Long time no posts

9 Apr

And no new pictures this time either. I have been having bit of a problem with my dominant hand for several weeks, I could do something like typing with it, even if it did get kind of sore after a while, but anything needing fine-motor skills like drawing or painting, well, a few brush strokes, or a few lines, and I would start to lose control because it got sore on the upper parts of the arm and I could not quite keep it still enough. No problems with the actual hand, but if your arm starts to shake a bit, well… plus it was also just plain unpleasant. Not major type of pain, except a couple of times when I got stubborn and used it for a longer period, but I’d rather not deal even with mild ache if I don’t have to, and it did stop aching in a short while when I didn’t use it.

I would do my best not to use it at all for a few days, it would start to feel better, and the same thing would happen when I tried to use it again.

So I finally went to a doctor to complain, and she said the muscles near the shoulder joint seemed to be inflamed. Two cortisone injections. Seems to be a bit better now, but I have been using it more for a day now and it still seems to get sore with use, so I presume I’m getting the next two she said she’d give me this week if the first two didn’t seem to do the job.

Lesson is presumably not to delay going to your doctor. I have some tendency to that, if the problem seems mild I, more often, tend to start waiting in order to see if it will go away on its own. Not necessarily smart. I don’t even have to pay for this, it’s covered by my employer’s insurance. Besides my work is probably the main reason why that shoulder got inflamed in the first place. Well, in my defense, part of the reason was, this time, that our firm provided health care got transferred to a new clinic about a month ago, one which still doesn’t seem to have gotten our information transferred to their computers. And I liked the last doctor who looked after my branch in the last place, I’m not quite sure what I think of this new one. Oh well. I suppose I’ll get used to her in time.

Meteorites and locusts

15 Feb

The first meteorite which was big enough to cause damage since Tunguska. Cool. And not, I do feel sorry for the people who happened to live where it came down and were injured or suffer financially, but nevertheless, these happen, and it is cool to have witnessed one even it is only because this happened at a time when video cameras are in wide enough use that there are now several videos to be found in Youtube. A couple of decades earlier and we could have read about this, and with luck seen a few photos, but now you can actually see what it looked like when it happened.

Locusts on the other hand are just my excuse for why I still can’t put up any new paintings. You know, the time eating kind? Lots around during this week, I did a little bit of this and a little bit of that and several days went by with only a few added dabs of paint in a couple of the paintings, and none finished. I did manage to write a bit though. The text even seems to be fairly decent. I think I’m, once again, starting to get slowly back to normal, if you consider normal what I am during the spring and the fall and mostly during the summers although then too much light can bother me a bit too, I can get slightly manic I suppose. Scattered, sort of, I do have some tendency to start too many things and, as a result, have some problems finishing most of them. I am at my best during the late summer and early fall. There are times when I really would like to move somewhere more south. It would be nice to see what it is like to live where the nights and the days stay more constant.

Sleep

9 Feb

The joys of having an unconventional sleeping schedule – I work between two and six in the morning, so usually I sleep from about six or seven in the morning until about noon, then usually get a nap of two to four hours around midnight before going to work.

Unfortunately that means that I sleep most – or should, anyway – during those hours when repairs are done, when they need doing in the apartments of the apartment building I live in. Like several days last week. No point complaining, of course, since the drilling and hammering and more unidentifiable noises happened exactly when they are supposed to happen. Well, right now I only have that night job so not that big a problem, plenty of hours still left when I can sleep. You might think. Problem being that my kind of sleeping schedule is hard to keep even without distractions, so one f*cked up day can mean a week or two before I can get back to it. Humans are meant to sleep when it’s dark, not after the sun has risen. Right now I get sleepy a bit after noon, and if I succumb and go to bed and don’t use the alarm I will wake up around eight or nine in the evening. Unfortunately, from past experiences, the best way to get back to my normal schedule probably is to just keep pushing going to bed a two or three hours forward every day until I’m where I am again sleeping something like that four hours before work, and will then be sleepy enough to get to sleep right after work again.

Interesting part is of course how safe I am for driving even with my normal schedule. I have a couple of morning newspaper routes, and I do the routes with a company car (driver sits on the right side since that makes it easier to drop the newspapers, or, for the postal carriers who use the same cars the daily post, right from the opened window into the mailboxes – the idea is that on the countryside we are supposed to be able to do the whole route without having to get out of the car once, which of course never works quite that way in practice, especially during the winters :)). I do have to use my own to get where the company car is since the distance from my home is 12 kilometers, and buses don’t go at the time when I start the work. So, lots of driving between sleeping. Very good there is hardly any traffic at that time of the night. I haven’t had an actual accident yet, but I have to admit I have smashed the driver’s side mirror on the work car a couple of times (on the wrong side, remember, and I need to get close to those boxes in order to be able to get the newspaper in without getting out of the car, and some of those boxes are high enough that the damn mirror will hit them if I get just a liitle bit too close). I am not perhaps completely alert when I’m working.

Oh, the mirror hasn’t been completely totaled yet. Even if the person who drives the car during the day seems to keep doing the same thing to it. It’s just gotten loose enough that now even a small hit means the parts fall apart. Or driving over a big bump in the road. There are several rubber bands around the thing which sort of hold it together, but if we forget to replace the ones that break, yep, then things start to fall off.

Anyway, this week was mostly eaten by the disturbed sleep schedule, I didn’t get much done, but I’m getting things together again (awake enough in the mornings to paint right now) so should get new material up tomorrow or day or two after, latest.

Man and hiisi

30 Jan

EPSON scanner image

 

 

 

 

Right. So still something else. I’m trying to get the hang of acrylics so I’m painting a lot right now, but lots have ended up in the ‘this is not quite working’ pile. Some are probably salvageable, some not.

Reasonably happy with the colors. The color gradations look smoother on the painting than on this scanner image, the process heightens the visibility of the brush strokes, and even slight differences in color become noticeable. I really have to learn how to use those damn graphics programs, it would be nice if I knew how to make the scan represent the painting better.

Hiisi has no completely accurate English translation, although I suppose goblin isn’t too far off if we are talking about the small devil or troll like creature the word can also mean. Originally it seems to have meant a place of worship, a holy grove or a holy tree or rock, but with the coming of Christianity the word gradually got the meaning of a sort of a devil. There is no single idea of what they were supposed to look like, but horns and tail seem to be rather usual, as well as hairiness. Perhaps something a bit like a satyr, or a cross between a satyr and a dwarf, with a bit of a werewolf thrown in as claws and sharp teeth are also sometimes mentinoned – usually they are described as small in the stories, although there are occasional giants too. They pester people in the woods, and they can kill, although usually they attack only from behind, if you turn to face them fully they are supposed to retreat. As is usual for Finnish folklore, they often are also rather stupid and easily fooled. So perhaps the best idea would be something like Gollum, only a scarier and hairier and more animal like version, something that when confronted will pretend to be small and scared and possibly beg for mercy, but will jump you and tear your throat out if you make the mistake of turning your back to it.

And now I’m getting the itch to try to tell a story about that picture. Well, maybe… after a few weeks, right now I’m still a bit too scatterbrained to write well. But I’ll make notes.

Stone angel

26 Jan

EPSON scanner image

 

 

 

 

 

I got tired of fighting with the skin tones, so ended up, instead, finishing this cemetery angel painting I had started several weeks ago. But I’ll keep playing with that more colorful painting too. I still think I can make it work, but I need to go slowly with it. I have this bad tendency to start messing things up if I get impatient with failing to get something exactly the way I’d want it, that is if I keep on going after things start to go wrong. But if I have a break and then try again, well, then I have a much better chance of getting it right, or at least getting something good enough.

I have one story for which this might be suitable as a cover. I’m not sure how good fit this would be, but I don’t particularly like the cover it has now so maybe I’ll try using this instead. Have to say that one thing I love about self-publishing is this – I can fix things and I can try different covers. I have no intention of trying for traditional channels anymore, I’ll stick to indie/self-publishing. You put the stories out there, and maybe sometimes fiddle with them a bit afterwards, but otherwise, well, they are there, and there is no worrying whether they sell or not or how much or when – selling or not would be a concern, at least for me, with traditional because that dictates whether you can get anything else out, now it’s just money which isn’t that big a concern for me right now. Not that it wouldn’t be nice, I am living on a wage which falls under poverty line now, but  it’s still a wage I can live on so no hysteria over things like not being able to pay bills if I don’t get money from the stories. I can concentrate on writing, and painting, and putting things out, and if something happens then it does, if not I’m still enjoying the writing and painting. Perhaps that does not count as a professional attitude, I don’t know, but it’s suitably stress free for me. I’m afraid I don’t handle stress all that well. I worry a bit, perhaps, about how good, or not, what I produce is, but even that is, at least to some extent, a matter of opinion. There have been several bestsellers I was unable to finish, and some stories and writers I loved which seem to have sunk without a ripple during the years I have been reading, so I guess I pretty much do go by the adage ‘ there is no accounting for taste’ nowadays. If I get enough readers there will be people who love my stories, people who hate them and everything in between. And if enough fall into ‘love them’ end, or close enough, who knows, perhaps I might even, some day, get some money from it.

Whippet dragon

24 Jan

EPSON scanner image

 

 

 

 

 

Acrylics on paper.

Besides a whippet there may be at least one cockatrix in the family tree somewhere too.

Okay, of course I’m not happy with this. I ended up trying for painterly instead of comics style, and that is something I really do not do well with acrylics. Which presumably makes it something I should do a lot so I will learn. The anatomy is a bit wonky too.

On the other hand it has been a very long time since I last painted, nearly two decades – I used to paint a lot before that, although it was almost exclusively with oils – so perhaps I should take the point of view that this is not too bad for a first effort, especially in a medium I have never used much, after a long break. (Yes, I started with oils, but since I have been adding a bit here and there even on the ones which are pretty finished they are mostly still not dry enough for scanning).

I think I will be able to post the other one on Friday. If I won’t completely mess the characters’ faces and other bits where they have exposed skin. I am fairly happy with everything else in it though, at least right now.

Not so yes…

23 Jan

Okay, skin tone problems. I don’t think I have to scrap the other painting completely, but this will take a day or two more. The other one, perhaps late this evening, or tomorrow morning.

Skin tones are one thing I tend to have problems with. I can do them in oils, even if I’m rarely completely happy with them even then at least the end results can be something I’m willing to settle for instead of starting to think in terms of fires (okay, there is a wood grill on the backyard of the apartment building I live in, but yep, I know, while it’s tempting burning paintings is not environmentally friendly, according to apartment house rules anyway, toxic fumes and residue and whatever, so I haven’t, yet :D), but that’s one of the things I haven’t quite gotten yet with acrylics, unless we are talking about something like comics style, with fairly flat looking surfaces with just one even tone for all of the skin, not much of an attempt to get the illusion of three dimensions. As I have said I admire the fully photorealistic style of painting, so while I can do something kind of comics style fairly well even with acrylics I’m never happy with that. The point isn’t so much that I think less of other styles rather than the fact that since that particular thing is what I’d like to learn how to do, until and unless I get there everything else I do will fall short in my eyes. I think that if I learned how to paint photorealistically (okay, is that actually a word?) then also painting less so would be fine enough for me – because  then it wouldn’t be for the reason I can’t do more realistic, but because right then I perhaps want to do something like that. Right now it’s because it’s what I can do, and so it falls short for me.

And I would, specifically, want to learn to do that photorealism with a paintbrush, not with a graphics program.

Oh yes

17 Jan

the two paintings I’m working on seem to be coming out just fine. Acrylics, on paper. Since that dries a lot faster than oils I think I can show at least one of them, maybe not in a couple of days but at least sometimes by the end of next week.

SAD

10 Jan

The damn SAD kind of jumped me a bit right after the new year. I just kept on vegetating and thinking that maybe I’ll start tomorrow, for several days. Pretty typical for this time of the year, there are things I just can’t manage, like writing (requires the ability to concentrate, inside your head, if I can’t even remember what the characters have already done I can’t keep the plot together), but while I can paint, and draw (you can see the whole thing with one glance…), the big problem of the season applies to them too – if I stop doing it regularly, even for a few days, getting started again takes an effort. Sometimes a pretty big one.

And I have been craving fast carbs like nothing. Potatoes and rice perhaps are excusable, but the two liters of ice cream will show the next time I dare to weight myself. This time of the year they always do, especially since I haven’t been moving much either. We had a very white Christmas with lots of snow but the weather warmed up around new year, and for a couple of days it rained. Which meant that most of the snow melted, except for sidewalks and other places where people had stamped the snow tight. So then it got cold again and now those places are coated with ice. I hate ice. I love walking, usually, but when that would mean walking on ice – no thanks. I fall down several times every winter even if I do avoid walking, and one of the problems that can give you, long term, are stuff like the badly scarred tendons I have on my shoulders. Lots of falls, most resulting in slight injuries like a small rip on a tendon which might give you slight tenderness on that area for a couple of days, at most, if you notice it at all when it happens, but if you get lots of those – well, they scar, and lots of scarring on a tendon can mean that it won’t work quite right any more, or fit in the space where it is supposed to fit… and then you may end with limited mobility and inflammation, and if that gets bad enough you may need surgery. I’m not quite at that point yet (occasional inflammation, but everything still moves almost as well as before), and I’d prefer not to get there at all. So I have gotten very wary of slippery surfaces. I still do fun stuff which might end in falls, but if I risk those injuries now it better be for something I really enjoy doing, and just walking while being scared of the surface on which you walk doesn’t quite meet that qualification. Especially if the weather is also less than enjoyable. Which it often is here, around this time.

Some parts of aging really do suck. Other parts not so much. I think I like what I am now a lot more than I liked the younger me. I used to be a lot more insecure and neurotic than I am now, for one thing. 🙂

Okay, I think I can get myself out of this rut, even if it is harder now than it would be when there is more light. I have started doing some preliminary work with acrylics. The oils are mostly still either a bit too wet or way too wet to show. I do much prefer oils to acrylics, but I think I can manage simpler paintings with the acrylics too. We’ll see.

 

Sick

28 Dec

I seem to have gotten an unintended Christmas present from my godson’s family. Their preschooler puked just before the holidays, I visited shortly the day after, and now I have what is probably a mild version of norovirus. Yee… I haven’t been puking, but everything else fits. So I won’t probably be posting until a few days into next year.

Well, good excuse to just sit and read and sleep a lot for a couple of days. And I’m feeling enough under the weather that I can probably also do that without getting too bored.

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