swap to chronological order of most recently posted
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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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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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the colour of a screen tuned to a glitched signal
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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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Friends, I just finished teaching the last third of a course on print production, and between that and the whole thing with twitter’s crop changing (somewhere? not for me but somewhere?) I’ve found myself thinking a lot about copper etching and my relationship with the acid bath.
So, first up, copper etching is an art form where you engrave (through various means) thin grooves into a copper plate, then squeeze thick ink into those grooves, then wipe off the ink on the face of the plate, then soak paper so it’s very soft, then push it all through a press.
The pressure forces the paper into the ink-lined grooves of the plate, pushing the ink onto the paper, and you thus transfer the image from your copper plate to your paper. It’s a magnificent art form you’ve certainly seen examples of, even if you didn’t know! Here, a Rembrandt:
There’s a lot of ways to create these grooves in the plate; Rembrandt used a steel point and scratched them in, a technique called drypoint. Later, artists used a technique where a waxy resist would coat the plate, then drew lines in the resist, then soaked the plate in acid.
This is the acid bath of which I speak.
There’s a few ways to apply resist to a plate, and they give you different effects when you etch with them. First is a hard resist, which is a thick, firm wax that coats the plate and is removed by using that steel drypoint tool to create thin line work, like this Doré hatching:
You can also use soft resist, a malleable wax that allows you to press textures into it, like Barbara Smith has in her piece “Textures” here:
(my terminology might be a bit off, I’m noticing as I google, but hopefully the metaphor will still stand)
And the third method, my fav, is aquatint; a process where you add a resist that is .. spotty. Something like a light spray, or a dusting of wax, so that the plate is covered with a rough, dithered dot pattern of resist, with exposed copper in between. Example via Wikipedia:
I decided to try out copper plate etching, also called intaglio print making, after seeing David Blackwood’s work, where he works with aquatint extensively:
Aquatint lets you lay down fields of tone, which he uses in great contrast and collaboration with the linework he etches into the plate as well. It’s magnificent work, but it’s made all the more miraculous when you understand the whole thing with the acid bath.
So, when you put a copper plate into the acid bath, anywhere on the plate that isn’t protected by hard, soft or aquatint resist (also called ground) is slowly dissolved into the acid, creating little grooves. The longer it’s in the bath, the deeper the grooves – kind of.
The acid is fickle, and the more copper already dissolved into it, the slower it will dissolve new copper. And that’s a problem because you want to control exactly how deep those grooves go; the deeper the groove, the more ink it will hold, the darker the line will be on paper.
Under-etch your plate, and your lines will be faint, hold very little ink, and be extremely hard to get ink INTO when you apply it before making a print.
But you can’t know this until you take all that resist off the plate, wash it, and ink it up and print it.
OVERetch your plate, and the acid will start to eat the copper away from under your resist, widening your lines or flattening out your aquatint, so it’s easy to get ink into the lines, but hard not to wipe it back out when you try and wipe ink off the un-etched face of the plate.
Again, not obvious until you go and try printing your plate.
And with intaglio, by which I mean copper plate etching, you might want lines of varying darknesses – you might want aquatint of varying darknesses – and so you will be adding and removing resists of various kinds, and etching and re-etching your plate over and over again.
And you can do various things to get the feel for the acid bath’s … acidity … on the day you go to etch something in it, but depending on the size of your bath, you etching a large plate for a while might change the bath’s acidity. Worst is if it’s fresh and you didn’t know.
So this whole art form, whereby people produce some of the most precise and exquisite pieces in the north western historical canon IMO, is actually an absurd collaboration with a rogue chemical that may or may not do what you want at any point in time.
And by my third year of making work like this, I had concluded that you simply had to think of the acid bath as a rogue collaborator who you handed your plate off to over and over again throughout your process. You had to just take a deep breath and accept chaos as an element.
Yes, you did your best to prepare your plate, get the right resist on it, draw the right lines where you wanted them; and yes you set a timer and kept an eye on your plate and checked the etch over and over again – but in the end you were teaming up with chaos chemistry.
And I loved it! I loved the surprises you got from acid bath, even if they went against what I had planned. I loved improvising around its unpredictability! Once I accepted that it was part of the practice, I found it exhilirating.
And for me, that’s the appeal of all traditional media – I can’t predict every little thing, I’m not 100% in control at all times, and artwork has to happen despite all that.
And so I expanded this concept for myself out to my larger practice. When I send a file to print? I’m collaborating with a printer; both the person, who I can maybe talk to, and the machine, that will have its own peccadillos. I prepare as best I can and still I may be surprised.
I’m not saying I never threw out plates that got way out of hand, and I’m not saying I never had a print run of my work I had to send back or reprint – I’m just saying that my thought process around them has changed, so I allow for a wider range of surprises than I used to.
So when everyone was going on about the twitter crop finally changing, and I realized I didn’t really care, I noticed that I had expanded this concept to publishing online as well. I prep a nice jpg and then I take a deep breath and accept twitter’s chaos in collaboration.
And that’s how I discovered that, to me, twitter is just another acid bath.
One response to “Etching and Acid Baths and Surrender”
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I enjoyed this article very much! I remember you showing me the whale print years ago.
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as I continue to chip away at my website, and get a feel for wordpress’s new full site editor capacity, I’m more excited than ever about what I can do with my website and also having some decision paralysis around what to do next, you know?
I think I mentioned this in an earlier post but I’m not in dire need of a portfolio site right now; for various reasons I’m not actively courting freelance art gigs, including but not limited to the state of my dominant hand, and the permanent salaried art director position I currently hold. it also seems likely to me that should I need to find a new job, I would likely seek out another art directing job; and the professional materials required to land one of those are not nearly as dependent on a portfolio of paintings as prior jobs in my career have been.
however I do really love sharing the work I’m doing, and have done, on the internet. and some of my work has a structure on its own, like my watercolor maps forming a pretty cohesive collection, or my crystal islands, or my comic work. I think those can all be their own sort of raison d’etre on the internet. but 99% of the things I make are much less organized than that, so I was wondering if it would make sense to simply approach things from an archival standpoint.
the nice thing about WordPress is the amount of metadata you can include in a post by having both the posted on date and the most recently modified date, as well as any custom Fields I choose to include, as well as tagging things like the medium or subject matter, and of course categorizing things. I feel like I would enjoy having a chronological archive of my own creative work on the internet in a way where I could find things if I wanted to share them in particular, but also in a way where it would be straightforward to do some curation to form a narrative around my own development or exploration of different mediums or ideas. like I think it’s pretty funny that I have almost three decades of my own artwork and that despite this depth of time and a huge range of skill, it’s all clearly made by the same nerd.
but I also have a little voice in my head that says this is hilariously self-centered and self-aggrandizing – and I have a slightly louder voice in my head that points out that this is maybe not something that I want to share publicly on the internet? but maybe that is easier to judge on a Case by case basis. like no, I’m not uploading my grade 9 handwritten novel, hahaha, can you imagine, dear God – but some of my grade nine drawings feel like important parts of my creative journey? God that’s so pretentious. anyways if I’m going to talk into the void on the internet I guess I can talk about whatever the hell I want, but I am curious if there’s a precedent for people maintaining archives of their creative lives publicly, and of course if there’s any interest from anyone else in this sort of thing.
living through this dominant hand stuff has certainly made me more self-reflective about my art right now anyways so, maybe this is something that feels like the right choice today and then in a year or two or three I will either choose to take down or feel deeply embarrassed by having done ever. future me will just have to deal though.
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very proud of these sketchy pencil crayon autobio comics!
and an arm update for y’all as well:
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So my day job at Bloom Digital has kept a lot of my life under NDA, and it’s a real treat to get to tell you about LongStory 2 and all the hard work we’ve been doing to make this game a reality!
LongStory was originally created in 2014 as an alternative to shallow “insert coins for romance” sims on the market. LongStory was one of the first dating sims that supported young people in exploring their gender, sexuality and identity in a safe supportive space, and we’ve had a devoted fan base since the first game launched.
And now, the LongStory 2 Kickstarter is live! We need games like LongStory now more than ever. We are looking to raise CAD $25,000 in finishing funds: https://bit.ly/4a8p7Jm
Your support will help us make a full new season of a diverse and LGBTQ+ game that our players have already fallen in love with. At Bloom we believe the world needs games that create that hopeful and loving future: You can help us continue this story with our signature compassion, curiosity, conversation and, occasionally, sarcasm.
Backing this project gets you access to the sequel, the original game and some sweet LongStory swag! Not to mention the satisfaction of knowing more inclusive, safe, consent-based emotional gaming content will be available for players new and old.
Also, did we mention, we’re live on Steam with a demo for Steam NextFest? You can take a good look at LongStory 2 for free right here:
It’s a gorgeous, heartfelt, funny game and it has the potential to really mean something, especially to any queer kids in your life; getting to be a small part of making it a reality has really meant a lot to me!
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Ceramics
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updated:
posted to: arttagged: celadons, ceramics, crystal islands, glazing, learning, palette, sculpture, structure, underglazeI’ve been learning ceramics in a casual ongoing way now, enjoying getting out of my comfort zone, and playing with a new medium. Much like printmaking, kiln fired and glazed ceramics are really a collaboration with chemistry and physics as well as a personal creative act, and I love that aspect so much.
Below I’m sharing my work in reverse chronology – the newest stuff is at the top. I think? you can see some real progress, but it’s amazing how much more I have to learn! I really love the feeling of being at the start of a long journey into a medium — it’s gotta be one of the most inspiring feelings I encounter as an artist.
In January 2024, I took a local intro class that included both wheel and handbuilding – I had to relearn everything left-handed and, in the case of the wheel, one-handed, so I set my expectations low, but I really feel like I was able to push myself and make things I am very proud of! The crystal island above was not planned — the instructor simply inspired me after he demonstrated his own whimsical sculpture approach, and I couldn’t resist trying! It feels like a miracle that it stayed together, stands up on its own, and looks this good, and it’s left me starving for the chance to make infinitely more islands!
Wheel throwing single (left) handed (above) was certainly a new challenge, and while I didn’t manage to work things as thin and delicate as I had earlier with my right hand, as you can see below. But they had such a wonderful range of glazes; and that small-mouthed shallow bowl is, it turns out, my dream water cup for painting – impossible to splash, easy to reach the bottom to wipe the paint off. And despite an s-crack in the base, it holds water fine! A miracle.
Below are five little cups I made over a three day workshop. First time making handles! As is traditional, none of these hold over 200ml of liquid due to shrinkage when firing – they’re so little! But I do still use them – the handles actually turned out lovely to hold, even if hilariously out of proportion with the little mugs themselves.
My first ceramics class, back in January 2023! Two functioning hands made learning the wheel a fun and exciting challenge, though at the time my handbuilding was frustratingly clumsy. Regardless, I got a functional (tiny) lemon juicer and a functional paint palette out of it, and I learned so much about throwing and glazing.
My favourite of all of this first batch is definitely the bubble glazed cup with the seagull silhouettes. Sadly the clear glaze on top crawled, but it’s a visual design idea I’d really love to try again soon.
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This short horror comic by Scott Base is making the rounds on tumblr again! and as it has haunted me for years, I feel it’s worth sharing:
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