064 thursday april 14
ready to snooze / spring poem / leftover gravy / playoff basketball is here
well here it is, the accidental second installment. i hope everyone is ok with reading about two vegan recipes in one week. hopefully you all enjoy seeing some sketches and a more polished piece they didn’t really inspire all that much, separated by two days instead of seven.
it’s been a quiet couple of weeks in a lot of ways, i think mostly because i’ve entered one of my favorite phases to be in on a project at work. the sustained last-minute push. since i work on projects that are basically small enough to handle everything on my own, at the beginning of every project i sit down and try to map out a slightly more efficient path to the end goal. a little bit more regular spacing of the effort. and then two weeks in, the client will usually think of a couple little things they want to change, which will set off a whole cascading series of downstream effects, and i’m back to mostly just Rolling With It. rolling downhill towards a deadline.
a lot of the process leading up to say, the final three weeks or so before submitting a set of drawings to whichever county or city is pretty haphazard. there are a certain amount of things that need to get done, and the checklist is basically the same on every project, but because there are so many different people involved even on small projects, the information you need to make final, concrete (ha ha) decisions trickles in at different rates and at different times and things change and get changed back and so on and so forth. so if, for example, you have allowed yourself three months from start to finish to complete a full set of drawings, in my experience two of those months will be spent with the project in a semi exploded, nebulous state. there’s definitely a floor plan that everyone has decided on and agreed to. the basic constraints and shapes of the project have been identified. but all the nuts and bolts and beams and columns and window types and sizes and exact door locations and countertop configurations and gutter details and utility connection information, all those things are still kind of hovering around each other in a big cloud.
and then in the final three weeks, when you finally have all the information you need somewhere in that big cloud, it’s time to compress it all together so it fits into a nice neat little roll of drawings.
this is my favorite phase for a few reasons. one, solving puzzles is fun but only when you have all the pieces. two, it’s more or less the only time you can put your head down and just focus on documentation, without all the meetings and cyclical communication and coordination that every other aspect of my job entails. and three, because of the specific way my firm tries to balance any hours you work over 40 in a week with “additional time off” (basically, if you work 45 hours one week and 35 the next it balances out without someone yelling at you) during this push i usually end up accumulating just enough flex time to take a four-day weekend trip somewhere fun after i submit the drawings, but not enough to drive myself insane through overwork.
should i be stoked about this last part? maybe not. nevertheless.
1. painting
everyone’s getting ready for bed. they’ve all climbed their ladders and lit their candles and are wrapping themselves up in their cubbies.
initial sketch. very clear what i was going for here right out of the gate. pretty much nothing changed.
another pass of the linework, with the perspective constructed a little more correctly. also i just realized that guy is lighting a candle that’s already lit. whoops. maybe he’s retracting his hand after lighting it. let’s go with that.
first pass of colors, which wow these are very muddy. but a good starting point, i guess. keeping it very simple on this one, looks like there are just three colors being used at this point.
there we go. there’s some more stuff going on. one fun thing about drawings like this is trying to decide how far away that light should be going. and where it should still be lighting up edges. i don’t have an actual method for doing this, it’s all by feel. sometimes that works out, sometimes not.
for the final version above i did some more work with layers and overlays, to deepen the shadows and give a slight variation top-to-bottom of this wall or whatever it is. also i believe i did some slight recoloring in some areas of the linework layer. so scroll up to check that out.
2. poem
“spring poem” - april 2022
the sun is out and it’s pouring hail
everyone i know is getting their car stolen
everyone i know is tired
of seeing what comes next
3. leftover gravy
i made myself some poutine kind of on a whim late last week. having the ability to make myself poutine on a whim is probably not the best thing for my long-term health but it was one of those days where it was way colder outside than it looked and i went somewhere with a light jacket instead of a medium jacket and the crappy air sealing at the windows in my apartment was slowly leaching all the heat to the exterior and i got home kind of late from something. poutine is great when you’re cold and borderline grumpy.
i made some gravy from scratch to try and make use of some slightly suspicious looking celery and carrots in my crisper drawer, and ended up with a lot of gravy left over after the fact. so this weekend i found myself googling “what to do with leftover gravy.”
there are some pretty obvious answers, it turns out. some would probably argue that there’s absolutely no need to turn to google when everyone pretty much knows what gravy is for and the range of its uses.
one thing this search did remind me, though, is that you can put gravy on a sandwich. hey! that sounds pretty good. i also had a potato or two that needed eating, and some lettuce just sitting there, so i decided to make a big sloppy sandwich with crispy hash browns, BBQ soy curls, some kind of slaw, and of course, gravy.
soy curls are really easy to cook with. they’re so great.
wow yum. i ran out of store bought barbecue sauce so i improvised a little bit with some other aging condiments in the fridge. this sandwich really exceeded all of my leftover-using expectations.
there it goes. shredded up the potato to make some nice crispy hash browns, then some BBQ soy curls, then a big slop of gravy, then some green-onion-and-iceberg slaw i threw together. the buns were also left over, from that fish sandwich last week that you just read about two days ago. wow! i’m like one of those dust bowl era homesteaders who re-uses everything.
when i googled “what to do with leftover gravy” there was actually one thing on that list that surprised me. whoever wrote it for whichever content farm got my click suggested using it as a base for curry. makes sense! vegetable gravy is really mostly about concentrated vegetable flavor, why not!
added some coconut milk and veggie broth, cooked up a bunch of vegetables and potatoes to throw in it, and made some rice. it was great! great idea! thank you, IncredibleKitchenHacks or whatever.
4. playoff basketball is here
not much to say in this section beyond the title. but playoff basketball is here. a bunch of teams who sort of maybe have the sliver of an outside chance are turning on the jets, and a bunch of aging superstars are decanting themselves from their cryonic recovery chambers to play actual basketball for the first time in months.
so far we’re about halfway through the play-in tournament, which i am counting as the playoffs even though you might not, and for my money it’s already been great. if you’re on twitter you probably saw some clips of the Timberwolves celebrating after defeating the LA Clippers to lock up the 7 seed. if you follow me on twitter you might have seen seven hundred now-deleted tweets about CJ McCollum, a former trail blazer who is now lighting it up on the Pelicans.
there’s more on the line now. players are digging deep and playing harder. starters are playing serious minutes. both teams are actually exhausted at the end of the games, which doesn’t always happen in the regular season.
i recommend checking it out. some of it, at least. one thing that might help if you are not really a serious basketball fan is to make yourself a little bracket of what you think is going to happen in the playoffs. even if you don’t know anything about the teams it gives you just a little more incentive to pay attention, maybe catch a game or two, start picking up on some of the unfolding narratives and story arcs.
i found myself added to a truly chaotic 30+ person playoff bracket group chat this year, so i filled one out too, which i am including here in case it’s interesting.
i think that’s about it for this week. double dose! have a good week everyone. see ya next tuesday. bye.