Not every day can be interesting, some days are just sitting and planning. After a day trip out to Liverpool yesterday, George and I sat down today to capture some of the things we talked about in the car on the way up. This is pretty much how it goes.
That last step is going to happen on Friday.
A late post today, or I guess an early one. Had to make a flying visit to Liverpool yesterday and popped over to Albert Dock - where a lot of things were closed, unsurprisingly considering it was a weekday, in January, in a gale and most people have better things to do.
Got back late last night and didn't feel like posting, so an early morning post instead and then we'll see how it goes. A busy morning today and then things calm down in the afternoon when I'll be able to get some admin done.
Did a bit more repotting. Once again, will the seedlings survive? Who knows, but I'm looking forwards to getting ready for the next round, when we get into spring.
The rest of the day was spent going through all my notes for the last couple of months and filing everything away so I can be more prepared for this upcoming week.
I'm no good at gardening, or rather I've never really done gardening so I haven't had a chance to get good or not at it.
One thing I've very not-good at is knowing if something is a weed or not, especially when it's just sprouting. Which is why I now have a greenhouse where I can start everything off, and then, once big enough put it into the garden.
The rule is now simple, if it's currently growing or sprouting in one of the borders, it's a weed, if it's growing or sprouting in the greenhouse it's a plant.
I'm going to assume if I do it enough, and photograph things enough, and document things enough I will slowly somehow learn what's a weed and what isn't. But that feels like a few years away, for the moment this is a safer bet.
Bulbs though, I'm pretty good at knowing they're not weeds 'cuase they're generally sturdy as fuck and pretty distinct. Even so, it's nice to have these growing in the greenhouse rather than out as squirrel and bird fodder in the garden.
I made a bad decision at the start of the year and that was to embark on a photo365 project; I've done it before on Flickr and Twitter (when it was the Good Place), and this time over on SubStack.
I know it's a bad idea, in the same way as committing to 10,000 steps a day is, you get to 11:30 at night and realise you haven't done the thing for the day.
Which for a photo360 generally involves stepping outside and take a photo of "the dark". And yet here I am, doing another stupid year long daily project.
Today I had some early morning meetings and then couldn't face walking in the cold, to the cold studio to basically get through a pile of work created from the morning meetings. Instead I took myself off upstairs to the spare room where I've been since, only emerging to grab some clementines.
It's now 5pm (this'll be scheduled for a couple of hours time) and I'm cutting my losses and taking a selfie now to get day 16/365 out of the way.
I finished these last week, but the process of getting the envelopes sorted and everything ready to send off still takes a bit of time. I had all these ready to go yesterday, but as today was posting off artworks for Patreon supporters day I decided to just do everything all in one go.
Nice to get the desk space back!
Today was a tough one, the studio was cold, I felt slow and tired, and I had a lot of work to do. But, Kitty helped by writing all the addresses on the envelopes, and putting a message on the cards inside for me.
The process too a while, an mainly involved me sitting next at the desk swapping cards and envelopes in and out when I was told to.
Didn't take any photos today apart from this one, so here we ar.
I'm still trying to get the hang of writing here daily, it doesn't really show up on the site, although I can always change that later I suppose. Anyway, I had an interesting time today getting brushes to work with the ArtFrame, for the Patreon post that's going to go out on Thursday.
Trying to fit everything in is tricky, and in an ideal world I'd be shooting video from this project and making something fun to go up on YouTube, but I've tied myself to making the tutorial videos and I need to get the next one out ASAP, the sooner they're all done the better, or at least when I get into the swing more and start making one after another I can now and then drop my own type of thing in.
This wasn't supposed to be that kind of ramble though. In the meantime here's one of the results of playing with the brushes and algorithms.
This morning I cut the A3 sheets of brush stroke designs into postcards, and then stamped the back of them with my new numbering system. Next up I need to get Kitty to write on the back of them and then I can get them into the post.
It's fair to say I'm pretty fucking excited about the work I got done today. I've been playing with putting brushes into the drawing machine and then controlling the z-height to get nice sweeps. I've been using these Pentel brush pens which are good and all, before you can use them you have to kinda "activate" them by removing a bit of plastic that allows the ink to get to the brush.
But, I have all these fancy shimmer and sheen inks that I just can't get through quickly enough. Turns out with a bit of finagling I could put a small amount of ink into the feed to the brush. It can get nicely through about four of these plots before the ink gets a little "scratchy".
I've absolutely loving how the colours blend together, it's delicious!
And then wrote about it a bit. But I'm pretty pleased with the whole set up, in that it actually cuts!! After that it's just like using it like a pen, write the SVG or GCODE and good to go.
There's a couple of extra steps, I have to get it to "draw" the same path a few times, getting deeper each time so it can cut through various thicknesses of paper/card. And I have to leave little "bridges" or gaps in the cut so the whole shape isn't truly cut out, you have to go and snap off those little bits. Fairly standard but it makes all the difference to getting better simple shapes cut out.
I still need to wrap that logic up into code, where to place the "bridges", but that's a problem for another time.
...are spent sewing notebooks in the greenhouse at the bottom of the garden.
My thumb is perfectly okay.
Today’s cat is feeling a little bothered by everything.
I guess the one aspect of doodling a daily-ish cat, is someday you don’t doodle one. Today is the first day and I’m sure there’ll be many more.
I spent the last couple of days cat-sitting a real cat who tended to keep me awake, so I’m too tired for any doodling.
Tried to make a slightly fatter cat, only slightly succeeded.
This cat has feelings
Still can’t draw paws!
This one is a bit more grumpy, like me 😀
I drew a cat!
