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Playing around with colored pencils. This is the second drawing I've done with colored pencils, it was an interesting time. I practiced iterating some drawings before doing the final piece. I don't know how much it helped lol.

But anyways. I think the skin color turned out a lot better than I expected. I only have the Prismacolor 12 pack, so no skin tone colors, so I was expecting the color to be super over saturated. And yeah, it's still pretty saturated, but it's still closer than I expected.

The poses are whatever. It's a dull pose and a dull angle, and they're floating in s p a c e. I threw a little bit of shadow in, but it's not very convincing. The bodies are O K. Perspective is not great, and the shadows don't super make sense but you can kinda see where the light source is supposed to be from. I think I'm kind of caught between wanting the shadows to be just decoration, or shadows to have a meaningful impact on the figures.

The photograph is also Not Good. Lol.

But I think the biggest thing I learned was the skin color, and practicing with pencils and being light with them and layering them up. Taking my time with them and not rushing was pretty effective.

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So I'm moving in two months, and I have SO MUCH FOOD, and I would like to start making it go away for before I move so I throw out as little as possible.

Here's what I'm starting off with:

It's quite a bit, and I am one person.

Godspeed, self

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Maybe I'll start using this as a "learn to draw" page, because I've been super into that lately. I've been thinking maybe I'll talk over how I feel about some of the paintings I've been doing.

So I just worked on this one today, and I think it turned out really well. I've had some kind of breakthrough recently with painting, which has been really nice, so I'm very motivated.

For this painting I really focused on the colors and the facial structure. My initial colors were very saturated, like I figured out how to use contrasting colors for the shading, but they were way too intense, but I managed to reign them in for this picture. The eyes are slightly too small, but I think they're still within normal human eye range lol. I think the rendering turned out really well, I tend to have difficulty with tha when colors are involved, but I think I did a great job here. I also used a lot of comparing angles with getting the facial features in the right spot. The farther eye is a little flat, I think I shied away from pushing the shadows on that side, since by that point I had realized the nose was kind of off and I subconsciously thought that if I don't put any strong colors there then no one will notice lol.

The hair is practically a completely different style, but I actually really like the more graphic style of hair. I'll play with it some more until I get bored of it, but right now I really like how it looks.

I think the surprising winner is the headphones. I really phoned them in, but I guess it really worked out because I think they look great.

So that's what I did today. If I like doing breakdowns of my work like this, I might do another post.

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August 16, 2022

I feel at a crossroads here. I'm trying really hard to not chase the new shiny, but my god I really like math. I ended up staying past my break and into my second hour watching videos on derivatives. I'm really leaning towards going ahead and shifting my courses that I'm working on to be more math-based. I want to have fun, and I'm not "having fun" with the programming stuff, like it's fine and engaging, but I'm very excited doing those calculus problems.

I also did some more Drawabox stuff. My brain is kind of janked up a little bit with it. It's a pleasant kind of tedium working on the exercises, but I feel sort of weird because a lot of my exposure to art was very much in the "personal expression" sort of vein. It feels weird enjoying this more technical form of drawing.

I think I'll back-burner the computer science/programming stuff for a bit just to see if this math stuff gets out of my head. If it does, then I can just return to the programming stuff where I left off. If not, then I'll continue with math and see where that takes me.

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August 15, 2022

It's my birthday! I have to go to work. I hate working on my birthday.

Today I did some Python for Everybody. This chapter was about tuples, and most of the exercises just used tuples to change the keys and values for dictionaries, so it wasn't too invigorating. Next chapter is about regex which will be... fun.

Next up was Drawabox, and getting to those boxes to draw. I'll be stuck on that section for a bit, since it's time-consuming, so it's a good opportunity to put on some music and just hang out.

Also swapped out Khan Academy for a calculus course off MIT OpenCourseWare. It's my attempt to drum interest back up for math. I'm finding myself super engaged in the material. I did take calculus back in college, and I didn't find it too bad, but I definitely don't remember much from it. I definitely don't remember much from trig/geometry back in high school. I think maybe I'll go back and watch a video on sine/cosine and things about finding triangle sides, or maybe I'll watch the Khan Academy videos but not bother doing the exercises. I just watched the lecture for calculus and took notes; I didn't get to the problem sets yet. I'll look over them, but I'll leave actually doing them for later.

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August 14, 2022

Today was kind of a mess. I did a lot of stuff, but it was off-schedule. I tried working on Spanish like I did on Friday, but Duolingo was super boring, so I stopped doing it. I tried doing some flash cards on Memrise, which felt better. I also want to try reading some children's fiction. I'm not sure how much more of Spanish I'm going to try out.

It's really interesting to me. When I was younger I really enjoyed doing things that required a lot of tedious repetition, like math or learning languages, but now it's difficult for me to keep my interest on things like that. I'll try out Memrise and reading children's stories, but if I'm still bored working on it, I might stop doing it. Same with Khan Academy. I don't literally need it for a class, and remember how to do it for a test. I can just skip it.

Relatedly, I'm really bored with the Ethics, Technology, and Engineering class. Today I replaced it with more drawing. Drawing is getting a little fraught for me lately, which is pretty common. I have a lot of negative thoughts about my drawing, even though I want to keep doing it. I was doing some stuff with pen today, just either doodling or copying pictures. I was getting down on my ability to recreate what I'm seeing. It really interferes with just sitting down and practicing. Ironically, I can tell that if I keep going I can get really good at drawing with pen and copying what I see, just getting to that point is rough. I keep getting sort of confused about what I want to do, because part of me wants to practice drawing from my mind, part of me wants to do studies in a structured way, and the last part wants me to just do Drawabox.

Maybe I'm just in a mood to do more studies. I go back and forth between wanting to do studies and wanting to just draw whatever I want. Maybe if I follow whatever instinct I have at the time I'll feel better.

But anyways here's some faces from today:

I tried out some redlining, but I don't think it worked out that well, since I don't have a strong feeling of what they're supposed to look like anyways.

I also started working on some of the reading list that I posted previously. I started reading Whipping Girl, which I've heard a lot about and figured I might as well start forming my own opinion. Part of me wanted to start with Gender Trouble, but I've tried reading it before and it's not a fun read. Whipping Girl is a lot more fun to read. As of right now I don't have much to comment on, but it's also not anything that I don't already know. I'm looking forward to continuing to read it.

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Potential Book Lists

I'm putting together a book list, to have a guide in what to read for my reading sections. I'm interested in critical queer theory and philosophy, and I also like the idea of being interested in scifi/fantasy, except the part where I never finish the novels I read. So I'm going to start with the heavy stuff first. I'm going to have a bunch of sections with 3-5 books on each so it can mimic a several month "class". The books aren't written in any order, same with the sections.

I'll keep updating/evolving this as I go.

Intro to Queer Theory

Gender Trouble, Judith Butler Whipping Girl, Julia Serrano The Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde Crip Theory, Robert McCruer

Film Theory

Black Feminism

The Color of Kink, Ariane Cruz

Trans Feminism

Captive Genders, Eric A Stanley and Nat Smith Transgender History, Susan Stryker

Colonialism

Orientalism, Edward Said The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon

Queer Masculinity

Critical Race Theory

Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon

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August 12, 2022 (Part 1?)

I have a lot of thoughts so far about today. First of all, I set several hours of things to do for the afternoon as well as stuff for this morning, but I don't know how motivated I'll be to do them. I don't have work today, and there's a part of me that wants to laze around and binge watch movies and TV.

Also I recently learned about Kim Jong Gi, who's a Korean artist. I was really into drawing with just pen a while ago, and I really like the simplicity of it. I still do. Part of the reason I ended up trying to use other materials is for a couple of reasons: 1) I decided that there would be an upper limit of how good I could get while just using a pen, and 2) it wasn't financially feasible/I couldn't make money off of it. I'm trying really hard to not use money-making as a core reasons of why I do my hobbies, but it still sneaks in there. It's consumed a lot of my thoughts for a really long time; I can't just put it down.

But seeing this artist made all of that interest come back, because he's really good and he also doesn't use construction lines or anything like that, he essentially "freehands" everything. (Well, not everything, he does do blueprints/mockups/first drafts of commissions) but a lot of stuff he does is straight out of his head on the paper. I don't think I'd ever be as good as him, since I won't devote the time/energy to it, but it's still a worm in my head that's making me excited to do drawing.

This has several complications. The schedule I wrote up does have an emphasis on doing programming stuff, but there is some drawing stuff (like 60/30 or so). It makes me want to change the whole schedule to just drawing, which defeats the purpose. I did the schedule in the first place to get programming knowledge with the hope of changing jobs. Getting sidetracked by doing drawing defeats the purpose. It also doesn't help that my work situation has gotten a lot more palatable, and the very action of doing some kind of structured hobby stuff is making me feel a lot better and less interested in searching for a new programming job. I can be very emotional and arbirtrary sometimes, and I don't give that enough credit.

I'm also struggling with motivation in some of the courses, as I mentioned about Khan Academy. I'm someone who's very prone to quitting things, and I don't want that to derail any progress. I'm also very prone to being "inspired" and changing everything I do to follow that inspiration. I still don't have a good framework in order to accomodate those impulses without driving myself mad.

Something else I want to keep in mind is whether I should be "allowed" to do work outside of the assigned time. I'm also prone to burning out on stuff, in that I get really worked up in a thing, do a lot of it over a short period of time, and then never want to do it again. The schedule I have right now (50 min of work, 10 min break, then 50 min of something else) is working really well to mitigate that. But I like doing stuff while I'm watching TV or movies, just doing something with my hands, and it would be easy to let myself do some drawing. But I know in that kind of environment, the chances of me getting upset about the quality of my drawing is really high, so I've been avoiding that setup. I'm not really sure what to do about it.

This is a lot more thoughts than I thought it was going to be. I think for right now I'll continue with the schedule that I have and not make any big changes. I need more data and experience with it before I can do anything helpful, I think.

So on to this morning. The first thing I worked on was the Missing Semester. I didn't get really far in it today. I was at the exercises for Chapter 2, and I ran into a lot of problems. Like I said before I can't get any kind of virtual machine running, so I'm doing it all through Cygwin. I didn't want to use a word processor (?) inside Cygwin, so I was trying to find some kind of GUI program. I found the fake Linux filesystem that Cygwin set up, so it was pretty easy to save files written in N++ in that filesystem. That ended up being a big mistake. The exercises wanted me to write several bash files, and something about either the way N++ saved the file or Cygwin ran them kept on leading to a bunch of very confusing and unhelpful errors. I would get EOL errors constantly, a lot of errors about illegal characters, and my program was literally

function marco { marco=$PWD; }

I was getting very frustrated and couldn't figure out where in my short program I was having problems. I spent near an hour trying to figure it out. The only thing I could think of was that it had something to do with me being on Windows and running Cygwin. I reached out to a couple of friends of mine who would be much more likely able to run a Linux computer, with the intent of having them run the program and see if they ran into any errors. Eventually I got impatient and just wrote the program in Vim in Cygwin, and it ran totally fine without errors, but I was frustrated enough that it distracted me from doing the next thing on the schedule, which was finishing up an Udemy course on drawing anatomy.

Before I realized what the problem was, I worked on bash through the break and into the next segment, so I started the anatomy course late. I couldn't focus for a couple reasons, 1) I wanted to go back and do more stuff from the Missing Semester Course because I got very little work done due to the difficulties I was having, 2) I was talking with a friend now about our experiences with programming, and 3) because of being inspired by Kim Jong Gi, I really wanted to work on perspective with Drawabox and not anatomy on Udemy, and the Udemy course recommends using pencils and I'm feeling very pro-pen right now. I ended up just watching one video from that course before moving on.

I made myself start the Programming Languages A class on Coursera, and I'm glad I did. It wasn't particularly interesting or anything (just first day stuff for the course), but it made me feel like I got work done rather than just scrambling like I had done for the rest of the morning.

I think with practice I'll get better at sticking to the schedule, even if that means abandoning a frustrating program in the middle of working on it. Right now I've got a break until 1, and then some more things after that until 4pm. After that I can hang out and do nothing for several hours. I really want to draw right now, not gonna lie.

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August 11, 2022

I went ahead and adjusted my schedule. It now has something like A-days and B-days; Monday and Thursday are A-days, and Tuesday and Friday are B-days, and I have a third set of activities for Friday afternoon and Sunday morning that I can do with just my tablet/phone. I frequently go to my girlfriend's on Sunday so I might be too distracted to do anything on Sunday morning, but it's there if I have the focus. Same with Friday afternoon.

I also went ahead and put Drawabox on there for my drawing, along with finishing up some Udemy courses that I had already paid for and were just sitting on my account.

Today I did some Python for Everybody, drawing, and Khan Academy. Nothing really stands out today. In Python for Everybody I'm pushing myself to redo the functions from scratch every time rather than modifying what I've got, just so I can remember the functions. File read and mofidy functions are really basic, but I always forget them, so I'm just sort of drilling them. In Drawabox I finished up the ellipses section in lesson 1.

It's not particularly interesting to look at. I found out about Kim Jung Gi and I fee really inspired watching his drawings, which is part of why I wanted to change my drawing regimine. I frequently get frustrated with how fast I can draw; usually I lose interest in what I'm drawing long before it's complete, so I end up with a lot of incomplete drawings. Also I like the idea of not being able to undo, which sort of complements just having a drawing pad and a pen. I'll try it out, focusing with this, for a bit and see how I feel about it.

Khan Academy is getting on my nerves. I don't really enjoy doing it, so I'm not spending my time on it, therefore I'm making a lot of mistakes. I keep redoing the same things trying to get 100% on stuff. I'm going to pass now on doing 100% on the mastery quiz at the end of each chapter, because it's driving me crazy getting everything correct. I want to still go through it so I can go through the calculus bits, but I'm just not engaged at all. It's funny to me because I loved math as a kid, and I was really good at it. But now, as an adult, it's just tedious. I should find a different way to engage in the material instead of just trying to power through it.

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I just realized that I don't really have a drawing class or anything. Right now I just have a basic outline of concepts I want to tackle, but no structured class with a beginning/end. I'll have to think about whether I'm okay with it being more open-ended like that (and thus won't have a class to add to the Projects page) or if I want to either find or design a class to work through.

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August 10, 2022

My plans fell through for today, so I did a bit more on Missing Semester, and Python for Everybody.

I'm going to switch over to reading the notes for Missing Semester. I tried watching the video with the CC on, but the CC is really bad. It takes longer for me to understand what's going on if I'm just looking at a finished snip of the code instead of watching him do it, but that's okay. I get less confused that watching bad subtitles.

I've never done any bash scripting, so a lot of the stuff on there is going to take me a bit. I got to the end of the second chapter and I'm working through the exercises. I'm having difficulty keeping bash and python seperate in my head. It also doesn't help that I'm not on a Linux computer and I'm operating through Cygwin. I'll keep going until not being on a Linux computer is harming my ability to continue.

I got through the Files chapter on P4E, and now I'm to the exercises for the Lists chapter. I'm learning some things about Python that I didn't know before, so I'm glad that I'm going through the course even though it's a little bit basic for me. I didn't know that most list functions were void, or if I did it wasn't properly internalized enough to be helpful. I didn't know that primitives would send a copy of itself to functions, whereas non-primitives/objects send a reference of the object to the function. It'll be interesting to make complex programs while keeping that in mind. I have to thank my girlfriend for pointing out these basic programming things that I probably should have known by now.

So far I'm really enjoying this class-structured sort of learning. I'm looking forward to it every day so far, and it also makes me feel better than just sitting down and watching TV. I keep trying to think of other things I can shove into this class structure, but I know I need to calm down a bit. I don't need to do everything.

I guess I also don't know what to do when I start working on larger projects. Once a week won't be enough to make significant progress on them, but I also don't want to negate my time doing other things either. Hmm. I'll figure it out.

I'm going to put up a thing about what projects/classes I'm working on as a separate page. I think it would be neat to have a list of things I'm currently working on, and a list of things I've completed already.

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August 9, 2022

Had a really busy work week, so wasn't able to do any fun/hobby stuff. I watched a lot of Charmed to decompress, but it didn't get me anywhere new.

Today I worked on a couple things. One was an online course called The Missing Semester (https://missing.csail.mit.edu/), which is really just about some of the compsci stuff that tends to fall through the cracks in more formal instruction. Mostly it seems about the Linux environment and setting up workflows with tools and programs that are generally helpful. Unfortunately I cannot install Linux on my computer since it's a business computer my best friend stole from work, so it is bootlocked, but I installed Cygwin so at least I can practice terminal commands and bash I guess. There's also a lecture on security and cryptography, which I'm more interested in, but I might as well watch the rest as well.

Then I did some drawing. I'm brainstorming larger projects with the idea that maybe having an overall vision to strive for will help keep me focused. I'm going to work on that on Fridays from now on. Here's some of the sketches I did today.

I'm starting to get a feel of a flow a little bit that I typically don't get when doing life drawing. I'm also really bad at warming up while drawing. I think I want to start warming up more.

The last thing I worked on today was Python for Everybody. I finished chapter 7 today. A lot of it is review, but I like the little exercises at the end. I remember my dad trying to teach me programming when I was a young teen, and he just threw all the information at me and then told me a project idea, without giving me guidance on how all the concepts worked together. I should be done with the rest of this course in the next few weeks.

I've been brainstorming some bigger projects to work on. I think I'll also start working on those projects on Friday as well. I already have some time blocked out.

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August 5, 2022

Today I worked on more Khan Academy, more drawing, and more programming stuff.

Still chugging away at Khan Academy. Today I mostly worked with negative numbers, which really trips up my "Doesn't pay too much attention" problems. I really need to work on that so I can put "detil oriented" on my resume.

Drawing went well. I avoided colors for so long that it's actually surprising to me that working with color makes you better at working with color. I also watched a video of someone doing a landscape, just out of curiosity, and they approached painting by not working one section to perfection before moving on to the next, but by kind of bouncing around and bringing the quality of the painting up as a whole rather than one bit at a time. I went ahead and tried that, and it actually worked out rather well. Also, I get kind of nervous about working on fiddly areas like the knees, where there's a lot of light detail, but I forced myself to push through it. I think it turned out rather well.

So I've decided that the first course of OSSU for programming (How to Code) is much too basic for me, so I'm moving onto the Programming Language sections. I'm not sure how much I'll glean from it, considering that I've worked in multiple languages already, but there's more of a focus on functional languages, which I don't have a lot of practice with.

I think I also want to start thinking up some programming projects to work on, in a variety of different languages and focuses. It's to start putting some things onto Github. My main language is Python, so I'll definitely use that. Here's some ideas that I have now:

Some very easy program, just to get started. I'm thinking of something that I can package into an .exe, just to see how that works. I want to make a picture randomizer for figure drawing, where you can customize the sort of drawing session that you want to do. It would use images that you already have downloaded. There's a lot of programs like that already online, but they're all limited in particular ways that frustrate me.

Some kind of networking-related program. Maybe a chat program? I don't know much about using networks.

Some kind of data analysis program. I'd have to think about what kind of data I could analyze. Not only would I have practice writing the program itself, but also I could practice using some visualization software, and maybe some data storage of some kind.

Actually, now that I think about it some more, I could make a small IM program that could have both a downloadable .exe and a mobile app, and then use databases to store the chat information. I wouldn't release it, but maybe I could populate using generated chats.

Use AI to generate chats? I'm not sure if there are AI modules that I can use without writing my own.

Some small game, with graphics.

A mod for a game. I had a dream about a Rimworld mod that I want to try out (I promise it's not weird).

I feel weird making things that already exist, which is why I've avoided making a lot of programs in the past. But it's okay to remake the wheel. I'm practicing. It also doesn't have to be anything that I release, either.

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August 4, 2022

Today I worked on the Ethics, Technology, and Engineering course, some drawing, and some Khan Academy stuff.

I remember my dad one time telling me that my greatest downfall in math would be, being sloppy. I can understand the rules well enough, but I copy down wrong numbers, or for a brief minute I think 7x8 is 46, or something like that. It's not that big of a deal, but it makes getting 100% in all the Khan Academy stuff really tedious at times.

I did some sketching/figure drawing work today. This is the only page I saved, not because it was the best, but because I didn't think to save them until the very last one. There were some.... very interesting figures today.

He's got a huge head, that's all I'm saying.

Also I'm starting to get recruiters in my inbox, which is pretty neat. Had someone message me about my availability for interviews, but it seems like they're looking for someone to relocate. I've got to find the job posting to see if it was listed as a remote position. I tried to only apply to remote jobs, but one might have slipped through.

Okay, I checked. It's listed as being remote, but the "client" is listed as being in a different state, which is confusing wording. Also I noticed that I can see rejections on Indeed, which is interesting. I'm not surprised, given my current work history, that I got rejected.

Also just got an email from work that I'm doing a 14 hour shift this upcoming Monday, which I'm thrilled about, especially since I'm still in recovery from Covid and I'm working 12 hours Saturday and Sunday. Just more motivation to find a new job, I suppose.