daily-ish notes…

  • re: the renaissance man.

    The term “renaissance man” is one of those labels that someone is not allowed to give themselves, I think.

    A renaissance man is a term for someone (man or woman, I think, gender identity aside) who cultivates a broad and expansive interests and expertise in many areas, creating a skillset that reaches into both diverging and overlapping crafts, fields, technical abilities, and other uncategorized fields of knowledge such that they are adaptable and malleable to create, produce, support, or teach many different complex things.

    Someone with lots of smarts, a PhD or other advanced degree maybe hella intelligent, but it doesn’t automatically make them a renaissance man if they are highly focused on a narrow speciality, say.

    But a Youtuber craftsman, who produces their own videos, markets their own work, composes their own theme music, does complex woodworking on screen, writes a blog about it, and then goes on tour to speak and teach about it all, she could be considered a renaissance man.

    You can’t call yourself that, but other people can recognize it in you and bestow that label upon you, and I think I see it as an aspirational goal if that kind of broad and expansive life is interesting to you. Reach for it.

  • on daily surprise.

    It may be a surprise to learn that when I wake up each morning during these daily efforts of drawing or writing or whatever, I don’t actually have a plan.

    The point of daily effort is sometimes the emergent nature of the effort itself.

    For example, today I had no idea (as usual) what to draw for my daily sketch. Another pinecone? (I’ve got multiple photo references!) A scene from my photo library? A view from the window? A random object? A weird and wonderful robot?

    Lunchtime came and despite the cold I went for a walk with the dog. There in the park, sitting on the branch of a tree huddled against the cold an old, fat magpie was sitting glowering at us, cawing a warning as I stood there a moment to watch.

    I pulled out my camera and took a photo… then promptly went home and started my Wednesday sketch.

    Surprise!

  • drawing on complexity.

    Today’s sketch caught me doodling while looking out the window of my office during my lunch break. I work nearly twenty floors up in a downtown office tower, and have a panoramic view of the city.

    I was looking out the window with my mind set on drawing a building or two and before I knew it I had started sketching buildings in detail, with complexity, overlapping and jutting with perspectives and shapes and shadows and forms and nuance.

    The result was a sketch that is opposite of what I might more often draw, simple shapes and colours.

    There is some element of realism to it, but largely it turned into a loose, but quite complex, illustration of the view of the various buildings five to ten blocks away.

  • on kudos.

    Having support from other people, positive words of encouragement, or other kinds of thumbs up for your efforts is nice, but you can’t rely on it.

    Sometimes people get jealous of the things you are able to achieve, or are envious that you are able to achieve something they cannot.

    Sometimes people just aren’t in the mood, frame of mind or emotional space to validate something that is important to you creatively.

    Sometimes they don’t see what you see, the effort, incremental improvement, or the pride in success of some new concept or technique.

    You’re not always gonna get kudos, and you need to be okay with that and just keep going.

  • in support of practice paper.

    Maybe it seems obvious, but when I first started watercolour and was dealing with the cost of supplies, I overlooked adding practice paper to my kit.

    Y’know. Practice paper: a book or pad of okay paper on which you can doodle, experiment, goof around, try out techniques, swatch colours, et cetera, et cetera.

    It took me almost a year before I bit the bullet and bought a coil book of mid-level watercolour paper and devoted it to whatever… low expectation, scrap, mucking about stuff.

    The freedom to try something and not have it committed to your expensive supplies, or neatly bound books that seem like collections of your best efforts, just half-baked ideas tossed onto the page or muddled about, it frees up your practice for all sorts of learning opportunities.

    Yesterday’s sketch was based on an idea for a technique that I had, but also didn’t want to commit to fully for a moleskine urban sketch book I’ve been working on. I trialed the method in my practice book, liked it, and then refined it for the second, final painting.

    Seems obvious… but sometimes the obvious just isn’t.