please look at my horses

I've been idly wanting to paint some kind of "anatomy thing" lately, and this week I was struck with the sudden, urgent desire to paint horses. So here are some horses. I tried painting the forms and shadows with a blue and yellow combo, and then added pencil on some paintings for more detail later.

And you know what? It feels really good to paint a horse.

I'm happy with these and I hope to paint more. I'm a horse painter now.

"It's Done" Scanner Animation Frames

I made a scanner animated video recently called "It's Done", and here are some of my favourite stills from it.

Since my current scanner software has a variety of different settings, I used them to make scans that have a few distinct styles, and so there's this fun slightly changing look going on throughout the video that adds some extra texture and shadow and stuff.

I also used some scrap paper to make a little paper bunny and some stars to move around with me. I really like brown/cream/textured paper lately, and I've been thinking about it a lot. It just has a nice texture to it, really fun and playful feeling when I'm so used to using white printer paper for a lot of things. It feels great to have different types, textures, and colours of paper around - so much choice and tactility! Tissue paper, card, brown packing paper. All my favourites :-)

The three different settings I used here are:

1. scanning as "photo"
2. scanning as "document"
3. scanning as "document" in greyscale

I also used an option that scanned in black and white rather than greyscale, giving a really stark, high contrast, two colour scan rather than the depth of tone you see in the greyscale above (this was my least favourite setting type, hence why I didn't include an illustrative still here, but still interesting).

Hands look really great in greyscale. I love scanning hands. There's such a sense of art to that body part - the one that serves as the delicate and precise primary connection to everything around us. Listen... I like hands.

Anyway, here are the standard photo scans, they look nice and light and like scans. Normal scans.

Next we have the colour "document" scans, which suck all the red from the skin, like so:

I'm gonna call scans like this "vampire scans".

I love them, they look so weird and dark and saturated. Sort of wrong-looking. Vampire scans.

Dark and light and coloured and greyscale scans all smushed together... that's what I like baby!!

Me & My Sheep

Here are some scans. My face is the same, but this time I have a small sheep. My sweet son. Scanning with the "new" scanner (which is now not new at all) still feels fundamentally different in some ways. I still miss the old one. But here we are with different options, time to move around, wiggle around in a different world. Same as it ever was. Sometimes with all the changes that come it still feels as if fundamentally everything is the same, forever. But then, I guess there's plenty of old things I don't remember at all, so it's hard to evaluate, really.

There's something weird about being the same person, remembering small things from my childhood, or the fact that the foundation of choice for me and all my friends in the mid-2000s was Dream Matte Mousse, that neat little pot with its prevalence in all our weird school rucksacks, clinging on to a specific time and memory. I guess I was that person. Once the foundation gets all scooped out of that little pot, I'm in there. A little creature.

I love change a lot. Things that are new, or dipping into something new, making something else, winking at a new friend with a new joke. It's kinda scary to be the same. Maybe I should try to like being the same more. Being the same as the ten year old girl with a bowl cut and blue combat trousers and a t-shirt featuring characters from Disney's Atlantis. Maybe I should watch Atlantis again. That same Ponyta appreciator who found a Ponyta card on the ground while crossing the road. That same adolescent of an age long forgotten, watching Brief Encounter for the first time on FilmFour by accident and being struck by its raw conveyance of suffering and restraint and connection, the rapid arrival and departure of the trains at the central station such perfect metaphors for sudden love and stark sacrifice - things abundantly, hurriedly given and ripped away.

Every time I watch that movie it feels like it has a newness to it, and an old familiarity all at once. It's everything that way. It's the same, and I feel that same profound sense of rawness each time. Maybe a little differently, but still always the same. A paradox. An overlap.

But still, I'm not my favourite movie. Maybe, somehow, I can see life a little bit more like a movie that way, though. I guess most movies, to me at least, diminish in appeal on subsequent viewings. The idea of looking at my past self is a bit like that to me - or I'm afraid it is. I often think I'd like to forget who I was, in one way or another, but who I was is who I am. We're the same. Two colour channels on the same image.

But it's also true that I have this sheep. A beautiful new sheep. Or at least... it was new at Easter.

Remembering

Sometimes I like thinking about the organisational mechanics that would take place after I die. Maybe this is partly because I love watching true crime YouTubers (specifically Stephanie Harlowe, and sometimes Georgia Marie) and the way they meticulously go through the histories and daily movements of the people involved. I like to imagine someone describing my life, my stuff, my relationships, etc, with the same considered voice. Here's a story pieced together through objects and movements, and other people's memories. I imagine someone going through all the things I own and gathering an idea of who I am. There's something calming about it. What can you make of me through all the files on my computer? Am I an interesting person? A good one? Or am I just a jumble of things? It's a really compelling thought to me.

I was looking through an account I use periodically for file storage, and I found these old photos. A black and white film I put in my old Diana Mini to shoot, apparently, blurs and flowers. Some distorted, cute, and cared for memories, placed neatly into a folder and saved for later. Sometimes I want to burn all these things. Imagine deleting all of your files, getting rid of all your belongings, maybe deleting your memory entirely. Wipe yourself clean. It's not possible for a whole person, but it is possible for files, which is kinda fun. Still, you're always "who you are" I guess, and that's a strange thing to tangle your thoughts around sometimes.

How have I been a person for so long? It seems like everything is always changing so much. Putting myself together in my mind like a puzzle piece from old memories and artefacts, yeah, it kinda makes me worry - am I really someone worthwhile? Can I trust my memories/experiences/beliefs? Who is this weird little person? Maybe I don't know myself any better than someone would looking back on disjointed evidence of my life. Maybe that's a good thing.

Anyway, check out these photos from 2016 - a thousand years ago, before I rose from the lake one misty night.

HAPRY SURPASSING MOTHCUB DAY

Wednesday was an important day. A day to celebrate my friend Eric's recent surpassing of me and my subscriber count on the accursed website youtube dot com. His videos simply exude a power stronger than I could ever imagine. So on this day, we marked a joyous event, with HAPRY SURPASSING MOTHCUB DAY - so named because the banner I purchased only contained two P's. It was a most hapry occasion.

Meowth oversaw the ceremony. His watchful eye shall guide us all in our lives. His warning, we shall heed.

All the Pokémon were there, of course.

When I began to "take" "photos" (a cursed act) to get a nice shot of my glorious banner, Natalie, my joyful queen, was filled with delight. The proximity to the banner only fed her bright energy as she crocheted some kind of devil scarf, imbued with the great power only gained by surpassing mothcub (me). For Henry, the power was too much.

Also check out that drawing of Mob of Mob Psycho 100 fame. What a boy.

With the banner in its rightful position, we were ready to hold our top secret gamer meeting. For gamers only.

The first order of gamer business? Crush "Big" "Joel" and his puny body.

Then: we achieved gaming.

With that dealt with, it was time to release our album.

Beautiful.

Then it was time to go to Asda, for important toffee apple beer.

And also Hobgoblin.

Natalie is the queen of beer and I love her.

Later, I finally remembered to take Danny DeVito home after leaving him at Eric's for possibly one thousand years. A sombre and touching moment was had.

What a powerful and beautiful day.

YUM

A little more miscellany! I've been organising some of my art stuff recently. Old paintings going somewhere, strange things all in their places. I got a new camera, an Instax Mini 9, so I had to make a nice little space for that and its film. I also have come into an abundance of tissue paper, and I'm thinking about doing a lot of little tissue paper paintings soon. They're pretty messy, because the paint goes through, but they're fun and crinkly and weird - and it's always good to be fun and crinkly and weird.

I think Tumblr will be my home for paintings for a while, mostly at least. Now that New Twitter is upon us, it seems best to do strictly 16:9 drawings there, since they're cropped best (or more accurately, since 16:9 images are displayed natively at that ratio, so I don't have to deal with cropping if I use it). So I've adopted the precision of posting only digital drawings there, and there's something interesting and fun about having that limitation. I'm forced to be diligent in a place where I'm usually just wild and whirling around like a sparkler. So the limitations of Twitter (16:9) and Instagram (square), make Tumblr the weird and jumbled space. I guess that sort of captures how Tumblr has always felt, or how it felt in the beginning. This weird little cave of things. Weird and cool things everywhere. Like the lighthouse that used to take you to different websites at random (does anyone my age remember this anymore?). It's still that wonderful little art place to me, so it makes sense and feels good to post paintings, journal pages, and miscellaneous things on there.

For this blog though, I want to do some more diary-like stuff maybe. I haven't posted diary pages here in a while, since I wanted to keep a diary this year and keep it just for myself, but I thought about doing some photo diary posts. I wanna take more photos (and... I have that new instant camera too). Experiments and adventures and scribbly things.

But for now here are bunnies.

(and dogs licking hearts)