Pandoramic

Pandoramic

Human, artist, animator, writer, doer of tries.

Goal

Originally, I set out into June with the intent of dedicating the month to studying perspective.

The roster included:

Most of the roster stayed the same, but I decided to transition from the perspective theme to following along with the June Study Jam that started around the same time, which included daily environment and figure photo references.

How’d I do?

Art Generally? Success. Here’s a collection of my work from the month.

Despite my earnest desire to do full color studies of all of the reference, I only succeeded on that front with the landscapes, but I did do sketch studies from all of the figure references, and I kept up well with my imagination sketches throughout the month.

Between the caretaking and health struggles at home and my relative lack of familiarity with environments (plus delaying the decision to transition to the JSJ from perspective-themed stuff), I found myself burning out about halfway through the month. I really didn’t want to give up, so I recalled a bit of a discussion from the Andrew Huberman Podcast about dopamine (Increase Your Focus, Learn Faster, How to Be More Creative, Increase Your Motivation are all related to this) and devised a strategy to keep chugging, even at a slower pace: marathon Burn Notice on my left monitor while painting, slow down, and just keep going. It actually worked quite well for me, but by the end of the month I felt a strong need to do a mini dopamine detox to bring myself back down to a place where I could move forward with work and focus without constant stimulation.

Tangential but related, at the beginning of the month I created an Instagram account for dedicated art posting. DeviantArt used to be my jam, but I’m less than enthusiastic about the way the site has changed over the last few years goes as far as basically all of the functions are concerned (posting, engaging on posts, browsing…) and although ArtStation has something real to offer on the organizational front, it also lacks the charm and ease of engagement that DeviantArt had back in the day. I’m sort of giving Instagram the side-eye for its potential to fill that gap. One point in its favor so far is the ability to share videos, which opens up the flexibility to share little animation sketches and experiment with the apparently ubiquitous process video features on mobile art apps.

All that said, I’m sorely out of practice with social sharing and I think it’s going to be a minute yet before I hit a stride. I’ve been told that the secret to ‘building an audience’ is to post regularly and consistently, which suggests things like every post should be a single image, one should create at a faster pace than they post and withhold enough work to keep a buffer, and so on, but that approach feels disingenuous to me and until I settle my feelings on art posting and social media, expect irregular dumps of varying sizes.

Reading 1.5/3, but the perspective knowledge became much less urgent with the swap of study goals for the month. One of my larger take-aways was that most of artistic perspective comes down to making observations about relative size - sort of an obvious, duh kind of thing, but being cognizant of it simplifies and demystifies the whole practice. Things diminish in size toward the horizon, parallel lines appear to converge, and the placement of the horizon line also establishes the viewer’s eye level and direction. The rest of learning about perspective seems to be tips and tricks to estimate, duplicate, and transfer relative measurements and points in space.

The other major take-away from my study in perspective was that, for most of my creative ambitions, I’m better served by creating 3D scenes to mock-up backgrounds and skip the need to painstakingly measure out and place every element in space. Further study in this direction looks more like learning about cinematography than drawing, I think.

BeeRef Weeklies image-right This was a major quality of life improvement over my previous effort-tracking method (writing out my activity log). I made a template file to contain information for a week at a shot, and every Wednesday I reviewed the previous week and filled in the template for the following week with my self-assigned reading, pre-selected photo references, progress updates toward goals, and reminders for things I wanted to do. My daily work was screenshotted and pasted into the ‘from the day’ box. The effectiveness was above and beyond what I was hoping for when I set up the system; my constant panic about whether or not I was really getting much done or making progress to my goals largely subsided, and I found I was often fairly pleased with my efforts by the end of the week. Maintaining the system was a very low mental overhead activity, which makes the experiment a strong net positive life addition.

Health The wacky health issues from May carried over into June, and I found myself having a difficult time with sleep (namely, frequent exhaustion and over-sleeping). It was a big sad to lose the pre-caretaking morning hours. At the same time, I did start getting out of the house for midday walks down to the beach, which was an improvement that’s difficult to quantify properly after so many months of seriously not leaving the house. Wes and I made some major changes to our dietary intake, primarily aimed at helping him to recover from stomach ulcers. We embarked upon a protein smoothie diet (coffee + frozen green banana + whey protein isolate + whole milk plain greek yogurt + vanilla extract), purchased a distiller for our drinking water (so that we would no longer need to deal with bottled water or the heavily chlorinated and cloudy water from the tap), and started mixing up electrolyte water (lemon juice, salt, water) to sip at throughout the day. All but the sleep improved substantially.

Garden I wound up having to pot down my strelitzia after a good chunk of the root system rotted away and it tried to take a nose dive out of the big one, and I wound up having to repot my crossandra as well after mistakenly switching it onto a daily watering schedule. YouTube helped me problem-solve the last issues my garden was having, most prominently reallybigplant’s casual troubleshooting and discussion of her own indoor plant maintenance. All of the propagations from The Big Cutback of May took off, and my indoor garden is now going strong and much bushier.

Because I am greedy, I also took on an orchid and a few new cuttings (golden pothos, clusia, and snake plant) from some landscaping that went on down the street, most of which have taken well to the cutting life and are on their way to becoming real little plants of their own.

After getting everything under control in May, it was pretty much smooth sailing, even with the enclosed patio garden. One of the storm doors doesn’t close properly, so I think that I’m going to have to learn to be zen and vigilant in the face of inevitable invaders. The major infestation does seem to be over for real, though, and my succulent cuttings are all finally growing up.

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