Trying my hand at wall art

I finished three projects last Sunday. This would be impressive except that I’d been working on them for some time, it was really just that day that I could slap all the pieces together and make the end result look intentional. Projects are like that. You figure out your idea or bang, it smacks you in the head. Gather the materials, do the prep, work on the pieces and finally, put it together.

I did a lot fewer projects when I was younger because I didn’t have the patience to work through the process all the way. These days I really am about 50/50 on process/result. Sometimes I get impatient and just want it done–instant gratification is a hallmark of growing up in suburban consumer culture, doncha know! But I’m finding more and more that even if things turn out like crap, sometimes it’s the doing and the learning that really makes it worthwhile.

But I don’t think this turned out like crap. I mentioned this one a few days ago, it’s called a piacere because literally it’s letters that spell out a piacere. I’m still a musician at heart, and so it was really only appropriate that I chose this musical term.

It means that the player can perform the music at her/his discretion with regard to tempo in particular, but more in general to just play the piece according to their own inclination. If you follow the link you’ll see the definition and the various related words (rubato, ad libitum).

I chose the term as a nod to the way I think I like to do things - in my own way. Of course, we can’t in general do the things we want to do how we want whenever (darn!).  But I try.  So the materials I chose were from things I found around my house that I had kept as memories of things.  The A’s were music: the one on the left contains pieces from a postcard of a page in a medieval antiphonal, then I imitated the painting style for the rest.  I have pieces of medieval music and chant on the sides.  Medieval music and manuscripts were my favorite part of graduate school.

So about the pictures - Jeff dislikes picture frames sitting about everywhere, so I have to get creative in the ways that I have pictures in the house.  Since the whole thing is really about life, and the fun you can have living it, why not?  The P is a picture from the Central Park exhibit The Gates with a picture of Jeff and I looking out at the statue of Libery.  The I is for my brother, though bamboo is just fun to paint.  The nonprofit Pandas International has been sending me updates on the damage from the earthquake in China - the whole area is still not doing so well - that’s been a really sad story to hear.

The C is pictures of the Cloisters Museum, an entirely medieval-oriented museum in far north Manhattan. The E is from the Maker Faire last year (the picture below from SXSW interactive - nerd-E!!), the R is about all my hiking, and the E … well, I just love flowers.  And I love New Orleans, and there I am at Cafe du Monde.  I was pretty worried about New Orleans this past week. I grew up in Houston, so there were always hurricanes, and bad ones are always a real struggle and worry.

OK, now to stop with the reminiscences. I thought that was a fun project - got to try out some new paints, it was meaningful to me as well as autobiographical, and it’s nice to see in my front hallway. 

My Weekday, Comic-Style

I have a drawing tablet, and I’m not afraid to use it. Wait! That should read “I have a drawing tablet, and I have no *$%&* idea how to use it. But I’m fixing that. In my ongoing quest to conquer my nemesis, Illustrator, I knew the next step was to draw something from scratch. So I got out my Wacom drawing tablet and selected the pencil tool. I soon remembered that my drawing tablet is an older variety and takes a bit of blunt force determination to get it to do kind of what you want it to do. But I prevailed! As proof, I present to you a bit of levity in my first comic, entirely drawn on computer! I can tell that drawing with the tablet is going to take practice, it’s a little like learning to write all over again.

Guess I should say something about what I drew? The first 2 are morning - I go find exercise of some type nearly every day, and I am working on running in a fun run in November, if you can imagine (I can’t). Coffee is a daily requirement, a beverage which my colleague Will usually makes. I will euphemistically refer to his concoction as “coffee” but it’s more like “coffee-flavored mud.” I advised him of the one-scoop-per-cup method of measuring this morning, and he laughed at my insistence on measuring.

The middle is my whole workday. I sit at my computer with periodic trips to the printer. Woo! Excitement! Action! Adventure! Seriously, I think that 95% of my work is computer related. That is why there is morning and sometimes afternoon exercise. Otherwise I would turn into a boneless puddle or would have to resort to one of those foot-pedalers under my desk, and I’m not ready to admit defeat yet.

In the evenings I play with my computer and cats and dog, and occasionally cook, and usually I do some more sitting and watch some sort of sci-fi and do some handiwork. I love sci-fi and can often be found watching old episodes of Star Trek and Firefly (gorram cancellation) or perhaps a new episode if the TV stations can be convinced to make new ones of the three I like. I prefer to do my more active crafting work on weekends, but I’ve been known to paint on a weeknight.

What to draw next??

The weather, and other unpleasant facts

It’s 10:44 pm, and it’s still 86 degrees outside. No kidding. Ugh. The weather people tell me it is supposed to be 98 tomorrow. Now that it’s June, I know the weather isn’t going to do anything but be gross until October. All I can do is hope for a lot of rain to block the sun and try to balance my air conditioning bill against personal discomfort. You’d think I hadn’t grown up in the subtropics with all my complaining about the heat, but I just can’t seem to reconcile myself to being baked.

<–That’s my most recent painting. I’m experimenting with shapes and painting the negative spaces instead of the object itself. This is a technique exercise, just to try to see objects differently, to understand better how things are shaped. I like how it turned out, and I’m going to try more like it.

Summer calls for several things, craft-wise. I’ve put away all the blankets I’m making, and switched to things that aren’t hot to sit under. I have a couple of big crochet projects I’m planning (one left from last year) and a bunch of experimentation with fabric.

But first I have to put my house back together.

One thing I had to do for summer was move my sewing machine downstairs. Heat rises, and this apartment has craptastic insulation. No force on earth is powerful enough to make me stay upstairs during the day in a Tejas summer. Migrating my space has been this weekend’s production, and in fact we dragged the rest of the house into the evil reorganization vortex. I think Jeff and I moved all but 3 pieces of furniture over the last couple of days, a painful process.

Fact is that I feel as though I’m supposed to be moving right now. For the last 8 years I have moved every two years for school purposes. Big, go-to-a-different-city moves. Plus the natural upheaval of 5 years of thrice-yearly college semester changes. I wonder if I’m not having withdrawal, if the furnishings aren’t my way of making up for not being able to make a big change this year. After so much constant, regular change for so many years, I’m actually finding it more difficult than I imagined to continue in the same city, same house, and same job for a third year. I know people do this staying-in-one-place thing all the time, but I’m just not feeling it.

Anyway, another result of the shuffling-furniture project is that I have some new colors in my abode. The way I decorate takes my frequent redecorating into account - I have a primary color in here (brown) and then I use lots of colorful accents. This is a much less expensive way to make sweeping changes quickly. The red in my main space has given way to bright green. My front room has moved on to include orange and blue. I have three new sets of curtains to make and some pillows. And I have Plans for a couple of tables involving a combination of lacquer, paint and paper.

Thus begins summer. Jeff, of course, says I’m causing too much trouble for myself, but what would be the fun if I didn’t?