another month of 52's (five-pack ten+10 bits for a creative practice+self help junky)
reheating stale takes
I'm now distant enough from these pieces they’ve become surprises to revisit. I should to accelerate the release of these five-packs, but things are about to crazy at work. If I fall further behind, that will let them age longer as old surprises to uncover.
,
world
floating
in
a
jar
I had a rough time with the composition, and I need to take a month to practice the sign painting script to hit right. Even so, I'm happy with this final version, even if it took a little computer magic to make it work.
,
uhoh
them
mops
gots
buckets
In retrospect, I the sign painted UH-OH would have worked better, but in the moment I pushed the cursive in the finished versions. I'm looking for a good pointed brush outside of my Pentel pens, but it will take a few tries to get right. That's gonna be an expensive exercise since it requires buying individual brushes.
,
aquarius
poor
ganymede
mixing
nectar
I've been starting my mornings by practicing the my script of the month. Pushing the finished piece with the hue function gave it a nice watery feel, by changing the colors. My main practice inks are yellow and pink because they are quite dry (so they don't heavily on cheap paper).
BTW the original Aquarius myth of sad, if not traumatic. Them Greeks told things real. Same for the Bible, even if we normally gloss over those parts.
,
we're all in this zoo
As always, there are so many little decisions that must be made after the overall concept. Again, the practice sheet came to the rescue, adding a little extra noise to give the composition presence.
,
a light in the swamp
The top two versions are tweaks of the same scan. All versions were done as black/grey ink on white paper and then inverted in GIMP. After that, it's about how hard to push the dials.
,
As much as I'd prefer to do it all perfectly on the page, the computer is an integral part of my process. These discussions about process are my penance for relying so much on the box.
Similar to the writing seminar in undergrad, I suspect my most influential class in grad school was the digital photography course with Frank White. As an architectural photographer, he unapologetically embraced the computer as part of the process.
Of course, the process is a lot harder if you don't start with good inputs, but the final piece is the final piece. Excuses about what happened along the way don't matter for the deliverable.
That's how I do it here. I'm not above the occasional process photo to flash that I can do most of it in real life. I'm not hiding anything, whether it came from the pen or was pushed in the computer.
It just is.
Cya next time!
,
PS—10 Bits For a Creative Practice
I wrote this as a response to someone's post in early 2024, but the records have been drowned in the endless feed of content. I liked this enough to save it as a draft and it's finally time to reshare it.
Show up every day.
Jump in! FFS just start.
Study the greats.
Celebrate your peers.
Don't freak out about bad work.
Tension is the trigger to breathe. Relax.
If you can’t do it slow you can’t do it fast. No rush.
Pivot freely.
If the crop feels wrong, the crop IS wrong. (Trust your gut)—an aphorism I learned in that photography class. The concept of trusting default triggers has served me well over the decades for many things beyond images.
Do it again tomorrow!
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PPS—Self Help Junky
Another response to someone else (exactly who lost in the endless feed).
As a former self-help junky, I’m a big fan of the anti-self-help movement. Of course, a moderate approach is generally best in life, but if you could only pick path I'd recommend skipping self-help.
But I’m moderating this reactionary stance after reading Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery.
I wonder if the question for judging a book is “how” versus “what”. Don’t invest in books that tell you what to do (or avoid). But there might be value in books that explore how to get somewhere that you already want to reach.
In that spirit, here is a quartet of self help books that might be of use:
Fail-Safe Investing, Harry Browne (great life-finance advice, though do your own research on portfolio composition because the specifics are dated)
So Great they Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport (good compilation of career advice for someone entering the workforce)
Several Short Sentences about Writing, Veryln Klinkenborg (this book goes beyond writing to life, even if a bastardized version of his advice has infected LinkedIn with punchy shallow drivel.)
Effortless Mastery, Kenny Werner (a slow approach to practice, nominally about music but it applies to anything. It's a distant second best to Tai Chi training at a good school.)
All that said, the Bhagavad Gita would trump all of these books, even if it's profane to place this text next to self-help fare. May the gods forgive me.
But always be ready to ignore anything that you read in these books. Never confuse the author’s confidence in their advice for it’s applicability to your wild and wooly reality.
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PPPS—Black to Yellow
For giggles I took a brush pen with black in and put in a cartridge with Lamy Mango Yellow. The first sheet shows the transition from pure black (marked with the cyan slash on the second line) to yellow.
Interestingly, when I went back for more practice, there was still some more black that came out of the brush.
The next morning I made the "aquarius" 5WP (above), which had more black sneaking out (every other line was made with that black-mango ink, the other lines were made with the former mango pen, now filled with a pinkish ink).
Funny how these things play. The joy of the real world!
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Loved all of this. But black to mango yellow and back. Delicious! Also second time I've heard of the Several Short Sentences book. Will check it out!
When you're writing the close lines for the background cursive for some of these, are you writing something specific or is it just jibberish? They're an interesting backdrop for the main text of the graphic. What's more, they're not really that distracting. It's interesting how that works.