In this case, someone asked me for a purse. I don’t actually use purses, so my initial response was disinterest. Also the sheer density of chainmail that would be required to make a purse that wouldn’t drop hairpins through the sides was depressing. Then however, I remembered this:

A little leather necklace of mine. Cute, and a little punky.  The basic weave of it is a 4-in-1, with a little strip of leather hopscotched through. And if it were possible to make several of them, and link them side to side…

First step:  I needed lots of little ‘necklaces.’  I had a large leather rectangle on hand, and no particular plans for it, so I cut it into narrow strips of slightly less than the width of the links.

I made a nice swatch of 4-in-1, and wove the little strips through it. By this point, I knew this was gonna work, and I was pretty sure it as gonna be awesome.

I wove until I ran out of leather, and wound up with a sizable piece of… fabric? This side is the verso.

And this is the recto. That means ‘the front side of the piece of leather’, by the way. I swear.

From that point, I connected the sides, made a simple strap from the last strip of leather, attached that, and was done.

Well. That was a successful little experiment.

This purse is too tiny to be of much use, unfortunately.  It’s barely big enough to hold a credit card, which is a function of using leather I just had on hand. Next time I’ll actually buy some leather on purpose, and so the resulting purse will be big enough for at least a wallet.

Just to be clear – I’m not this calm, cool and collected. I also don’t glow.

Balancing work time with everything else time is something all artists have to hammer out for themselves. Well, other than perhaps the independently wealthy artists with no family obligations and a particular gift for benign self-absorption, but I digress.

My balance is a work in progress. I have two part time jobs that are not art related, and one that is. None of this includes ‘just for fun’ projects, i.e. stuff that is not directly related to making money. Like, say, this blog. There’s also life, of course: Car payments and Thanksgiving dinner with the inlaws and watching the Perseids.

I do alright at leaving the work I do at a remote location where it belongs, but I run into trouble with work I do at home. Chainmail and some drawings are ‘work’, but they are also fun, which complicates matters. Sometimes, I want to make chainmail, as it is genuinely relaxing. And sometimes I have a show coming up, so I feel like I have to make as much chainmail as possible before the deadline, then I work myself into a slightly tarnished and blistered bag of twitch.

My problem is saying no in a rational way that also allows me to get done what I need to get done. If chainmail is fun, I shouldn’t balk at doing it a lot, right? But then I’m ‘working’ in my relaxation time. And if I only ‘work’ when it’s fun, then I’m not treating it like a job, which is the level of dedication that it deserves, and that my taxes sort of imply I should devote.

…

Oh, I’m sorry, did you want a conclusion? As I said, it’s a work in progress.

The original picture is here. I chose to work from that particular picture because of the limited palette and because of the luminosity.  (Hey, just ’cause I’m a little scared of color doesn’t mean I don’t prefer intense color.) Also because it’s a picture of me that I like, which is rare. Using the photo for color reference and layout, I made this:

Not so great, right? I’ve never had much trouble getting to this point in a painting, (photoshop or actual) but then I hit a wall called ‘I dunno what to do next.’ Which is why I never really got into painting until recently.

This time when I started flailing, I called in my guest expert *coughfiancecough* and had him take a look.[*] As usual, he made me face what I already knew:  I wasn’t done yet, and he wasn’t about to let me pretend this was ‘good enough’.

So I did this:

and this:

and this:

And then played with opacity and layer order for a little while. Plus a few tweaks, I now have this:

Much better. Hopefully, I’ll remember how I did it for next time…

[*] A word about letting someone look at your work before it’s finished: Don’t do it lightly. Particularly don’t do it if you don’t have a strong sense of your direction in this particular piece, or if you are at all dependent on praise. Sometimes you need to see something through to its end in order to learn, even if you’re pretty sure it won’t work. That’s doubly hard to do if someone’s sitting on your shoulder saying it won’t work give up now. (Sure, they’ll actually say something like ‘I think I’d like it better if you smoothed the edges a bit’, but that’s never what you actually hear.) An extra eye and a careful word can give you perspective when you need it. But it can also totally derail your process, and your trust in yourself as an artist.

…

On second thought, it’s probably best to stay away from Ungulate metaphors when discussing nude women.

Things I’ve learned so far about Renaissance Faires:

-It’s easier to not stuff yourself on Scotch Eggs if you just don’t eat that first one.

-Talk to the organizers (on the phone or in person, so tonal subtleties come through) early in the planning stages. It may be that you’re being way more dedicated to editing out modern stuff than you need to be.

-Apparently, lots of people go to Ren Faires in order to soak up the ambiance. And not to buy anything. Crap.

Photodump! (As always, all pictures courtesy of my dear technologically inclined fiance.  Further photos of his over at his flicker.)

P.S- Best overheard Ren Faire quotation, delivered with full pirate accent: ‘Aye, I’m the Scottish Pirate. You can call me Arrgyle.’

Sorry for the radio silence, but I’ve had a load of bricks drop on my head. It’s name is The Virginia Renaissance Faire.

My first reaction upon learning I was accepted into the Faire was to start giggling hysterically.

Y’see, the Faire is not one day. Or a whole weekend. Oh no. I’m signed up for all the weekends in May. That’s six days, 9am-5pm. This means I need to make more inventory, pronto. But oh wait, this is a Renaissance Faire, which means my fancy-pants new Easy-Up tent isn’t going to cut it. It needs to be covered in fabric, top, inside, and legs. Plus it would be good if that covering didn’t look like shit.

So I’m basically sewing a tent. Did I mention I can’t really sew?

Further updates as events warrant.

Let me explain why I’m so excited.

I have a historical problem, loosely referred to as line addiction. I draw edges. I draw them first, and hang the rest of the picture on them, like scaffolding. When my college painting teacher told me to build the image from the inside out, my first thought was literally “but- it doesn’t work like that.” [*]

More recently, this has meant that I’ve been doing line drawings before making digital color images. Which shouldn’t strictly be necessary. If I’m making digital paintings, shouldn’t I be able to do an underpainting as my laying out and on-canvas ‘thinking’, rather than a line drawing? (Trust me, this isn’t through lack of trying. It’s part muscle memory, part training. It’s like putting an accomplished downhill skier on cross country skis and expecting them to not go whup!SPLAT. [**])

Last week, inspired by Three Panel Soul, I decided to give this ‘painting’ thing another try. Miraculously, something clicked. I know what I want to do differently next time (bigger brush, for one thing) but this is an encouraging start in a direction which has previously been mostly blocked to me.

The subject is a Wolpertinger. I was surprised to learn from wikipedia that Wolpertingers have a historical basis, and were not simply created as an amusing Brewfest pet. (Dear non-WoW players: Brewfest is an in-game holiday involving a lot of drinking. When drunk, you can see Wolpertingers. ) Apparently, “The Wolpertinger is not a typical cryptid, as local people likely never believed in its existence. Rather, it is some kind of traditional prank belief, as is evident from the many stuffed Wolpertingers displayed in village inns along with real hunting trophies, which have been fabricated deliberately in order to make fun of gullible foreigners who may want to go hunting for this remarkable animal.” I find this hilarious.

[*] Convergently, I listened to a TED talk after I painted this which suggests that edges (and motion) are the foundation of human vision. Very interesting stuff for visual artists, video here.

[**] whup!(SPLAT) is the direct transliteration of the sound you make when your skis fly out from under you for no reason, and you land on your back. For people from warm locals: Downhill skis have a rigid connection between your ski and your foot, plus your ankle is mostly immobile. You walk like a flatfooted duck, but the ski does not slip out from under you while you’re standing around. Cross country skis, on the other hand, have soft boots and connect to the ski only at the absolute toe of the boot. This greatly increases your independent mobility, but also that of the ski. Which occasionally chooses to exercise its freedom when you’re standing around not paying enough attention to staying centered over the ski.

In the words of Randall Munroe: “You’re a kitty!”

I used to draw a LOT of horses.

For about four years, I drew practically nothing but horses, dogs, and dragons. Understandably I got good at drawing horses, dogs, and dragons. But when I reached the end of that stage and developed an interest in drawing people, I suddenly hit a wall. Though I’d developed a great anatomical understanding of animals, little of it applied to people. (Look, I think that people are animals. But there’s a big difference in musculature and movement between a digitigrade quadruped and a plantigrade biped.) It was like I’d lost about a year’s worth of gains in drawing skill just because I switched subjects.

That was a bit depressing, as you might imagine. But I kept drawing people and anything else that I was in the mood to draw, and I got better at it. As I got a bit older and a bit more varied in my drawing diet, horses gradually dropped out of my regular drawing rotation.

Ten years on, and now I’m on the other side of the same wall. I’m now much better at drawing people than I am at drawing horses, and it’s a bit depressing. When I sat down to draw this horse, it was sort of like my hand contracted a sudden case of terminally stupid.

Le sigh. Tortured artist is tortured, I suppose.

Last week my buddy Mike called in a artistic favor I owed him to get something pretty for the top of his soon-to-be-live blog. He didn’t really have any firm ideas, other than he wanted it to be something that would be appropriate for both his musical and computational pursuits.

It doesn’t always happen, but it did this time: I had a brilliant idea. Punchcards. Musical score. Both covered in dots. BAM.

I think I still have a few tweaks to make though. I like the partial transparency on the punchcard and musical staff details, and I think the dots come off a bit too ‘hard’ in contrast. Also I’m not sure about the background. It’s copied from an aged piece of paper, but it doesn’t actually look much like an aged piece of paper.  I may have to do something about that.