Busy day at work, which means, not a busy day at the art studio

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It looks like my contract work will be expanding in the fall, with more work than ever. That’s a good thing, as it means I’ll have a solid income, but it all comes with a punch in the gut warning — all of the contract employees may not be given work, depending on what the high-level managers decide fits in the budget. This back and forth rush for being employed to being laid off has been going on for the last ten years, and I’ve got a plan B that will keep a roof over my head. Call me crazy, but I believe that I will someday replace all of the contract work with the income I make from drawing cute animals.

The future looks bright to a cockeyed optimist.

Chore Day, Feb 12, 2022 -- the usual chores and a trip to the big city

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Today was a typical Saturday — vacuuming, laundry, walking the dogs, and more. The “more” was a trip to Medford to buy a pair of pants at the Carhartt store, some socks at REI, and a vegan-friendly burrito at Chipotle. You know you’re in a civilized town when there’s a Chipotle. The burrito was bigger than my head, so I ate only half of it.

Working on Sunday Night???

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Yes. I worked on my outside job today. I spent many hours discovering that I couldn’t get OBS to run on macOS Monterey. I ended up plugging all of the recording gear back into my Windows computer.

After I got everything running, I rehearsed what I wanted to say several times, and I especially tried to maintain eye contact with the camera. In the end the recording was okay for a first try, but it didn’t flow well. Despite all the flaws I saw, I decided not to re-record or do any editing. I realized that it would take much more practice at recording before I could see an improvement in my delivery. Simply doing another recording, with my current skills, would probably create more new errors and blunders than my original recording.

Jan 29, 2022 -- The chore day that wasn't

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This week’s chore day was Thursday instead of Saturday, so there were no chores today.

I was only human in the house for the next few days, which means that I do all of the dog walking, cleaning, cooking, and straightening-up tasks. The dogs had a few scuffles about who owned the sofa, and the afternoon walk with Nacho the Pug was cold as hell, and not a good day to forget my warm mittens.

I spent a couple of hours preparing to shoot a welcome video for my real world job. After many years of working with customers, I’m now making the first video in which I’ll show my face. I’ve been practicing looking at the camera, not scratching my head, and not making funny faces when my nose itches. I’ve also tried to get the lightening right so I won’t look like I slept in the woods. Which reminds me, I have to trim my beard, eyebrows, and nose hairs before I start shooting the video. I’ll do that tomorrow. Thank the gods for tomorrow.

Busy Day in Southern Oregon

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My partner is traveling South to visit here family in the Bay Area. We spent the day preparing for her journey. She did this week’s shopping (so I would have food over the weekend) and she did her Saturday chores (chores are a big thing in our household). Afterwards we went to Medford to take care of some business: going to the DMV to get our clean air certificate for the car, going to the Carhart store to get her some cool overalls (she loves overalls), and going to Chipotle to get some vegan burritos.

My artistic contributions for today were to prepare OBS for the screencasts I’ll be making for my outside job, and I experimented with Clip Studio’s AI coloring, but I can see that it doesn’t know how to paint within the lines — it behaves more like a soft airbrush. AI coloring is interesting concept. I hope CSP keeps improving it.

Upgrading iMac to Monterey --- a big failure

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Today we spent the day working on my partner’s iMac. The upgrade failed and restoring from backup took hours. After reinstalling the operating system using Time Machine, we still have to update to a newer versions of macOS.

Worse, I accidentally deleted my original post with a detailed description of the recovery process when I closed the browser. That’s life.

Sunday, January 9: All Quiet in Southern Oregon

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I woke up feeling normal this morning. My Covid-19 booster symptoms were gone. Overall I had a mild reaction: a few chills and a little fatigue.

As for art, I tried the Heavypaint painting app for a couple of hours on both the iPad and on my Windows desktop. It’s quite basic — the idea behind the software is to limit the digital experience to something like a real media experience. Most of the tools digital artists expect are simply not there. For example, there are layers, but they don’t have opacity or blending modes. Despite it spartan tool set, experienced artists can make some great looking digital paintings. I’ll post some of my Thickpaint pictures here…someday.

Tonight is movie night. We’re going to watch In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar Wai. The Criterion Channel is my go-to movie service.

Last official day of my part-time job

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My 16-week contract has expired and all of the clients have gone home. I have a few more days to work. I’ll be doing evaluations, removing the my projects from the web, and turning out the lights…until it all starts up again in 6 weeks. Yes, I re-upped.

Over the next 6 weeks I’ll be working on my children’s picture book in every free hour. Now I’ve feeling burnt out. My p-t job requires deep focus and lots of dealing with people who aren’t well-prepared for what it takes to complete the course. I do admire those who “get it” at some point. It’s a good feeling to see someone take a few concepts and run with them.