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October’s Progress

Just Blogging

The equinox has passed, and Fall is officially in the air, even though in Texas you can’t really tell just by looking out the window. It’s mostly just shorter days, and am I getting blasted by furnace-air as I open my car door? Y/N, and if No you know the season has changed at long last. It was strange for the summer to sort of just disappear with everything going on, but to be quite honest, I’m not always the type to get all that much done outside during the scorching months anyway. Bring on the autumn leaves and cooler weather.

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Drawing Exercise: Blobs to Figures

Fun With A Pencil

Here’s a fun little exercise I’ve been playing around with lately. I started out doing the “draw random shapes and draw faces on them” thing, but thought it might be interesting to see how well it worked for figure drawing at large. I don’t find myself filling up the entire shape too often, and sometimes body parts escape the boundaries of the blobs. But it’s neat as a type of gesture drawing exercise. It seems to give the compositional side of my brain a good workout, and some interesting poses can be “found” within them.

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Wisdom and Madness

Scripture and the Creative Life

I said in my heart, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.

For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.

Ecclesiastes 1:16-18

Yesterday was Yom Kippur. I spent the day reading Ecclesiastes and part of Isaiah, and it was more scripture than I’d read in months. Perhaps a whole year. I’ve been so lazy about reading the Bible for a long time, to be completely honest. There’s a long and convoluted history of reasons for this, but they’re more excuses when I really start picking them all apart. It wasn’t because I intentionally turned away from God. It was because I have always thought I would be worthless if I wasn’t something more in this world. Which is why I took up a more serious pursuit of art.

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Oiling The Hinges

Oils, Painting and Process

My art-making muscles are so rusty! I’ve been focusing more on writing, veggie gardening, and fixing up the house during the lockdown, but I broke out these Chroma Archival oils again yesterday for the first time in months, and decided to try painting a J.C. Leyendecker. I considered doing a master study of one of his works, but because they’re simply too beautiful and I still have no idea what I’m doing with this new medium, I chose to copy a photo of the artist himself instead.

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Hindsight is 2020

Just Blogging

I should have started this blog a long time ago.

I mean, I did. Multiple times. I’ve set up maybe six or seven blog sites over the years, fiddling around amateurishly with layouts and HTML and CSS, but I don’t think they ever progressed further than one or two posts each time. I just didn’t know what to say, or if it was even important enough for saying. A turning point came when I joined Instagram in 2015, and met a ton of lovely friends on there. What started as simply a fun place to share art and meet other artists, eventually became that blog-like outlet that I had been craving, especially after the Stories feature was added. For those who don’t know, Stories are a Snapchat clone. And let me tell you, they are like crack. Heck, all of Instagram, and pretty much the entirety of social media is too. Except it’s all legal, and ‘free’, and all your friends are doing it alongside you. And I think in some way, large or small, individually or as a society, it messes all of us up. But that’s for another post.

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