I find I’ve not posted for over 4 months. I have been doing a chugging-along amount of art, craft, and other stuff.
To be brutally frank, my website was giving me grief and I wasn’t feeling the love with it and so I just didn’t post. Also…after the covid lockdown in my city, things changed in my head, and i just I didn’t want to. I have instigated a ‘as few screens as possible and utterly minimal social media’ thing when I’m not at work, too, and that is working really well for me. But the main reason I didn’t post was my website was a clusterfuck.
Probably no one came and clicked on it for a bit and therefore missed the bit where it :
a) vanished, and
b) the landing page showed up empty for a week.
Production testing. My favorite.
I was in website despair. Torn between needing to find out as much as I could to fix the issues myself, and not wanting to do that. Anyone who tells you hosting your own site and doing all the maintenance work on it is easy, is on crack.
The problem statement (which is something I had to explain to a plugin AND a theme provider): the person who designed my site for me in 2017, used a theme and a building package that he owned the keys/licenses for, but I didn’t.
So I slowly watched their versions get more and more out of date, and I couldn’t do anything about it. Updating to the latest version on your wordpress plugins means fixing security vulnerabilities, and makes sure everything works with the current version. So I ended up purchasing my own version of these things but then implementing them was either too scary or actually really hard and requiring a lot of back and forth with tech support (I can’t register my theme until i de-register the last theme and i don’t have the key to the last theme so I had to get them to do it but explaining that was asynchronous email chain of doom.
Anyway it’s Good Friday today. I managed to noodle around and change the layout of the front page so I think it’s a bit tighter and flows better and by gosh that took a lot of effort to make myself do!
I’ve been working from home for a year now. I finally gave up and bought an Aeron chair and my back and hips have not stopped thanking me. I’ve started feeling far more effective in the domain I am working in (the trifecta of golang, kubernetes, devops) and I’ve managed to make it so that I do a bit of drawing or art every day, despite a fair amount of ennui. I have always done a lot of drawing and doodling during work meetings if i have to listen but not watch. Still doing that:
I have discovered the joy of hunting down vintage knitting patterns both online and in op shops. Most op shop hauls are 60s and 70s (I ignore the 80s, as everyone should. Yes I’m judging that decade). This set of jumper patterns had the cheesiest men posing awkwardly with horses. I am here for that.
I am doing smaller sketches in nice art books more often, but really my go to has been the pencil and pen drawings from the kitting books. There is a joy to getting better with practice. My first ones were not great but i am improving; like all art your first attempts can be perfectly fine but you really should want to be able to go back and look at them later and go ‘ewwwwww what is that!!!‘ Then you know you’re improving.
I have been trying to get proportions correct when drawing these figures. And not making assumptions about what people or shading looks like.
Well that’s my drawing update. I wonder what’s next? Another 4 months? 🙂