Bienvenidos!
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darkness
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old
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I’ve come to talk with you again
So this first blog post may be a bit wonky in format. I spent some time last week neck-deep in the designing of it and learning all of the features Squarespace provides for blog posts. Hence the accordion thing at the top of the page. Lord knows what you’d ever use something like that for. One idea I had was to start posts off with a lyric of some kind. The teeny grey text at the top is a tag. Rationally I know they’re meant to help someone find your post easily but I’m not sure what good that is if you don’t have a search bar on your site…I guess I’ll see how the page populates once I get a couple of posts up. But I digress.
“This is a block quote. I’m a little annoyed that I can’t change the color of the text to the teal or yellow, but I’m not about to pay an extra $7 a month for the ability to insert custom css.”
Is this whole blog post going to be me explaining the bits and pieces that make up the design? Could very well be. Could also be that I’m still a bit cloudy in what my goals are for this blog and how I’m going to present them. I suppose it would be easier if I filled you in on what those goals are? Unfortunately Love, those seem to also change more often than Tara Gregson’s personalities. Side note, Squarespace has an entire option for font called “code.” I was going to make this text block that, but then the indication that there was a link there went away.
Here’s what it looks like. Why?
LOVE THIS
I definitely want to use this color block for something just for some pizazz you know? Maybe I can highlight something important here? Maybe i can use it for a tangent that connects back to the main blog post somehow? Whatever the case may be i can’t write allllllll the way to the bottom of the block because it looks pretty bad in mobile view. If the title (teal) text is too long, it blends into the paint splatter as well. Just some notes to self. Carry on!
speaking of this far
Another thing I was tossing around was how long a blog post should be. I don’t want it to go on forever and ever (my internal dialogue can ramble, oh boy, can it ramble. And I suppose the length depends on what I’m discussing. And what am I discussing?
next question
Quick aside that has to do with rambling blog posts. You know when you go to look up a recipe (assuming you don’t subsist on Girl Dinner) and they tell you the super duper quick, 392 page story about how they grew up on a farm in Scotland and make their own cheese when all you want is to get to the part that tells you how many Monsanto onions you need to cry through to make your Persian lentils?
What’s the point?
I feel like this blog post is like that so far. I PROMISE this is going to relate to art somehow. Or some deep-seeded meaning of life. Or at least give you a chuckle. Or at least contain enough interest to hold your attention. To make you want to keep reading despite the fact that you have much better things to be doing with your time. I clearly didn’t know what I was getting into when I planted these seeds, but I’ll be here, every Thursday, watering them, tilling the soil (or is that what worms do?) hopefully growing some classy strawberries. Not those shitty ones that are the size of a grapefruit and taste like water. The itty bitty pretty ones. I got that title wrong LOL
Quick, a picture to distract you!
i meal prepped
too much food i’m realizing
But if you’re going to binge eat it may as well be vegetables. I guess this section should probably be about the picture that’s below it, rather than above it. I’m learning ya’ll. I meant the point was to save this section because I added it while designing the content without knowing what the content was going to be. So who knows what I’ll keep or toss. This post is just the master I can duplicate and edit when it comes time to actually say something. The onions. I know.
can't say i didn't show you any art!
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can't say i didn't show you any art! *
i considered using
that scrolling text there but it reminded me too much of an ad. And I HATE ads. I also don’t think I can continue a sentence from the title text because there’s too much of a gap and that sentence could be read as “I considered using…” drugs? That’s what popped into my head first. And I’d never do drugs. I wouldn’t D.A.R.E. ;)
Believe it or not I wrote this post in one go. Whatever came to mind is what got written down. And as you’ve probably surmised if you’ve made it to the end. Not going to lie this process is very similar to how I paint (when I’m painting for myself anyway). Throw some color down, use one of the 10,000 brushes I’ve collected to see what they do, mush it, smudge it, keep adding color until what’s that? If you squint and cock your head a bit that blue squiggle looks like the branch of a tree. And that dark red blob could be a cliff if I shave off the top. Maybe I should change the color of that cliff actually. It’s a little loud, and not the fun loud, the obnoxious loud. What is that cat doing? Oh my god I forgot to text her back! Why the heck isn’t this undo button undoing?! There we go. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
I was going to link that hmmmmmmmmmmm to a clip from the Emperor’s New Groove: where Kuzco is spacing out while Yzma is talking. To drive home the point that sometimes my. inner dialogue gets in the way of creating when I initially first sit down to paint. It’s only when I get into a state of flow that all that noise fades away. The more excited I am about painting the quicker this happens. True, I only learned there was a term for the feeling I got when I was lost in art relatively recently in life, but I know that getting in touch with that feeling again is paramount. If you don’t know this already I’m a children’s book illustrator. And don’t get me wrong I LOVE what I do and wouldn’t trade this job for anything else in the world. I’m incredibly lucky that I can spend the day researching what sort of clothes people wore in the 1800’s, what color a Korean phoenix is, and what would a completely imaginary world look like from the ground up (that one was a little tricky). But because painting is now my job it sort of changed my relationship with it. I’ve had to find new ways of getting back into flow while doing it (painting traditionally seems to be the key there) but I’ve discovered that by expanding my dalliances in the arts (singing and now writing primarily) I’m reconnecting with something I think I lost touch with for a while. Don’t get me started on social media or AI either…ok fine, I’ll share some of those goals with you. Next time.
To make it make sense, the point of me telling you about the link I was going to insert was to reiterate how much I HATE ads. Linking to that Youtube video started out with a 15 second ad, and there were two of those, and I sure as heck ain’t watching the ad to find the timestamp that would’ve been relative to linking it in the first place. And I sure as heck ain’t making you sit through the ad either. It takes you out of the flow. A problem to figure out next time.
I mention that I wrote this in one go and it was similar to how I paint. Then I went on a tangent trying to illustrate what could be going on in my head while painting while failing to circle back to the fact that I rarely erase. Not while painting digitally anyway. And this blog post has been the writing-adjacent version of that. Bold, confident strokes often look that way simply because you can’t make them if you’re hesitating. In my head that translates to using the backspace while writing, which of course I’ll use if I misspell something or hit the wrong key on accident. But if I don’t know what I’m going to say next I simply pause for a bit. Calculate. Regroup. Continue on. Even if what comes next doesn’t make sense. Even if you end up with an incoherent jumble you’ve learned something while sitting down to write.
And maybe next time you do it you’ll be able to organize your thoughts a bit ahead of time so you don’t sound like you’re schizophrenic. That was my inner-critic. It’s mean sometimes. We’re getting a handle on that though.
At the very least I’ve managed to have fun and time FLEW. Two hours to be exact. This reassures me. Not knowing what I was going to write I felt like it could’ve taken me all day to come up with something. Painstakingly organize it, edit it and re-edit it. But this is a workout in more ways than one. And the more fun it is the more likely I am to stick with it. To look forward to sitting down and doing it. I initially started this off by writing whatever came to mind with the intention of going back and rewriting it. But in the process I did enjoy myself. I did have fun. I kept going. It became a sort of game I began playing with myself. I know I repeated myself a bit. No undo remember. In procreate you use a two-finger tap to achieve that. Sometimes, on the rare occasions I put pencil to paper I find myself tapping the page sometimes. Shit. There goes my analogy LOL Of course I undo. I don’t erase (unless I’m shaping something) but I definitely undo. When I’m drawing something I don’t know very well, like people and man-made objects. Or if I put a stroke down that doesn’t “fit.”
I think that’s what t Ok so I wanted to rewrite that bit but I’m so gungho about not undoing anything now, at least when writing, that I’m using that strikethrough as a compromise. That’s part of what gets strengthened when you paint traditionally. There is no undo. You don’t have the world of color at your fingertips. Sometimes the order in which you do things matters. If you make a mistake you have to figure out how to fix it or use it. It’s part of what makes it so engaging. It’s an unpredictable puzzle you get to solve, or at least it is for me right now. My The traditional part of my ability has withered away and it’s a goal of mine this year to get that thing on the road to recovery. Partly
so that first part was a warmup
I got to keep all the sections I laid out so I can access them easily for next time and I got a bit better of an understanding of how I’m going to tackle this blog. Step by step. Bit by bit. Now the real question is did I lose you? My inner critic is uncomfortable showing this off. I imagine it looks something like this:
And you wanna know a secret? I just added this last section :)
But boy it was a blast
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