054 tuesday february 1
big cloud / opening lines of fake novels / chicken wrap / every bone i think i've broken
ah, tuesday! what a pleasant surprise. won’t you come in.
i just now remembered that there used to be a barista named Tuesday at a coffee shop i was once a regular at. i assume that was her real name. a name like that, i think your first instinct is to assume it’s some semi-annoying affectation or nickname or something, but the vibes related to this particular case led me to believe otherwise.
during one of my longer stints of unemployment, when i was heroically attempting and failing to balance job searching, thoughts of the future, and existential despair, i spent a lot of time in this particular coffee shop “working on my portfolio.” which mostly meant spending 5-7 minutes blazing through every architecture or design related job board i could find, scrabbling around for any newly posted openings with some combination of “junior” and “designer” in the job title, and then spending another 4-5 hours dragging little boxes and text and images and boxes of text around in the massive InDesign document that represented, at that point, the sum total of my architectural endeavors. sometimes i would whip together yet another superfluous rendering of some previously-unrepresented angle of a project from school. sometimes i would just watch youtube videos.
this was 2012, and jobs for junior designers of any stripe were a little thin on the ground. thanks, obama.
when i wasn’t “working on my portfolio” i also did a little bit of painting. mostly out of boredom. mostly for something to do, on the lower floor of the house i grew up in, in the town i grew up in and had all-too-briefly left behind before slinking back, in that gloomy gap between finishing my undergraduate degree and finally taking the plunge into grad school and committing myself to the path of the architect. looking back, these are not great paintings. but they did get me started painting more regularly. and for one month, the aforementioned coffee shop which i had been haunting let me display a dozen of these medium-bad paintings on their walls. some of them even sold. for amounts sometimes exceeding forty dollars. and after a month, the aforementioned barista named Tuesday bought one of them. it was of a whale, i think.
a little afterward, i told some of my college friends that i had decided to go back to grad school and i was excited to be moving to portland and things were finally looking up ha ha ha and oh by the way i just sold a painting of a whale to a girl named Tuesday. and even though it was 2012 and American society was experiencing what you might call its “peak indie cringe” era, they hated that. they did not like that sentence. they did not hesitate give me a whole lot of shit for even thinking something like that was okay to say.
alright let’s get into it.
1. painting
it would be kind of funny if i wrote that whole thing two weeks ago about slightly restructuring this segment to work more studies in, and then wrote about and shared all those cloud studies last week, and then this week there were no clouds to be seen.
believe me, i considered it.
but it’s 2022! the year of self discipline. tigers are famously self-disciplined. which is how you can tell.
i spent a good amount of time this past week, these past couple weeks, diving into the archive of an artist named Loish’s Patreon posts. she’s an illustrator and artist who is relatively well-exposed, at least in circles of illustration and concept art, and what i mean by well-exposed is that if you’ve seen any illustration work online in the past maybe 4-5 years or if you gravitate towards a certain expressive artistic style and use social media, especially instagram, well, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if you’ve seen some of her stuff. i think her real name is lois something. i think she lives in belgium.
on Patreon she posts a lot of process videos and sketches and more importantly she does a pretty good job of talking through what she’s thinking during these videos, and it’s usually very accessible, relatable, and easy to follow. lots of trial-and-error. lots of mistakes. lots of vocalized frustrations that sound very familiar.
so i was thinking about her process and approach to environments as i did this one.
rough pencil sketches. i got a bigger sketchbook, so these are easier to lay out all together and compare.
very rough color blocking. a big part of how Loish’s process is a very warm embrace of the benefits of the digital format, to a degree that even i usually don’t go. for example, keeping every major element on a separate layer, which means you can subtly adjust tones, hues, values, etc. way later in the process than you would be able to if you were painting flat. so the initial choices don’t matter as much - if you’re in the neighborhood, and you have a reference photo you like or you’re aiming for, it’s very easy to tweak as you go - not by repainting, but by sliding sliders and watching colors shift in real time.
getting some secondary cloud shapes in there, and some gradation of the cloud from top to bottom (tools used: layer masking, clipping masks, several brushes, two types of blur filter, and hue-saturation sliders.) as usual, some of these shapes are more fun and dynamic and expressive than in the final. but the linework is helping a lot with that, honestly - turning it off really changes things.
foreground stuff. pretty standard.
okay we took a big leap here.
as usual, i started fucking around with this and introducing more complex shapes and spiraling out of control and yada yada yada ended up here. in a more complex place. this time, at least, i was working from a few different reference images. so hopefully it looks a little more reasonable than it would otherwise.
almost finished here. another layer of detail in the mid and foreground. some tone work. some birds of course.
scroll up to see the final.
2. opening lines of fake novels
We were all at Parker’s flat when the idea took hold. Later, nobody remembered who brought it up first. It was one of those late-summer days when the truly miserable heat of August had broken but his big, empty rooms were still full of golden light, and we were always warm and drunk.
-
Gaelwyn knew he had made a fatal mistake the instant he shifted his weight to parry the next strike. Quicker than he would have believed possible, Kronnath’s sword flickered under his guard, snapping out of its arc with a casual ease, and slamming into Gaelwyn’s side. The breath exploded out of his chest and he staggered to his side, already overbalanced from his misguided parry, his feet somehow getting tangled into each other and sending him crashing to the flagstones, an icy numbness already spreading across his ribs. In an instant more, the tip of Kronnath’s blade was hovering at his throat, unwavering and stone-steady.
“Not bad,” rumbled the bigger man, and just as quickly as it had appeared, the menacing blade was withdrawn. “But if you’re still intent on winning in the Champion’s Circle next month, might I humbly suggest Your Majesty limits himself to seven ales the night before. The eighth may likely be overkill.”
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“How many alarms does a fucking star cruiser need, anyway?” thought Captain Acreus to himself as he hurtled down the corridor. A new tone had added itself to the cacophony of already-blaring emergency alerts. The usually-neutral lighting had deepened to crimson, punctuated by flashes of blue so bright it hurt his teeth as the phaser battle raged outside the armorplex portholes. Engine damage, hull breach, loss of power, loss of backup power – Acreus ticked them off in his head, cataloging each klaxon and mentally sorting them by importance. As he rounded the last corner before the bridge access hatch, bare feet slapping against the cold metal deck, he realized the most recent addition was one he hadn’t heard in years. Decades maybe. His square jaw set in an even grimmer line as he realized what it meant. Enemy Hyper-gate detected.
The Quiriox Swarm had returned to Earth.
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The big presentation was due in nine hours, but somehow, curled up with her laptop on one end of the couch, Alice couldn’t focus on anything but how cold her toes were – and how long it had been since she’d had someone’s warm legs to tuck them under.
-
When I was fourteen years old, my pa took me into town and bought me my first real pair of boots. By the time I was fifteen and a half, I had put three men in the ground. When I was seventeen, the trouble really started.
3. chicken wrap
not the most aesthetically perfect avocado i guess. could have used a different avocado chunk for the intro image.
this week the idea is simple: take the fried ‘chicken’ salad with noodles from like a year ago, and put it into a wrap. why a wrap? well, i have a bunch of tortillas to use up. and i’m almost out of noodles.
one addition to this version is some miso-glazed carrots. i also had carrots to use up. a good detective would have observed a pattern by this point. we have miso paste, garlic, soy sauce, carrots, olive oil, and maple syrup.
i decided to shred the carrots because i thought texturally it would fit better in the context of a wrap. i am allergic to raw carrots, so i had to cook them one way or another, and cutting them into larger chunks felt like it would end up being too similar in texture to the avocado. too much mush.
tofu chunks ready to go. if you freeze a block of tofu, then thaw it, you end up with a very chicken-y texture. very easy! probably better for you than buying Vegan Chicken Substitute Products but who knows.
for the liquid half of the dredging: plant milk, apple cider vinegar, a little pickle brine, and some hot sauce. mix it up and let it sit for a bit to settle together.
for the dry half: equal parts flour and cornstarch, plus some baking powder and some spices.
double-dredge the tofu fingers and get them ready to fry. ~375 for maybe 5 minutes.
as in the salad of one year ago, i think the secret star here is the dressing. unfortunately looking at it now i can’t remember what was in it. lemon juice, certainly. ginger, definitely. i think grated garlic? sesame oil? probably rice vinegar if i had to guess? looks like some black pepper for sure.
then you basically just assemble all the stuff! i hope that gif plays.
4. every bone i think i’ve broken
i put these little lists together sometimes for the fourth segment when i reach the bottom and i get that alert from substack that lets me know i’m almost at my email length limit. when i’ve used too many images or something. or written too much in the other segments. as i allude to on a practically monthly basis, there’s no real way to get the length right on these without just doing trial-and-error.
so sometimes more sophisticated, refined, thoughtful content has to get bumped to another week and i have to do a little list instead. this week for example is every bone i’ve broken, i think.
my left forearm when i was 13 ish. i was riding my dad’s bike down the hill in the backyard. it was the first time i had ever been on his bike instead of my own, and riding it down the hill for a first try was, in retrospect, a stupid thing to do. i was headed right for a tree and couldn’t really reach the brake lever in time so i jumped off the bike instead. my arm bone didn’t really snap it just kind of… bent. which i didn’t know bones could do. and which has inspired my current nutrient-rich diet of mostly broccoli.
my left ring finger when i was 16. i already told this story in the newsletter, though.
my right big toe when i was 28. i had just moved into a house with an incredibly steep staircase and my then-roommate had set her laptop on one of the bottom stairs. it was very dim and i was in a hurry and i slipped on it and flew into the air like a cartoon character. and somehow in that process my big toe became broken.
honorable mentions:
my left wrist when i was 28 - probably just sprained, but badly. i flipped my single speed bike’s hub over to ride fixed gear that summer, just to see if it was fun. it was fun. but stopping correctly enough to get a foot down at stop signs without tipping over took some learning. in this case i didn’t do it correctly and tipped over.
my right wrist when i was 28 - probably just sprained, but badly. same proximate cause. separate incident.
my right ankle when i was 28 - probably just sprained. you know the drill. i don’t ride fixed anymore.
well i think that will do it for this one. have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.