Category Archives: Reflection

Always Someone There to Remind Me

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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

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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…

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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.

 

New Things

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I’ve written and rewritten this post a hundred times.

Quite a long time ago I deleted twitter and facebook off my phone. I’ve slowly weaned myself off Facebook, without many regrets. I use marketplace to buy bikes and bike parts but mostly, I don’t interact. I do have this blog and my new iteration of this blog cross post to Facebook, to my comfortable shoes studio page. But I also fail to interact there.

I never liked the twitter app, so it wasn’t a hardship to delete it and just use Tweetdeck on Chrome on my phone. But now Eloon has bought it and is quickly ruining it.

quote from cnn:

“By Friday morning, Twitter employees from departments including ethical AI, marketing and communication, search, public policy, wellness and other teams had tweeted about having been let go. Members of the curation team, which help elevate reliable information on the platform, including about elections, were also laid off, according to employee posts.”

Anyway. I used to love twitter, BUT I strongly believe that a social network is only as strong as it treats it’s minority members. I’ve left numerous groups because the person running it didn’t stop bullying or harassment behaviors, both toward myself and others.

So I’m also giving up on twitter, but if you follow me there I will continue to cross post about my posts here, on instagram, youtube and also my Micro Rant blog here.

Part of my Comfortable Shoes Studio Philosophy has always been to do something as long as I can and it makes sense for me. I’ve been mulling it over, but maintaining the RSVP website is no longer sustainable- as much as I want to continue with the seasons of the show, it just doesn’t fit with my life right now. That is to say, I do not have time and to continue with it would mean burning my candle at both ends for something that doesn’t work for me. I’d rather pour that time and energy into Comfortable Shoes Studio and YouTube. So even if I go back to RSVP, it will be under the Comfortable Shoes Studio heading. As such, the website will continue until it runs out (2 more years) and then it will be held under the CSS website (it’s already here.) As such, I’ve already let go of the Useful Journaling blog, as I wasn’t updating it anyway, and it makes more sense to just put any posts that I might’ve put there, here.

The whole point of all of this is to bring ALL of my varied interested- video, podcasts, and art back under the Comfortable Shoes Studio umbrella.

I’ve harped on the idea, loud and long that everyone would OWN their ideas on their own online home. For me that home has always been Comfortable Shoes Studio.

My current plan for Youtube is to do a series of vlogs where I explore life and philosophy. I’m going to work on being in front of the camera again. I know this part will make a LOT of you happy, I’m planning some art instructional-ish videos, right now I’m working on a series about customizing commercial stuff, in this case a sketchbook.

In this video I sand the label off a ChapStick tube. In part because I didn’t want to rep the company every time I used it but also to prepare it for making art on.

In this video I fill out the first page of my new work sketchbook and decorate the front cover with Posca paint pens.

State of the Art: Filling a Sketchbook

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This weekend I realized that I’m about 10 pages away from filling my current sketchbook. I knew I was nearing the end but I’ve had a flurry of ideas to record and noodle out, each time I’ve made sure that my sketchbook is within easy reach. With a mere 10 pages left, my first thought was, “Ohhhh now I have a reason to go to Artist & Craftsman to pick up a new one!”

I did not have access to the car in my moment of weakness, so instead of driving, I dug through my bin of notebooks and sketchbooks. These are books I picked up on a whim at a variety of places when I see them. The first book I grabbed was a traditional hardback black sketchbook with heavy mixed media paper- too “good” for my kick around idea noodling sketchbook. Then I grabbed a dot gridded journal, also not quite right. Then another hardbound sketchbook.

Finally I grabbed a different black sketchbook, and realized that I’d grabbed a black Hand•Book journal, one older than my current version. I had forgotten at one point that I’d bought the black version, and bought a green one about a year and a half ago.  Maybe less. It was before I had my interview for my new workplace. Anyway, I had forgotten that I’d bought a black one as back up for my previous journal, blue I think. So I immediately dug into the new red one and left the black one in a drawer. These have been my go to sketchbook for the last few years. The earliest I remember using one was in 2012 or 2013. I know I was using them before i went to grad school- I carried one with me everywhere through grad school.

This does come with a downside- the elastic needs to be replaced or at the very least tightened. Which is a problem I’ve never had with a Hand•Book Journal before. Their elastics have always been snug and perfect, even years later. This is the first of a half dozen or so of this brand where the elastic has been anything but perfect. (I will note that this is a pre-Speedball distribution Hand•Book.)

I do very little to prepare a sketchbook for use, I write my name, address, phone number, and email inside the front cover. For this sketchbook I’m adding some washi tape to the back pocket- the washi will stick but peel off the plastic pocket with ease. Unlike notebooks I don’t do much prep for a sketchbook, the whole point of one is the clear empty expanse of paper for ideas to blossom.

State of the Art: Creating a Place to Work

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One of the key items in my art making and creative arsenal are my headphones. With these I can create a place to work, make art and be creative, just about anywhere. By extension music helps too.

I’ve used headphones as a way to tune out and tune in since I was in elementary school. Back then I slipped the foam cushions of my Sony Walkman over my ears and tuned out of the world and into my art or homework and later in high school to work. Soon I was using foam covered earbuds and trying to hid the black cords around my ears, through my hair and into a hoodie to wear them in study hall.

My parents had rules on when my brothers and I could wear them.

As I got older I used headphones to tune out a variety of things- the noise of my roommates, construction, late night noises in the neighborhood, the people on the train and other various things. Over time I moved to in ear buds (IEB) and I found they worked better to help me tune out and tune in, and it really kept the noise of the subway out of my head.

At the DayJob I needed to buckle down and get a LOT of paperwork done, some of which I had let build up, so I popped my IEB in and sat in the gallery with my laptop and churned through the work. In the few hours I had I churned through pages and thousands of words of work. The combination of noise cancelation through the DIY plug tips and the music I chose (The Tidal 420 Playlist for giggles) let me tune out of the stuff that was happening around me, while I focused on the music.

Of course when you use true wireless BT IEB it can lead to confusion- one coworker laughed as I pulled a bud out, apologized, then said hello back.

For me, there is something really helpful about being able to isolate myself from the noise around me. I tend to look up when I hear a noise and then get distracted. It takes me a minute or two to get back to what I was focusing on. Headphones means I can ignore all the little inconsequential noises around me, and just focus on the task ahead of me.

It seems dramatic to call this bliss, but as an easily distracted person, being able to focus on just one thing is fantastic. That combined with the controls being on my ears just makes setting up a place to work easy.

In some places, like my home studio, I use a speaker system. That works well enough there since it is a private location, in a more public location, like my DayJob studio, I use a speaker when I’m not feeling distractable, otherwise it’s headphones.

I have to admit, I never really thought much about my use of headphones until recently. I’d been feeling very distracted and popped my IEB in, did my work, then realized I’d been doing this for YEARS of my life, and that I’d unconsciously been making a place to be creative.

It works for me. Do you use headphones or music to make a creative space for yourself?

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Keeping a Notebook PERFECTLY

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There is no way to keep a notebook that is perfect for every person. There is only the perfect way for each person. That is to say, keeping a notebook is highly personalized. My method of a pocket notebook and 3×5 cards alongside a sketchbook (currently also functioning as my ETEW Journal) and a separate work sketchbook would not work for most people. Hell most creative people merge home and work into one planner and notebook- especially if they freelance. That doesn’t work for me because I need to create a division between work and life- I need work- life balance.cover of a red talens sketchbook covered in stickers

What do these different notebooks look like? (I’ll be using notebook and sketchbook pretty interchangeably from here.) My work sketchbook is an A4 (8×10) red Talens sketchbook covered in stickers. Eventually it will have doodles too. I use a larger sketchbook at work because I use it in classes to teach kids about sketching. We also work larger than I do at home, so my sketches are correspondingly larger. I purchased this sketchbook because it was inexpensive and also the bright red cover could be easily found on any table in my studio.inner page from sketchbook filled with skull, pineapple and other doodles. Also meeting notes.

The work sketchbook is a place where I capture meeting and course notes.  I doodle and jot down notes and I try to keep each meeting to a single page, but sometimes I use 2 pages. Occasionally I work on a page shared with another meeting , especially if the previous meeting didn’t need a lot of notes.sketchbook page showing a watercolor demo and sketches of soda cans and pineapple on pizza

I’ll be the first person to say that my meeting and other types of notes won’t make sense to most folx. I tend to draw the speakers and doodle important words and points in funky lettering. I see the goal of taking notes as a way of jogging my memory. For work we have a notetaker for each meeting, a quick look at the notes will get me the info I need. For trainings I take notes that are a little more detailed but are mostly to jog my memory. I save a copy of any printables to the cloud or my computer and call it good. Generally I believe that info can be pretty easily looked up if I search, but I have to jog the memory of that instruction first.more sketches of pineapple on pizza

My home sketchbook is a B4 (6×9 ish) Hand Book sketchbook. They’ve changed the name of them several times over the years. Speedball seems to have either purchased or is handling distribution of them now. Which is a good thing, for me, they have been my go to commercially made sketchbook for a few years, and better distro is great. The paper is perfect for a wide range of materials.A planning page with lists of possible projects for my summer groups

The pocket notebook is where I gather on the go ideas- things I hear on podcasts, in conversations, phone numbers from students for their parents, notes from books I’m reading and so on. It’s a good capture system. Sometimes these ideas get pulled into my Every Thing Every Where journal or sketchbook, or here as a blog post.steps for carving lino, things to consider and a reworked statement for a group

The above is what works for me now. Over the years I’ve used different systems, most documented here and there in this blog. I still like to read about the systems of others. The Take Note Podcast Blog (that’s a mouth full) has had a number of great posts about keeping a notebook where they gather information about authors and creative folx who keep a notebook.

The Perfect…

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I’ve spent much of my life looking for the perfect pen, pencil, brush, sketchbook, and journal. I read reviews of the items I’m seeking and things I’m not. If a new  article starts with “The Best…” I read it. Part of this is that I want all the information before I make a purchase, but also I want the information. *

If there is one thing I’ve learned it’s that the most perfect and best tool for any job is the one I have on hand and ready to go.

Case in point, when I sat down and started to doodle the fried chicken sticker (see this post) I used the pencil I had in my pocket (Blackwing 93) and the paper I had on hand (Staples recycled 20lb copy paper.) When I sketch out my Trans remembrance poster turned sticker, I used the same Blackwing 93 in my Talens sketchbook. When I wrote up ideas for a new group I used the Uniball Air I had in my pocket in my sketchbook. When I wrote down ideas for a series of found prints, I used my pocket notebook and Parker Jotter.

Much of these choices have to do with the fact that these were the tools that I have on hand, not because they were special or perfect. Though, one might suggest the Blackwing 93 (or other versions of the firm BW) is a near perfect pencil. I think that the Parker Jotter is a perfect pen for pocket carry. The all chrome and steel version makes for a good gift for a starting out pen collector.

I’ve been known to grab an AmazonBasics No.2 pencil and sketch with it. I have slowly started to switch out the pencils in my studio with Pen + Gear pencils.

If I wed myself to a particular pen or pencil or paper I’ll feel limited or unable to work. But if I use what is on hand, I’ll get something done, or started. I spend a lot of time seeking out the best, but I also let myself use what is around me. The ideas need to be collected and explored, I can do that with anything.

Yes, I make sure I have something decent on hand, but I’ll use anything if it’s there and perfect isn’t around.

* I recently read an article that said this is a trait of formerly gifted kids who strive for perfectionism. If I hadn’t rage quit the article I’d tell the author to go to hell. /sarcasm.