swap to chronological order of most recently posted
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So my first round of art school was a fine art degree. And I didn’t really know a lot about art careers and I wasn’t really sure what I WANTED to be doing, but I did kind of chafe against the “comics aren’t art” vibe some teachers had. And then Shannon Gerard came and talked.
And Shannon’s gone on to do a lot, a LOT of really cool stuff (http://shannongerard.org) but her talk was about, or at least mentioned, how she was doing comics as part of a cross-disciplinary masters, by making them with lithographic prints. Which is, I think, a real flex.
Like, it’s one thing to draw a comic, and another thing to draw it backwards, soak it in chemicals, and then, one page at a time, pull the right amount of successful prints from the stone, before you could draw the next page. It still boggles my mind. Just fuckin incredible.
And her process did two things – it elevated the medium to something the more traditional fine art faculty would engage with, and it also used the then popular genre of autobio/confessional comics, which probably also helped get fine art profs to connect with the project.
So my memory of her talk is prettttty faded, but what it did was give me permission to be a real shit about bringing comics back into my fine art work. Clearly I just needed to use more punishing mediums! So I did.
Did I have anything to say WITH those comics?
No.
Would that stop me?
Also no.So, in my final year of art school, baby artist shel decided to paint and etch comics of the most banal shit you can think of.
I did a BUNCH of these, and if you think these painted ones are… slow and meditative….
Wait’ll you see the blood, sweat and tears I poured into intaglio prints of empty spaces:
These were etched and aquatinted into copper plates, printed by wiping ink into every crevasse in the metal and then wiping all the excess ink off the face, then squeezing them through a huge heavy press, one print at a time.
That said I do still like these haunted window views inspired by taking the subway up past Yorkdale station every day for school.
But oh my god the LABOUR it took to make these. Was that the secret to making them fine art? I do not know, I just know I gave it a real good try. I even screenprinted a deconstructed journal comic, god help me:
Anyways, the last piece I made this way was also the first fine art painting I ever sold, and it was titled “waiting” and it was a journal comic about doing my first Canzine alone when my teammate ditched. Painted in layers and layers of acrylic, across six canvases.
Did I use these as livejournal icons for years after?
Yes.
Anyways now when I feel like I’m being a bit of a try-hard, I at least know where I learned it.
Oh my gosh okay I did make ONE more of these, the year after I graduated. It’s very angsty.
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I took a few friends to a rug tufting workshop for my birthday!
We brought our own designs, and I spent some time earlier in the week making mine more and more simple. It was still definitely way too ambitious, but I had a lot of fun making it and would love to try again on a bigger rug with more time in future!
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I love it and it’s so fun and also it’s really infuriatingly hard and I’m on year 7 of seriously trying to make it a part of my life, so, y’know, I have some thoughts!
Regarding getting started, there’s some real rabbit holes you can fall down, including ones such as “what sketchbook is best” and “instructions on building your own easel” and “which tripods are the lightest” and “real artists don’t use waterbrushes” and so on and so forth and they are ALL traps and I suspect I’ve fallen into each of them at least once. But much like all art, getting started isn’t so much about having the best gear as much as having gear you’ll actually use. Especially gear you’ll actually use a) enthusiastically; b) outdoors; c) to make inevitably frustrating and initially often bad art.
So for me initially, that was a small travel kit of student grade cotman watercolour half pans, a Handbook travelogue sketchbook with its ‘mixed media’ friendly paper, a wadded up takeout napkin or two, and one or more refillable waterbrushes:
Version 1.0.0 Between those and James Gurney’s youtube channel I had everything I needed to get started, and getting started meant making some really rough stuff for a while!
So the core of my advice on getting started is: find supplies you like that you’re not TOO precious about, and watch a bunch of other folks paint plein air and talk about the challenges and frustrations and process of it all, and then go outside and make a mess! And ta-dah, you’ve started! You’re a plein air painter now! You can never live this down!
And hot tip: timelapses of people painting (as opposed to footage that is filmed in realtime, and just heavily edited for youtube or wherever) can absolutely mess up your assessment of how fast things are supposed to go, so do make sure to watch some realtime footage too!
Pretty sure that’s just scratching the tip of the iceberg though so I’ll probably be back with more thoughts later on!
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In April 2023 I tackled the annual Plein Airpril challenge, and painted from life or from my own (or a couple of friends’) photos every day for the full month! I mostly but not only used gouache. It kicked my ass but I was very proud to complete it, and I think there are some real gems in the collection! Here’s all 30 paintings:
I took some fun photos of the process as well, including a few on location, if that’s your jam:
Doing an art challenge can be really fun, especially if you have a cohort you’re running the challenge with. I have done my fair share of game jams and I really feel like they share a lot in common with art challenges like Plein Airpril, Inktober, and also more storytelling oriented challenges like Hourly Comic Day, 24- Hour Comic Day, and NaNoWriMo.
That said, they’re not a guaranteed positive experience, and most of the time I have done things like this, I have not finished. You really have to let them take over your life a bit while it’s happening, and without a closeknit cohort of other folks tackling the same thing, or at least an audience egging you on, it can be hard to find the motivation.
Additionally, like anything online, there are people who use these challenges as marketing opportunities, throwing everything into them and producing fully polished, professional work throughout. It’s really important not to compare your work to others while you do it; in the end, you’re better off comparing it to itself and letting yourself celebrate your own progress through the challenge.
I think also sometimes these are approached (especially game jams, but art and comic and writing challenges too for sure) as incubators for professional marketable work. Incubators, residencies, retreats, challenges, can all share a lot, and there’s no reason you couldn’t use Plein Airpril to kickstart a gallery-ready body of work! But that really isn’t the core point of any of these, and it’s helped me a lot to keep that in mind.
Overall these challenges can be fun, and this year in particular I had a great time just making sure I got my daily paint on!
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i am starving for all the “how to art direct but not at a AAA company” content the universe can provide, certainly so i can continuously get better at my job, but also because I don’t yet have a language for what I’m doing all day every day at work and, like in this Lee Petty talk, I often unlock awareness of decisions I’m making simply by giving them a name.
Would love any recommendations! I’ve dug through gdc’s youtube archive and hunger for moooooooorrrrre
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So, some news: tomorrow I’m having surgery on my right arm – my dominant arm – my drawing arm, my writing arm, my brushing-my-teeth and typing-in-chat and unlocking-my-door arm – and will lose most use of it for years, and an unknown (but hopefully less dire) amount of use of it forever. As you might expect, this sucks so, so bad.
As you can see above, I have been trying to proactively warm up my left hand so I can still write and such once this happens. As you might also detect above, it has not felt great.
(complements on my left-handed writing are not welcome; the feel of it is so alien that even if it looked perfect, i’d be upset)
So while I go in to get that done, I was wondering if you’d be willing to reply or repost or something with a thing you like about my work that isn’t about how it looks? So I can go back to this post when I get real depressed afterwards and remind myself I’m more than my line quality?
And if you are curious, slightly more explanation with anatomical specifics below the cut:
so it turns out I have a peripheral nerve tumour on my radial nerve above my elbow in my right arm – it’s been slowly preventing me from lifting up my index finger (extending it) and more and more the rest of my hand’s extension has been weakening. scans show muscle atrophy in my forearm, so not only is the nerve weakening, it’s been weakening long enough that the muscles are getting noticeably less use.
from what we know, the tumour is benign, but it’s not possible to remove it without removing a chunk of the nerve, and likely fully severing the nerve. and though benign, the tumour has been steadily growing and is likely to continue doing so, where it would eventually effectively sever the nerve all on its own.
so this is a preventative surgery where we take the tumour out before it withers all the radial offshoot nerves farther down my arm, and graft in a spare (well, less important) nerve from my ankle, and hope that the graft takes and the nerve has a chance to heal and then let me rebuild my muscles and recover some hand and wrist extension. How much is not known. Complete recovery is impossible – some nerves in there are already dead and no amount of grafts and occupational therapy can change that, and more will wither while we’re waiting for the graft to heal.
Motor nerves can only heal for so long, so I’ll know more about my expected lifetime function in a few years. Likeliest outcome is followup tendon reassignment surgery to try and fill any dire functional gaps, and then what will presumably be a bit of a mind-fuck of physio trying to teach my brain that one of my flexion muscles will then be responsible for extension of fingers or wrist or something.
What’s confusing about this is, my other arm nerves are all fine.
Ulnar? Doing great.
Those nerves you fuck up with carpal tunnel? that I fucked up in 2008 and have spent a decade and a half taking very careful care of? really solid, healthy nerves! good job past Shel!So I’m certainly not losing 100% of hand function; I’ll still be able to curl my fingers and thumb and actively bend my wrist down – I just likely won’t be able to reverse all those movements. Hell, already I can tell how much weaker my right hand is at typing – writing this after a day of spreadsheets at work is really wearing it down.
It’s surreal how much all i feel is grief about this. There’s no one to be mad at, not even myself – it just, sucks. Can you hold a funeral for your handwriting? your markmaking language? your line quality? your ability to touch type up to 140 words per minute? your confident, trained, controlled method of self-expression? RIP, radial nerve. I already miss you.
It’s been a 13 month gauntlet of medical appointments since I first saw a neurologist about this and it’s a relief to finally have the surgery, but i do really appreciate all the other scans and tests and biopsies – they gave me enough information to make this legit horrible decision to try and save what function I can for tomorrow by making today awful. And to try and become ambidextrous, I guess, because god knows I’m not stopping making art simply because my body betrayed me. It’ll just be … not what I think of as my art, for a while, at least.
Tuesday Oct 3, 2023 Update:
life update / thanks for your sweet messages everyone / hope you enjoy speech to text because typing with my left hand is no fun
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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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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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