Recent things

Black and white drawings, crying about block prints, a new video

It’s approaching autumn where I live. I feel I’ve had a slightly unsettled relationship with time this year: I want it to slow down and also speed me to December. I suppose it’s not that unusual to feel conflicted in this way, but it seems more above the surface this year, somehow. 

So while I earnestly do want to be mindful™, and observe the changes closely and slowly, I also want the seasons to hurry up, especially if I’m not particularly enjoying some aspect of them (summer seasonal depresson, anyone?). But I do like the idea of celebrating the seasons so they don’t just fly by, and of making art that marks the changes. In this vein, I started a series of full moon drawings a couple of years ago. I admittedly only got as far as the moon of April, but it’s on my list to do the rest of them.

This is the full moon of sheep, owls, wisteria, weeping willows, and other things.

More black and white drawings

During the past couple of weeks I have returned to doing some of my “black and white drawings of a girl doing things” which is how I think of this sort-of series that I started when I had vertigo and needed something to take my mind off it:

I sold the drawings shown above without scanning them, sadly. They’re a bit discolored probably, because I took the picture with my phone, doubtless in poor lighting. Tragic!

This time, I did a few sort of Halloween-y drawings, a girl doing some vaguely witchy things, but mostly she’s just enjoying her time. That’s been a running theme, I guess. A girl enjoying time.

The four shown above are scanned, yet the quality is still a bit questionable if you ask me. I didn’t alter them in any way, so I don’t know if it’s the scanner or something I did to reduce the quality.

Crying over block prints

This is all mixed up with some anxieties I have about chemicals, and with some sensory issues. I want to make things by hand but when I use anything other than a pencil or fine black pen, I struggle with both the sensory hell that is getting substances (like glue) on my hands, and also the thoughts about everything probably being toxic to my body and the body of my ever-curious cat, Felix.

But anyway, last week I cut some lino into a little season’s greetings type composition in an attempt to make some cards to sell for this winter. I liked the composition and how it reproduced itself on the brown paper cards, but a number of problems coverged to squash my dreams: fingerprints and smudges on the backs of the cards despite my great care, Felix threatening to lick the ink (he learns about things by tasting them, apparently). I thought that more explicit disasters occurred, but I guess the general feeling of things-not-going-well sufficed to make me cry tears of frustration and annoyance!

I laid out the composition a couple of years ago but lost the lino so I had to re-cut it. This was the original print:

And this is last week’s effort:

As I said, I quite liked the composition, but I was also a bit underwhelmed by the overall effect. I decided to experiment a bit with some gold paint. I do love a bit of gold on an otherwise dull surface. What do you think? I also think the composition generally looks better on a white background, judging by the earlier rendition, so I’m considering adding white to one of them to see how that looks. One thing I like about hand printing things is that the end result is always a bit of a surprise. On the other hand, it’s unsettling to have a bit less control over the process. On the other other hand, it reminds me that I don’t have to adhere to rigid rules and it’s fine to experiment and play around a bit!

A video in which I wonder out loud why I journal

The truth is, I’ve never asked this question before; I always assumed there were good reasons for keeping detailed files about my life. But then I got a Hobonichi Techo Cousin and it all began to feel like a bit of a chore, I suppose, in some ways. So I began to ask why, culminating in what I hope is at least an entertaining video.

The video – sadly I’d have to pay to embed it here, and I can’t afford such luxuries at the moment, much as I’d like to – is the first of what I hope will be a series. I lack a lot of confidence when it comes to putting things out there into the world, but I’m trying to do it more, in the spirit of one of the reasons I started the channel. I.e., to make things and to send them out with all their imperfections.

This is the end of my first post! Bye for now.