4/25/2024

So painting is extremely cool yeah?

I don't have any paintings to show (mostly because I don't want to show them off, I'm barely starting ), but lemme tell ya, all this is so interesting. It's a whole new world being opened to me and I wanna talk about it just a little here. And yes, I'm still working little by little on the album thing. It's gonna be more of a mixtape of beats and such that I'm happy with more than an something with a theme, so I'm honestly just taking my time (a very long time) and letting things flow. It'll come out eventually, dw.

Anyways, I started wanting to learn how to paint after buying a bunch of craft paint for a posterboard I was working on for a college course. It was about existentialism and for that, I painted a big green alien searching up "I'm alive... now what?" It was a pretty novice attempt and I learned some valuable lessons from it, but apparently it was really "dope", and I enjoyed the process big time so here we are.

A big lesson I learned from working with craft paint then eventually working on cheap Walmart canvas board is that crafts acrylic paint is not a very high quality paint for painting stuff. It got the job done the first time I used it, but its thin and watery nature made it a big hastle at times, and it was extremely hard to control with the cheap Walmart brushes I got as well. It's something about the amount of pigment, and the binder to water ratio that made things dry really inconsistently and made manipulating the paint on the canvas a pain. On top of that, shit wouldn't mix very well at all and needed more care to get it to.

Still, I "completed" a piece and was like "I like this, but I think my materials are wack". Here is where "proper" acrylic paints for painting paintings come in.
There's artist grade paints and then there's student grade paints, but seeing that I don't wanna pay artist-quality money, I settled on Liquitex Basic acrylics... The difference between these and the cheap paint is so real, that this basic shit is divine! It's super buttery and highly pigmented and it mixes well and-and-IT'S 6 DOLLARS A BOTTLE! They're stupid worth it and I'm still collecting colors, but fuck, it's still tough when three of these things come out to around eighteen bucks. I mean the good thing is they're these big 4 fluid ounce bottles so they last a long time... supposedly.
I don't paint as often as someone trying to get better should, so only time will tell how long these last me. I'm a little skeptical of them lasting for long though, I tend to use a fair amount of paint.

And don't get me started on brushes because even the Hobby Lobby brand individual brush prices hurt my big throbbing heart. There's some that are about as much as the paint or more. On top of that, the one I got on discount is struggling most of the time to lay color down (though that might be my technique).

Speaking of technique, that seems to be the biggest part about this whole process of learning the medium. The weird part about this is that there's a lot of acrylic painters on Youtube but none in specific that have helped me as much as Jess Chung. She's an artist based in Melborne, Australia and does tutorial videos with beautiful landscapes and expert-technique...but on Gouache.

It's strange but the way she works on her pieces in her full real-time paintings has really taught me a whole lot about how acrylics CAN work given the fact that a portion of this stuff is water. The two mediums aren't the same, in fact there's lots of differences, but since acrylic is so versitile, you can get it to do things that gouache and watercolor can. You can dilute it with water and lay down washes (quick-tip: using fluid painting medium can help "stabilize" this a bit so if something is too-too runny, it'll restore some of the binder), you can lay down colors really translucently but go back on them opaque, and you can mix colors while they're wet... sort of. There's differences like acrylic being harder to mix than watercolor because it dries really fast and once its dry, it can't be re-activated unless you added a drying retardent before (I don't have that yet but I'm getting there), and the amount of water you can add to acrylic before there isn't enough binder for the pigment to hold onto the paper with, but if you treat acrylic kindly, be patient and considerate, and treat it like watercolor... it'll let you and you can pull off a lot of things with it.

Now, Jess Chung does a lot of landscape-type stuff and the gouache she uses in her tutorials is this cheap stuff from China called Himi Jelly Gouache.... It's very tempting to just switch over, but honestly, I'm committed to acrylic for now... Just uhh... something cool to note I guess. I honestly thought gouache was way more expensive, but this stuff is around twenty bucks so it ain't bad.

Speaking of the landscape-type stuff, that's what I really wanted to do with this paint stuff but I haven't gotten there yet. There's something about the scale and depth and tones and yadda-yadda that I barely get. I'm a self trained artist that prefers to use the colors black and white with no greys, so color as a concept is very new to me. I've used it before, but never well and I honestly preferred not coloring anything. Now that I'm learning to paint however, I feel I think a lot about color and the way we percieve it so nonchallantly despite how much of it is everywhere. Nothing is just one color, its a variety of shades and hues. My speakers aren't just yellow and black, they're reflecting everything and the big circle speaker thing is a yellow composed of a cooler tone. My room is a warm green and its mesmerizing. My hands are a pale brown (I think) with hints of red and splotches of ashy chemical-rash skin. And maybe I should I already know that the world is so much more than single colors because a big part of my black-and-white inking style of art also involves crosshatching and that requires an understanding of tone and shades, but um... It's like going from a 2D axis of working on math problems to a 3D one where there's your X, Y, and Z axis and saying "top right" isn't sufficient anymore. Cuz then you have to think about how far something is, how high are they from the ground, what exact position relative to a point they are on two 2D planes? It's a lot, but it's made me pretty invested in the world in general. Looking at the stuff in my room isn't enough anymore, I want to walk around and see how the mountains get covered in dust during a windstorm here. I wanna look at how animals and their forms change when they're playing around. I wanna go visit the mountains and the wetlands over here to see how the sun makes them Breaking Bad yellow.

I've drawn humans so much that that's the last thing I want to paint right now. And all these years of trying to be really good at character design and for what? All these years of doing black-and-white and why? To be lazy? To stay in my comfort zone? I have no idea but these acrylics are liberating and beautiful. All I've drawn is fruit and I feel like I'm grasping at something really cool... Where have I been y'know? It's a good question when I look at my older work and realize it hasn't changed much. I haven't changed much, and in my lil quest thing to learn how to paint, I'm seeing this more and more, and realizing it isn't a good thing for me. But now that I'm learning to paint... Well... Things are happening I guess?

I don't know but I'll leave this blog post at that. Hopefully I write again soon and add some more stuff to this site. For now though, its 11:43PM on a school night and I'm sleepy. I'm looking forward to the weekend. I wanna try setting up my acrylics for traveling, but we'll see how that goes. Like I said, they dry real fast.

4/4/2024

Hey, I'm just working on music but I thought this website was so fucking cool.

https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Aesthetics_Wiki

It's a Fandom Wiki but it names aesthetics and explains their origins and such. It's a really interesting place to deep dive into for inspiration and fun in general. For example, one of the most baffling discoveries I made was that those early 2000s shiny hyperreal technology aesthetic is actually called Frutiger Aero, or Web 2.0 Gloss.

Anyways that's all. I just wanted to share a treasure.
Also, check out DingDongVG's streams! He didn't mention it directly but he's a real knowledgeable guy about games and technology to listen to, and sometimes his viewers bring up really obscure things worth digging into as well (such as Frutiger Aero). Ironically, I'm also a viewer but I got nothing to offer to anything for now. Anyways, hope y'all have a good day or night or week or month or year oroorweuigtiwghiw

https://www.youtube.com/@DingDongVGStreams

3/29/2024

Starting this website, I thought I'd have a fuck ton to talk about but I'll be frank, I got nothing so I'm just gonna talk about math homework.

We're in this part of the college course that involves vectors and for once, I can understand most of it. Vectors as a concept aren't so tough but vectors in practice where you have to do all these different formulas is tough. I'm barely getting a handle on how trigonometric identities work and they hit me a combination of the two.

The good thing is it isn't entirely trigonometric identities though, its largely shit like dot product stuff and imaginary numbers. Usually, imaginary numbers suck. I'd rather eat shit and die, that's the kind of view I have on imaginary numbers. That was until last year when I got a professor who'd give us handout notes where we'd follow what she was doing on a big old projector projecting her projection of knowledge onto the paper with ballpoint pen 4k ultra high resolution back at us. I kept those handouts because they were a lot like a formula sheet with example problems, and though I've never taken them out, that method of note taking really solidified the way imaginary numbers work really well in my mind. Now they serve as an aura of knowledge I have in a crusty yellow folder full of all these other worksheets.

As for dot product, I specialize in putting numbers around parenthesis. What I don't specialize in is remembering the operations when I have to combine shit. You'd think you add the initial point and terminal point of a vector together, but no, it's actually the opposite. You have to subtract the initial point from the terminal point, which seems ridiculously sensible at first up until you keep adding them instead and keep getting the answers to questions wrong.

This one was in a different unit I took a test on (I think I got a 60 or something, I can't remember) but I never really understood solving trigonometric equations either. That sounds stupid of me, but to specify, these questions ask me to come up with a version of the equation with the period times 2n, and most of them need you to come up with more than one answer because they're quadratic. I never had a problem with quadratic equations last semester, they were kind of easy with a calculator. On the surface, this shit seems easy actually, its mostly remembering stuff, but like... that shit is so ridiculously hard to remember the process of and its one of those things that you have to do meticulously. It is so fucking annoying and if I have to see 2npi again, I'm gonna scream.

So that's my little spiel on the thing. I gained interest in painting stuff, but I haven't gone far along with that enough to start writing about it here. Also still trying to work on that album I said I'd do. Making a piece of work that ties a lot of songs together is hard though, I don't know people do it. I'll probably write about that soon, but for now, here's a song I've had on repeat.

3/3/2024

This the beginning of this website so I got nothin.