i can’t believe it’s not monday!
well it’s been another dark week here in america. kind of as usual i guess. more police murder. and another cycle of our civic leaders (including our dear president) and ostensibly liberal journalists, and maybe your parents, and definitely some people you know or work with, fretting about property damage as people take to the street to express rage and grief and frustration in one of the few ways that causes the upper crust to blink anymore.
and if you’re one of those people, even secretly, even a little bit in your heart of hearts, and im not sure how many people read this thing but statistically some of you probably are: shut up. who cares. insurance companies will pay for it. it doesn’t matter if it “makes the movement look bad” because the people in charge of police budgets actually do not give a shit about you either way and if it wasn’t this it would be something else. so quit fretting about the profit margins of insurance companies. at best it’s deeply lame.
not much else i can say about that except stuff i’ve already said a half dozen times in this newsletter already in its short life: find a boat full of people heading towards the shore that most closely resembles some part of the geography of the ideal future you keep in your head. and grab an oar.
no need to harp on that i think. you all get it at this point. here we go.
1. painting
i was going to put some people into this one but tuesday came faster than i expected.
it’s a fun one! a-frame cabins, but in the future! looks like some kind of space habitat maybe, judging by that structure floating up above everything. mass transit too. good density.
this week the hardest parts were the color scheme and the sheer amount of time drawings like these take me. it’s always more than i think and i am always always tempted to bail about 2/3 through. let’s check out some sketches.
here’s the starting point. this is one of those ones where i already had an image in my head so the challenge was not to paint from reference or to create an interesting composition through sketching and exploration, but to somehow pin down the floating edges of that vision and get it translated into actual linework.
this is pretty close. those little circles along the path were going to be people on bikes. i will probably come back and add them at some point.
you can also see how sloppy the perspective is at this point. and originally, i was going to add a couple more rows of the cabins, so they’d be marching up the hillside in terraces almost.
one of the main things that takes a lot of time with these drawings is the layering up of detail and pieces. when i’m doing these constructed architecture-ish illustrations, i will usually re-draw the linework layer about 4 times. sometimes more. adjusting things like door heights, dialing in roof thicknesses, alignments of elements, and so on.
this is pretty close to the final linework.
at this point i would usually turn the linework way way way down so you can barely see it, and start filling in planes with color. on this one i took a slightly different approach and actually painted out a lot of the color with brushstrokes rather than selecting an a area and using the fill tool. gives it a little bit of a more hand-drawn look.
this is another one where as i was painting it i spent a lot of time thinking about how all my typical digital brushes are like, almost what i am looking for but not quite. i’m due for some cleanup there soon.
this was a fun one! i drew a lot of inspiration from retrofuturist art and mid century illustration in general, especially in terms of plant shapes and overall color palette. these are the kind of pieces that make me think, hmm, okay, maybe this is my “niche” and i should worry less about learning to draw people at some point in my life.
2. poem
“work poem” - spring 2021
what if i quit my job
and shut my computer and unplugged the mouse from my computer and turned off the other monitor and ignored the drip drip of last minute questions and well wishes and neutral wishes and reminders
and sat there
shoulders tilting in a new way, right hand loosening
a little sliver of ice sharpening
what if i quit my job and double triple checked everything and checked my accounts and told my folks and told my brother and got around to telling my sister and figured out my lease and how much dust i could leave in the corners which chips which holes to leave
and got in my car and drove
and stopped by one of the dozen coffee shops i’ve stopped by before and slept by a lake somewhere and slept by a river somewhere and came through the outside of your city which looks like the outside of my city and parked my car and checked my hair in the rear view mirror
and walked up your steps and knocked on your door
and waited there squinting fluttering
and your neighbor stuck their head out their window and said,
hey man
they moved
they moved a while ago
you didn’t know?
3. “fish” tacos
i didn’t get many good pictures of the finished product this week unfortunately because they were really delicious. nevertheless.
it’s definitely spring and getting toward summer and so it’s getting less and less appealing to eat giant bowls of pasta and enchiladas and things like that. in short it is fish taco season.
i was never really actually much of a fish taco guy back when i was eating meat. or a taco guy in general. not sure what the deal is there but whenever we found ourselves out somewhere on a patio or sidewalk drinking beers or margaritas there was usually something else i was more interested in chowing down on. who knows! maybe it’s due to my upbringing.
anyway these are pretty basic. after some disasters with various other attempts at fish n chips or shrimp or fish sticks i decided to keep it simple and low-risk.
you can guess what all this stuff is i’m sure. i’ve mentioned this before but if you freeze a block of tofu and then thaw it you get a nice meaty texture that’s much more substantial somehow than the standard tofu smoothness.
marinade for the tofu pieces. some vegan fish sauce, rice vinegar, kelp flakes, soy sauce, lemon, and sesame oil.
they will sit in this while i’m making everything else. this actually did work pretty well this time. i think in some of my past attempts it hasn’t. but the tofu soaked the flavor right up which is after all the whole point.
fish taco sauce, in this case vegan sour cream, vegan mayo, lime juice, garlic powder, and sriracha. very tasty. the “simple truth” brand of vegan sour cream is the real deal.
i asked on twitter what a good side for fish tacos is and this corn salsa / salad was the most appealing of the replies i got. corn, diced tomatoes, cilantro, lime, red onion, cumin, cayenne, salt and pepper.
yum
and here are the fish chunks. they’re double-breaded. pretty basic. i plan to fry three of these and air fry the other three just to compare.
assembling the tacos. first up is a little bit of that vegan ricotta that i made a couple weeks ago and am actually just now realizing i have no idea if it should have kept this long or what but as of tuesday morning, i have not died of food poisoning. recreating some kind of cotija cheese for these seemed very daunting and i had a few scrapes of ricotta left over anyway.
here are the fried versions. the air fryer was still going and i was hungry so these ended up being the only ones i ate in taco form. they were delicious and had a subtle fishy flavor - definitely not strong, i could have marinated them more i guess, but plenty for this.
they’re sitting on a bed of slaw that’s cabbage, sesame oil, rice vinegar, fresh ginger, and sesame seeds. and some red onions tossed on there too.
add tomato, cilantro, avocado, and drizzle some of that sauce over top and presto.
call me virginia because i’ve done it again.
4. two lists
for our fourth segment this week i have two lists. list one is stuff that hasn’t made the cut for this fourth chunk yet but might soon. no idea if this is interesting. list two is things i want to do this summer.
things to think about more and maybe write about
good boring architecture
ways to think about the future
mediocre books
what’s too much
the phrase “bearing witness”
winning
the weird city in belgium i spent a year in when i was 16
music
letters
summer plans
go to the desert alone
go to the desert with friends
build a sleeping platform in my car
sleep in a hammock
get too cold from sleeping in a hammock halfway through the night and sleep in my car on the sleeping platform
get only one sunburn
have only three hangovers
talk on the phone with someone in a different city
think about the future
well there ya have it! another tuesday in which the delicious food is pulling most of the weight, newsletter-wise. but that’s okay. have a good week everyone. see you next tuesday. bye.