weekly retro #78: making art, taking trains
after spending a lot of today on trains and out of town, i almost completely zonked out for the night as soon as i got home. fortunately for you, i caught a second wind. fortunately for me, it happened before 10pm.
after finishing my latest one several days ago, i wrote about my last few pixel art paintings. i've started my fourth, and i am hoping to not take nearly as long as i did with my last one. i hate to say it, but the more you do a thing the better you're going to get at it - and this applies to me too unfortunately!
this is even true of pottery. while there's a good chance my first teapot may not survive two firings, the fact that i made a teapot that actually looks like a teapot is a huge win for me. next week i start round three of my favorite wheel throwing course and then i'm taking time off from regular instruction to work on my first real collection. maybe including teapots!
besides spending less time online and more time on my offline art, i've also been trying to go out and socialize more. this includes engaging in more tech meetups - like brooklyn web workers - and even visiting my family more frequently. i think the key to powering through low energy and low ambition is to remember that i'm no longer a full time face of a product, that i don't have to be on or on my best behavior all the time. that reminder helps take the pressure off and gets me out the door more.
i think some of that pressure is also literal in the sense of the extremely high humidity we've had over the past week. when the air is this thick, i feel so anxious and me not want to leave the house at all. i hate the fact that we'll likely have to spend the rest of our lives constantly adjusting and adapting to climate change. and, unpopular opinion, i hate that we have a whole entire month left of summer lol.
things i enjoyed this week despite the humidity
- here are a bunch of cool ways to modify a cheap pocket notebook. i found this doing research for a bookbinding project i'm working on.
- i want to help turn the page of the world's largest pop-up book
- whenever this happens
- i finally tried fishwife sardines, specifically this preserved lemon one after finding a single tin on sale - these shit's expensive, but very good!
here's to a happy, less humid august. a month for fun in the sun (with plenty of spf) and getting ready for the fall/back-to-school reset that's ahead for all of us.
xoxo jenn