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9-28-03
Painted up at Sunrise on Mt Rainier yesterday. Some of my muscles are sore, but it was a good outing for 'the family' as we call ourselves. Clint is always working or riding with his friends now that he has a car of his own, and hasn't gone on a family outing in ages. Sunrise was pleasantly un-crowded compared to Paradise and at 6400 feet has a stunning view of the much more snowy North side of the mountain.
Sadly, this Northern exposure is more snowy precisely because it spends more time in shade, and shade is a bad thing for a painter...at least this painter. We didn't leave the house until 9:30, and by the time I had hiked up to the top of First Burroughs Mountain at 2 pm, I had about 90 minutes of stable light. I had loaned Sue and Lisa (heading up towards Third Burroughs Mountain) my camera so I was unable to capture the changing light.
I completed the painting as best I could, but the lighting is off. I'll have to look around the house for a photo of Sunrise at 3 in the afternoon. I understand the lighting on the South side of the mountain much better. The snow on the North side is much cooler in hue. Infinite shades of blues are the dominate color, without the warm pinks and pale oranges of the South side.
Sue and Lisa had a great time hiking all three Burroughs peaks. I would have liked to do it as well but it would have meant leaving my art pack at the car. I envied the many photographers up there with the newest digital cameras. My art pack is about as old and manual as cameras get: thirty pounds, a 3 hour exposure time and a 5 year learning curve.
9-27-03
The first week of Fall quarter is over and I am writing this from the back seat of the van as Lisa drives Sue and I up to Mount Rainier where we plan to hike the Owyhigh Lakes trail. You'd think I could turn off the job on Saturday but the week went by so fast I never had time to sit back and reflect on how I was doing. Whenever there was a spare minute, a student would find me and ask for help.
On Tuesday I teach portfolio and resume to a small class of web students. This is a fairly broad class where I teach them how to gather all their skills into a web based portfolio suitable for showing to employers. Because I've taught this class twice before, the preparation consists of reviewing my notes the night before and Xeroxing the handouts. After about 5 lectures, the students do most of the work and I serve as an advisor.
Wednesday and Thursday I teach the same drawing class for two different groups of about 20 students. This class used to be taught exclusively to the 3D Studio Max students, but now I've been asked to teach it to both the 3D students and all the incoming Media Design students. When it was just the 3D Studio Max students, I would tell them that the environments they created in 3D required them to understand how light and shadow created realism in a scene.
How better to understand lighting than to create it with spotlights in a controlled still life stage? While drawing the still life with pencil on paper, without the distraction of wading through endless software menus, the students could come to a quicker understanding of the importance of lighting and seeing with the artist's "eye".
The bottom line of teaching Basic Drawing to the 3D students was that their main instructor required it. They had been in the program for two quarters by the time they reached the advanced studies of 3D animation and learned to respect their instructors knowledge.
Now that I am teaching drawing to the 'newbies' in the program, I rewrote my first lecture to try to convince the skeptics that the ability to draw unlocks the creative side of their brains and helps them think creatively as they apply the software tools they will learn in our program.
The skepticism in the air was thick enough to cut with a knife as I blathered through the psychobabble theories, some taken right out of the book (Drawing on the Right side of the Brain) and others built on my experiences with creativity. A few people, usually the older ones, listened attentively, occasionally nodding their heads, but most of the recent high school graduates appeared to be tuning me out.
Surprisingly, I've found this bored expression to be an act and many really are listening and learning. They've simply learned that it isn't "cool" to appear to be interested to something as un-cool as a classroom lecture. The group that actually has tuned out...well, sad to say the damage has already been done long before they ever met me.
My Friday class is about using Photoshop for the Web. We start out building animated gif's, an image map or two, then move into Javascript rollovers and end with building complete web page interfaces, jumping back and forth between Imageready, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. In all my classes I have a wide spread of talent, from beginners to students good enough to teach the class...my usual mix.
One thing I didn't expect to find was that I am glad to be back working almost full time. That long quarter of teaching only 2 classes, and then the 3 weeks off with nothing to do but one web page interface left me feeling...what's the word I need here...abandoned? Perhaps un-needed? Maybe under-utilized comes closer.
I enjoy working in a busy workplace. One feels needed, even overextended. Oddly enough, I prefer that over the long lonely days sitting in the living room at my little laptop pursuing digital perfection. I guess I am a social creature.
9-22-03
Sorry I haven't written in a while. When I get really busy, my time gets so precious I have to choose between writing about life, and living it. It's 11 PM and I just finished my lesson plan for tomorrow morning's first class of the new quarter. I have 4 classes this quarter and due to some favorable number crunching by the dean, I think I may be making enough to live on this quarter...if I did the math right. Have to wait for my first paycheck to be sure.
I painted at the high school again last Sunday. I think I've finished this version number three. All that remains is to jazz up the sky with some clouds, and I can do that from home. The painting looks magnificent, although the time it took to complete it got tiresome, still, nothing good ever comes easy.
Between the freelance work I've been doing over the break for a couple clients, the painting selling at the fair and my increased wages, I am considering buying a new digital camera. (After I placate the wife with a new fridge of course). I've been drooling over the new 5 mega pixel rangefinders. Nikon, Fugi and Canon are the main contenders, and I am leaning toward the Canon Powershot G5. There are some awesome bulletin boards online where one can read user reviews, the most comprehensive is at dpreview.com. The user reviews are lengthy, and many have urls to actual pictures taken.
9-14-03
My client liked my design for her interface. It was fun getting back into interface design. Pushing pixels around on an illuminated glass box isn't real art, but so what? At least it's creative and more satisfying than throwing paper in a print shop. The three afternoons I spent painting Stadium High School this summer have paid off. The piece sold in the first 2 days of the Puyallup fair for $400. After the fair takes their 30%, I'll get around $280.
I painted there again yesterday on Stadium version # 3. They seem to take about 3 and a half afternoons, but I may have finished this one in 3. People were trying to buy it from me, and asking if they could pose with me and the picture, usually a good indicator of the quality of the work. School starts again in another week. Now that my design skills are tuned up, I should look around for some more work, of the full time nature.
Clint bought a "build your own" kayak kit from Pygmy boats in Port Townsend. I re-arranged the garage last night so he has a table on which to assemble to boat. I'm not at all sure where he got the boating bug. None of his friends are into paddling, so I guess it could have been the dozen trips he took with the family.
Despite my relentless begging, dad never bought a sailboat, preferring instead to paddle his 80 pound canoe around the sound. He and I have been paddling that old beast since before I met Sue, back in the early seventies. When the kids were born, we buckled them into life jackets and brought them along. There are some pictures of a family canoe trip here.
I vowed to stay off the computer on the weekend to prevent burnout, but writing here is more like reading the morning newspaper. It's a way to relax, clear my mind of the debris from the week, and think about something other than scratching for money. Clint had a high school project that required a famous quote. I found some great lists online, and this is one of my favorites:
"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work."
- Emile Zola (1840-1962)
9-11-03
Why is it that the most satisfying things are always the hardest to achieve? I've been fighting an uphill battle for a week, trying to get my interface design skills back to the point they were 2 years ago when I was laid off as a full time designer. I've been sitting here at this little laptop the entire time, pushing buttons in Photoshop, hoping for inspiration.
The tricks and techniques are coming back, and I have 4 interfaces to show my latest client, but I am worried that they are all lame. I came up with a design that encompasses most of her parameters...as I understood them. She hasn't gotten back to me yet, and in the mean time I'm trying to develop a new look from scratch and fighting waves of self doubt.
Why is it that we creative types have to struggle with these head trips? I know I have the skills, or can get them through practice...but why do I have to have this monkey of self-doubt hovering over my shoulder? I've created some very handsome interfaces in the last few days, but facing a new blank screen hasn't gotten much easier. It might help if I worked in an office with other designers instead of here in my empty house, agonizing at my lonely little laptop over every pixel.
Still, artists and designers have done this for centuries, why should I be any different? Self doubt is the price we pay for being creative in a society that mocks the creative spirit.
9-8-03
This was a vegetable weekend. I spent the week working on freelance projects, mostly simple html work, but toward the end I was working on interface design, something at which I have become decidedly rusty. It's the most creative part of this field, and also the most challenging. I know my skills will return, just not in a couple days.
Instead of wearing myself out working Photoshop exercises all weekend like a good little geek, I turned off my computers and read novels. While I have a large bookcase full of paperbacks by a wide variety of authors, I prefer the kind of book that can't be put down such as those written by Dick Francis (horse racing mysteries), John D MacDonald (the Travis McGhee series), Clive Cussler (Dirk Pitt), Tony Hillerman and Louis Lamour
For excitement I went for a couple bike rides, worked out and waxed the car. I considered looking around for a climbing partner, but it started raining finally on Saturday for the first time in over a month. It had been so long since it rained that I stepped out on the back porch for a while and watched.
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