse than anything I’ve written in many years. So I’m going to work on wring again.