036 tuesday september 28
lighthouse process / architecture poem / a rainy bowl of soup / thoughts on five jams
tuesday: garfield’s most favorite day.
this is the section where i give you all a little update on my life. this is the section where you all get an extremely controlled glimpse of how things are going and how i am feeling about how they are going. and this week is no exception.
in some ways the past year-plus of life has felt like a holding pattern. like breath being held, maybe, or like a bicycle slowing down but not yet slow enough to start to wobble and tip over. or like a weekend where you got 60% of your chores done but were hung over on saturday morning and kind of wrote saturday off and still got up and did some stuff on saturday but saved most of the chores for sunday, and you only got to 60% of them, and kicked the rest down the road, and got 7 hours of sleep, not quite 8, but enough to get you through monday and tuesday and most of wednesday and hell at that point it’s a downhill ride to thursday and friday.
the covid pause. the post-bernie free fall. they call it free fall but what it really is is floating weightless, with only the inertia you came in with, and if you slow to a stop in the middle of the space station, you’d better hope something else comes along and knocks you close enough to the wall so you can grab something.
i had a great week, though. i pulled the plug on a potential romantic situation that was pretty much going nowhere, which is usually a relief, and then later that week went on a first date with someone i actually did vibe with, which is not only a relief but a surprise. i celebrated a friend’s birthday with more friends than i have seen in one place in person in probably five years. and i went camping on the coast with a friend i really only know from the internet and had a great time. isn’t that nice? in this day and age? to make friends on a web site and then see those friends in person and already know that you are going to hit it off in terms of enjoying each others’ company? and friend from the internet, if you are reading this and had doubts, now you know: it was a great time.
probably most impactful on my mood, though, was the fact that the servers at work were fucked from friday morning to late monday afternoon. so i couldn’t do anything job related. isn’t that interesting.
let’s go.
1. painting
i’m doing something a little different today. i do usually talk process in this segment but today i thought it might be fun to actually get a little more specific.
as a result, this painting sucks. it’s boring. it’s half an idea done in three quarters of an hour. the composition is a mess and don’t even get me started on the tones. sheesh!
also i got back late Monday and had a lot going on that night. including a second date. so i prioritized spending time with beautiful women over this stupid personal project. so what.
sketch, based on a real beach in southern Washington: Cape Disappointment. wow, we could go crazy with the riffs on that name, couldn’t we?
ok now hold up. now what the hell is this? what am i looking at here?
this is the painting app i use: procreate. it’s a stupid name but i didn’t name it. and now i think it’s too late to change it. until they get bought by adobe and it becomes Adobe ProCreate and you can subscribe to it for the cost of a tank of gas a month and they stop maintaining it and they take the engineers who originally developed it out into a ravine somewhere and shoot them in the head.
here’s the reference photo. there are a couple basic ways to pull colors from photos like this, which i have talked about before: you can look back and forth between the photo and the painting a lot, and use your knowledge of color theory and color mixing and light and so forth to gradually build up a palette, based on reference and inference and skill and context, etc. this is what art teachers would call “the right way.”
you can also use the eye dropper tool to sample some colors from the photo and save them into a palette. this is what art teachers would call “cheating.” this is what i did this time, and i’ll do it again, too. i don’t feel an ounce of remorse.
in this case, i picked three colors from each “area”: the sky, the rocks, the beach, and the vegetation. i tried to pick the darkest tone, the lightest tone, and then a midpoint tone - with these starting points, mixing the colors down the road gets a lot easier. when you know how dark you can go, and how light you’re allowed to get. constraints breed creativity, they say.
then, you dim the opacity on your sketch layer and start putting your colors in underneath. you can choose from a whole host of paintbrushes. if you are in a hurry you can also use the “freehand selection” or “lasso” tool to scribble out some basic shapes, which you can then paint into or drop paint into. i do this sometimes when i want to create some organic-ish shapes i wouldn’t come up with with just brushstrokes. it’s also faster. you can see that’s what i’m doing on that far cliff. and you can see that’s what i did on the beach, and in the waves. the sky is different. the shapes there are much softer.
more detail / progress. “progress.”
like many digital artists, about three years ago i created my own digital brush that was just for pine trees. it’s a bunch of triangles, essentially, but you can customize things like how densely they are spaced, the randomization of each tree, even a slight color shift between trees if you want. this was absolutely huge in 2018 and 2019. go check some concept artists out on instagram if you don’t believe me. this was like building your own lightsaber or whatever.
and here’s a shot of us getting pretty close to the end. i figured it might be neat to see all the layers. usually, most elements get their own layers. it makes it easier to modify specific pieces, especially the sky, and it also makes it easier to put things in between layers later. things like fog, or more trees.
layer 12 and layer 11 in this stack are set to “overlay” and “soft light” respectively - these are the tonal washes i put over pieces like this (usually at the end but not always) to bring things closer together in terms of hue, and to adjust the overall balance of light and dark. usually you do not want to get too fussy with this. a straightforward linear gradient from orange to blue, or yellow to purple, is a good rule of thumb. and then usually turned pretty far down in terms of opacity — just enough to get a sense.
that’s it! hope it was interesting.
2. poem
“architecture poem” - fall 2021
can you design me a house for writing,
you said
i said i get that all the time
people love to convince themselves that that’s all it would take
a new set of windows, a different slant of light —
a big room where your brain echoes against itself in new and unexpected ways
as it happens, yes, i can
i said
and people are right, in this case, to think all those things
but just coincidentally
and don’t let that go to your head this time
3. a rainy bowl of soup
i am kind of cheating again on this one. this photo is not from the campsite as i had intended, but it is a photo of the leftovers from the campsite. so i think it still counts.
i had big ambitions to cook some extremely delicious soup out at the coast this weekend and i even did a little bit of prep ahead of time. but when we got out to cape disappointment, the weather was comically abysmal. rain but not just rain, blowing, sheeting rain. the fire stayed lit for about 15 minutes which seemed like a miracle. it was not food photography weather is what i mean.
but i’ll go through it anyway. it’s pretty easy to put together if you are car camping. and for me at least it’s always a challenge to think of good camping food. so maybe this will be helpful for some of you.
the main innovation here was cooking up some mushrooms and garlic ahead of time, and using them as kind of a “base” to add some richness to the store-bought ramen broth i had. i used store-bought because it was easier and also easier to transport and also i was doing a lot of this at the absolute last minute and really at this point thirty something weeks in can that be any surprise to anyone still reading?
as they cook down and flavor up, i deglazed them with some soy sauce. i don’t know what that word actually means but i put some soy sauce in the hot pan and some of the crusty crud lifted up and blended back in with the liquid and formed a sort of glaze. that sounds right, doesn’t it?
meanwhile i had some leftover broccolini to eat. if i did this over i would definitely chop this up smaller. i would also definitely rethink camping in weather like that, though. so maybe the broccolini wasn’t the problem.
can you guess what i did with this? i hope you can. if not, check some previous editions for clues.
press and drain tofu, cut into cubes, toss in cornstarch, heat up oil, pan-fry cubes, set cubes on paper towels to drain and cool.
assemble your products. i threw out the broth packet on the noodles so it still counts as being vegan. that’s what being vegan is all about: throwing away food you don’t agree with.
and then voila! truck all this stuff out to the coast in a cooler, then use your knockoff JetBoil stove to heat up the broth, put the noodles in for a few minutes, then the mushrooms, then finally the broccolini toward the end. pull it off the stove and pull up your hood and sort of hunch over in your chair and wolf down as much as you can before the edible really kicks in and you become instantly, powerfully sleepy and pass out at 8:35pm.
that’s my method, at least.
4. thoughts on five jams
i’m back in music mode recently. this isn’t really my beat but i’ll give you all a little update on some songs i have been loving recently and four or five sentences about each one.
does it get funnier every time i write about music and preface it by saying i never write about music? maybe not yet. but it will. it’ll get funnier.
im not linking to the songs here because i can’t figure out the spotify embed thing. i apologize for that. but i linked to the youtube videos.
“physical” by dua lipa
i usually only listen to more mainstream pop when i am in production mode at work and need something with a beat that i can zone out to. usually this puts me in the section of youtube where all the channels are called like “chill summer vibes” or “tropical dream chill” or “tropical chill summer vibes” and the cover photos are of women in great shape doing innocuous pastel-hued activities at various beaches, shot from low angles. anyway this song was one half of a mashup by the white panda and the beat as i’m sure you know is one of the most addictive things i’ve ever heard.“automobile” by nation of language
i saw these guys open for someone else a few years ago and they blew me away. i love synthesizers and i love new wave and i love that kind of new order / joy division bass sound and i apologize to all my gen x friends for probably incorrectly conflating so many of those things. the album this is from is pretty uneven but there are some serious bangers on there. this one is great to sing along to in a car.“something to remember me by” by the horrors
i have no emotional or historical connection to this song. i have no idea how i came across it. but it’s in that category of like, mid-00’s overly long danceable electronic music with lcd soundsystem and that song by beck & the chemical brothers and all that. great working music. great driving music.“tall saint” by the national
sometime in the past year, spotify yanked the version of the virginia EP that they had had on there, and with it, quite a few alts and weird fragments and proto-versions of songs composed of elements that would end up scattered across other albums and “finished” tracks by the band in the years to come. the versions of blank slate and slow show on this ep are particularly interesting to listen to again if you are familiar with the rest of their work. but this one came up the other day as these things normally do, when a friend mentioned it fifteen tweets deep in some thread on twitter aimed at like five people and reminded me it existed. i am not usually a lyrics guy but i do of course make exceptions for little shards like “just take me one time around the ballroom slow and // take me home” that wedge themselves into your brain and spend the rest of your life glimmering when you least expect them.“day i die” also by the national
this album was an almost-total miss for me when it first came out, despite the fact that it includes inarguably the best song the band has ever written. the rest of it was weird and machinelike — all the percussion sounds like it was performed by a steam locomotive. but like many things in life i revisited it and my opinion changed. like broccoli.
the lyrics on this track are also good and i know lots of people like the national primarily because of matt berninger’s endlessly poetic musings on how to live a meaningful life when you’re three quarters wasted on red wine for the duration. but for me the best part of this song as i have said many times is when the guitars do the wee-waa part.
runners up with no thoughts or links attached:
“no widows” by the antlers
“212” by azalea banks & lazy jay
“so american” by portugal the man
“glory” by cold cave
“i don’t wanna get over you” by the magnetic fields
well gosh i think that’s about as good a place as any to call it for this week! have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.