Honeymoon Phase: Capstone Collection (1 of 2)

This concept of flow, I am very entranced by.

I've noticed for several years that I am the best presenter I can be, when I find a rhythm – a rhythm where my thinking and my speaking are keeping pace with each other, and allows the audience to click in.

What if there's a flow you can sit on, throughout the day. Something that you ideally sync with how fast you walk, how you write, how you react, how you connect with someone new, what deadlines you take on or how you move between activities in the day. There is something to this concept that relates to awkward silences, having "chemistry", the x-factor and feeling in control.

Just an unsubstantiated thought that I've been floating around.

On a completely different topic, I have passed the honeymoon phase of my painting hobby.

Capping off this phase with a milestone project, I created a Christmas card series that is admittedly four months early and not all that Christmas-y. However, with some perseverance and a dash of creativity, it turned out really fun.

The central theme is a girl-wizard who casts ribbons, illustrating flow.

When the holidays get closer, I plan to clean these up digitally to make them print-ready. For now, I will share a preview and some artifacts.

NB: Hopefully, it's not too odd that the characters in this collection don't have eyes. My focus group says it is better not to mess everything up with freaky eyes. So painting eyes is next on the docket of things to learn.

Honeymoon Phase: Reflections (2 of 2)

Having spent last weekend upgrading my art space from two wobbly, folding coffee tables into a pitch-adjustable drawing table, I take a moment to reflect on this art journey so far.

The fact that I'm still interested, after several months and multiple waves of inspiration honestly surprises me.

Making art has been sort of like how my Christmas collection progressed. I wasn't in the zone at all initially and sat on the first panel for a couple weeks, not knowing how to fix a wonky wizardress. Then I moved on to the six other panels, painting the wizardress in various poses. By the end, it was eons easier to go back and spot how to fix the proportions of the first character. If something's not working, it helps to wait a beat, take a different route to sharpen your skill, and try again later.

Similarly, painting taps into a slightly different part of my brain. So I think this hobby gives me a sandbox and different avenue to strengthen skills like redefining standards of perfection (classic), being in the present, and constantly relearning that practice does make progress (that skills are not innate).

Painting sure beats spending the time just watching TV.

Blogging has also been a big part of memorializing my reflections and finalizing each piece. Looking ahead, I would love to increasingly enjoy the process and not rush towards the outcome. I'd like to be a little less controlling. To keep finding my style, hopefully maintaining a clean and appealing aesthetic while shedding the dreaded children's nursery vibe. And I hope painting continues to be interesting and moderately meaningful.

Also, if I can have an additional wish, I would like to learn to photograph acrylic paintings, so I can avoid shiny glare but preserve the vibrancy and brightness of the original. Truly the greatest, most underrated challenge of posting.

Ideal Reading Room

Last year, I bought a shirt with painted windows.

This shirt comes out of the closet whenever I need to break the monotony of wearing navy, head-to-toe for work. Because I love this shirt, the pattern became the inspiration for my next painting.

The original vision was to show a brick face of an apartment building with six windows peeking into six different-styled apartments. As the idea evolved, six apartments narrowed to three, and the windows themselves were nixed altogether.

In an informal poll, most people liked the top-right pink room the best out of the three.

My real-life room decor best resembles the pink room. However, I'm happier with how the other two rooms are painted, as they're more visually interesting.

Reading Rooms: Boho, Scandinavian, and Cottage Styles

Boho

Scandinavian

Cottage

This painting turned out quite faithful to what I had in mind, which is very satisfying. It is one of my favorites to date!

Eleven-in-One

I make lists for everything. I used to rate every granola bar I ate. I have documented every movie that I've seen since 2014.

On my list of favorite things in the universe, some random items include: golden doodle puppies and unicorn-themed color runs.

Wow, so basic. Let's try again. Some items on the list are: The Good Wife (TV) and Born a Crime (book).

BTW WARNING: Long post.

I painted 11 small vignettes of things I repeatedly enjoy, sadly excluding many TV shows that require drawing faces which I cannot do. As this is the first painting where I did extensive freehand, you can tell the quality improve as I slowly discover the right paintbrush to use. In painted order (click images to expand):

1. Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code
All-time favorite book when I was growing up. I reread it ad nauseum. At one point, if you flipped to any page and started reading me a portion, I could recite back the subsequent sentences either verbatim or close to it.


2. Imagine Dragons: Evolve & Night Visions
Some great songs.

3. Tangled
Not my favorite movie, just a pretty scene.




4. Armchair Expert podcast, by Dax Shepard
This podcast is totally up my alley. Episodes get released at 5am on Monday mornings, right as I leave for the airport every week (pre-COVID). The routine of listening to an episode makes the start of the week feel like a blanket that slowly unwraps instead of a bucket of cold water being dumped on my head.

The podcast thesis is that being famous and successful isn't as fulfilling as people would expect. Dax teases out all sorts of interesting stories and glimpses into the inner lives of interviewees, often famous people. Fantastic.

5. GMK Dots
I recently had a two-week foray into the mechanical keyboard community.

This keycap design is something of a cult classic and resells for $300 on the subreddit. Just for the plastic part with zero functioning components! I did not buy it.

6. The Little Prince
A beautiful piece of literature.

I was shocked and amazed to have recreated the cover art in a recognizable manner. All thanks to my little round brush, which I have finally figured out how to use.

7. Ocean's 8
Honestly, this movie is a bit overworked and disjointed. HOWEVER, it is incredibly easy to rewatch. I find myself playing it in the background when there's nothing else to do, and enjoying the incredible cast of actresses more with each repeat.


8. The Incredibles
Another childhood favorite, my sisters and I were obsessed with this movie. We watched it in multiple languages. We voice acted all the Edna scenes by heart. To this day, I can still recite swathes of Edna monologue, with inflections in all the right places.

9. Contre Jour soundtrack
Contre Jour is an app game that I never played, but I instantly fell in love with its soundtrack. If I really need to focus at work, this is what I put on repeat. It's has an ethereal quality – ethereal like the balloons in Up, not like the new Taylor Swift Lover album. (Note from future Faith: What I meant was 'whimsical'.)

10. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR)
Fanfic at it's finest, HPMOR reimagines Harry Potter as a prodigy genius. My mind was actually blown with the ingenuity of it. The plotline has some uncanny links to canon, but diverges quite a bit into intricate plots based in real mathematical / scientific / strategic insanity.

It was still being written when I was in college. When it wrapped, I went to a physical, live wrap party with a bunch of strangers who also followed this fanfic. They were all nerds. It felt safe. But what in the world.

11. Sketch of designer dress with puffy sleeves
I love puffy sleeves. And I love the concept of designer clothing.




Finally, I added my favorite cup of mint tea and (now favorite) paintbrush to complete the illusion of an art studio desk.

When I finished the painting, I considered going back to redo the first few vignettes that were noticeably lower quality than the later ones. I ultimately decided not to, so that I can preserve evidence of my progression in skill. Additionally, I wanted to move on and not get stuck on refining the same piece forever. I think I stand by that approach, but it's hard.

I like the Contre Jour vignette the best. It's so weird and cute.

Making Delightful Things

This painting helped me take risks and relax my iron grip on making perfect art. I know – fearless person that I am, I dared to try a weird idea in my zero-stakes hobby.

I reached a point in the painting where I could have stepped away – the rainbow scales were done, the fins and the face were one solid color. However, it looked rather bland for a multi-colored fish.

I was struck with inspiration for zebra stripes, but proceeded to hem and haw about whether it was too off the wall. As it turns out, zebra stripes makes the whole thing fabulous.

Art is about generating a feeling and memorializing it in permanent form. My goal is to delight myself, so I need to remind myself that my focus is to look for new and cool ways to create delight. Not aim for perfection.

I mean, perfection does delight me. But you know. Trade-offs.

Other interesting facts about this painting:
– Most of the colors are combinations of three colors only: dark blue, magenta, and pale yellow!
– I used a normal pencil to sketch outlines on the canvas and learned that graphite is hard to cover over. Graphite is oil-based, so it fights with acrylic. Watercolor pencils work much better – which I use exclusively from this point forth.

Bet you were thinking about this

Reviving This Blog

Hello. It is 2020. We have been quarantined for 8 weeks. It's time to revive this blog.

I've been making a lot of art. I don't share it all on Instagram, because I don't want a profile of 10 consecutive paintings. Additionally, the design process is really fun and interesting for me to talk about, and yet my sisters cannot listen to another word from me. So I need a new outlet...

New watermark Almost exactly 4 years after abandoning this travel blog, I'm fixing the broken links and giving it a second life for art stuff. Somehow, this blog platform is even more outdated than before and my old email subscription engine broke. You can subscribe again here or in the left bar -- and you'll get post notifications in a pretty, new email template.

Revisiting this old blog, I still like the design a lot. However, some of my old writing is super cringe. So be kind, and maybe don't judge old posts. And I'll be kind to myself too, because I'm 90% sure this post is going to be cringe-inducing in a couple years as well. Or way sooner!

That's all! Welcome back, us!

If you're interested in more rambles about what's transpired over the break...

Before I abandoned it in 2016, this blog was a creative outlet that helped me find some balance to an all-consuming new job. When I got busier, I stopped investing the 10-15+ hours it took to create each post. But along the way, I also lost touch with a huge piece of creativity in my life, and forgot the joy of obsessing over side projects purely for the fun of it.

This time last year, I took a long vacation from work and stumbled into acrylic painting. When I picked up a creative hobby again, it was like opening a cupboard of favorite snacks that you had forgotten about. That's simply not done!

Now, being in a different place in my life, art means something different than before. More than ever, I need it as a way to stretch my mind, think non-linearly and embrace that there's no perfect standard. I am still low-level anxious to finish each painting as quickly and as close to my vision as possible, but I'm working on finding ways to enjoy each part of the process as well. I hope you enjoy going through this creative process with me, if anyone out there has more patience to listen than my poor quarantine buddies!

Faith

A Stage of Development - Main Update January 2016

Recently, I’ve been wondering about New Year’s resolutions and why they’re so popular, to realize that it signals hope for change and provides a logical deadline of one year to accomplish your goals. Resolutions have never really worked for me because the Gregorian calendar timeline isn’t particularly motivational. However, insofar that each day of each week in life has its own mini-resolution, things have indeed undergone change and progression.

Speaking of all these plane pictures, I was on a recent flight in which it was nighttime and we were descending. As the plane dipped and turned, the pinpoint stars spun as if we were soaring through the cosmos, the sound of silence gracing peace to the anchorless motion. It was incapturable on camera.

In the past six months since I started this blog, one of the defining arcs has been that I have become more acclimated to my job, a point of focus in my life and a source of satisfaction at this step of success.

After new job training in the summer, my first project had all the ingredients of a great transition project to a post-college full-time job: it was locally-based with a small team, and was quite short. Still, in that period, I was surprised by two things related to change. One was how surprisingly challenging it was to manage change and how unfamiliar I was with it due to an apparently very stable past few years. The second insight was that despite an extraordinarily new environment, my internal self and preferences remained very consistent, even though one thinks they will adapt with the surroundings. Really, these two realizations funnel into one insight which is that I overestimated my ability to adjust, and in that process, I discovered myself a little more by noticing the parts of me that remained impervious to environmental shifts against the parts of me that did change.

After the first, my second project was in Boston, which was another good stepping stone in the sense that I have several good friends who moved to Boston post-college and their proximity helped me feel less displaced. Compounded by the fact that the burden of the travel logistics each week was fairly low, this was a good opportunity to acclimate to the travel aspects of my travel-heavy job. I leave out the several ways in which this period of time was not optimal, because the point is that I continued adjusting.

As an aside, Boston is interesting in that many things operate like a big city but it has a smaller city feel. It’s well-developed with good food options and an easy transportation system. The speed of the assembly line at popular lunch places is in my mind ranked one-two with the speediest cities in the country, based on anecdotal observation. On the flip side, the city isn’t full of steel and glass and the streets aren’t all packed and dirty, so one could conceivably describe parts of Boston as “quaint” if that isn't offensive to the Boston sensibilities.

Following the Boston project, I helped with internal work in an industry that I hadn't worked in before. This turned out to be a great way to take a temperature of how much I liked that industry, which is really the whole point of the first few years of consulting. There are lots of other points, but a big point is exploration.

Now, I’m on my third project, quite far across the country. As I become increasingly familiar with my projects and my company, my brain will continue to release more space to process new questions and new information, the themes of which will inevitably trickle into the next main update I’m sure.

In other random news, I rolled over most of my vacation days from last year because I still don’t really understand how to use them. The concept of self-selected breaks is foreign after a lifetime of schooling. Also I’m the kind of person who rarely spends my loyalty points from any brand anywhere, because if I spend them, it has to be darn worth the irrecoverable points. It's slightly irrational, but still, the same concept applies.

These are the tough issues that we contend with in the adjustment to adulthood. Onwards and upwards to the next six months.