Tag: digital art

Witness the Small Life – Dirty Laundry

Mia Lambert Leave a comment

Life is a never ending cycle of soiled clothing. Rinse and repeat, dry on medium. I’ve felt this feeling times one hundred these last couple of days and the dirty clothes pile only gets higher and higher.

My visit to the laundromat this past weekend (huzzah to the broken washer) reminded me of the simple pleasures of waiting around. As soon as my roommate and I stepped into the jewel blue toned room lined with walls of washing machines I felt an air of productive stagnancy. There were people mingling about, caring for their jeans or tossing their clothes into the next cycle, and also people perched in various chairs of various types silent but patient. Crosswords and movies and games and naps were all around us as the sounds of tumble cycles created an atmospheric ambience. As soon as I deposited my handful of quarters and heard the water rush into the machine, I felt the room bring me to a lull. Although I had yet a hundred more things to do that day, there was a peace brought over me that I couldn’t quite shake. The very act of doing chores is a necessary nuisance, as we all know, and there’s something about the shared time taken with everyone at the laundromat that makes doing laundry feel a little less lonesome. People coming in with their hampers and baskets all come for different reasons, carrying different things. And yet we all spend the same time waiting around for the machine to release our socks and sheets until we come back to do it all again. There’s a comfort in sharing uneventful time with strangers that feels right in the laundromat.

To take into our next week:

Ins: Pomegranate tea, trout, violins, of Montreal (always), semisweet chocolate chips, goofy looking shoes, texting people about little things, chicken salad with grapes, wrist stretches.

Outs: Forgotten leftovers, not taking responsibility for your actions, forehead pimples, rooms that smell like feet, not turning off the lights behind you, frost in the morning, soggy noodles.

To everyone out there hoarding your quarters for the laundry fund: I understand. I hope for even more quarters to come your way, and for everyone else who is lucky enough to have an accessible (and functional) washing machine I hope you’re able to relish every quarter you receive. If you’re able to, take the time to sit around while you do your laundry. Find a friend. Share a story. Do a crossword. Count every quarter you have and do some math. There’s joy in mundanity and the laundromat is the perfect place for it.

Witness the Small Life – Cold Comforts

Mia Lambert Leave a comment

We’ve made it… the bend-and-COLD!-snap!!! Do we ever really feel alive unless we can’t feel our eye sockets anymore?

In honor of the frozen weather, I’ve been appreciating all the accessories and layers in my life that keep me functioning from sun up to way past sun down. As someone born and raised in the flux of deadly winters and chilling winds I’ve always had a plethora of hats, gloves, scarves (you name them) every since I was a kid. I think most people can look back to their favorite pom-pom hat or various kitten mittens in fond childhood memories traipsing around in the snow and sledding over death-defying hills. Although I’ve lived in the cold for the majority of my life, I can never ever get used to it. I blame it on my eczema or my penitent for tank tops or anything else I can use as an excuse but no matter what I do in a mere 2 minutes my teeth are chattering all the way home. Because of this, I’ve been giving extra thanks to the scarves that swaddle me and the hats that flatten my bangs a little too much. Each of them carry a piece of a past self or a loved one who cared enough about my warmth to make or gift me a little something that could carry comfort through a chilly walk home. Fabrics found by my roommate’s mother, hats passed down to me from my boyfriend’s family, and even skills shared to me from my grandma and cousin are woven into each hat, scarf, and mitten I wear. The next time I’m outside (which will be far too soon) I can feel a little bit warmer knowing the love and care I have with me as I scurry through yet another icy wind storm.

To take into our next week:

Ins: Chamomile tea (always), muted purples, actually interesting text books, aloe vera, hair pomade, perfectly fitted hoodies, overalls, a solid hug.

Outs: Nails that are too long, scorching soup, weird hoods on winter jackets, gel eye masks, ignoring when your feet are too sore, eating one too many anchovies straight out of the tin.

I hope everyone is bundling up in their favorite mittens and gators and earmuffs galore as we all try to survive these next few days of tundra. I task you all with finding and appreciating one another’s fanciful winter accessories as there are too few days when we get to wear all of them all at once!

Witness the Small Life – I-I-Icon

Mia Lambert Leave a comment

“Patience is a virtue” -Me (probably)

Is it just time going fast or do I not have my glasses on, cuz everything sure is a blur right now. Hour after hour I go to class, I do work; I get out of class, I do work; I go to sleep, I dream of work. Everything flashes by in a haze and I continue to work. Call me Sisyphus because this boulder just keeps rolling down!

Although everything happens so fast around me, my spare time has been filled with doodling on Photoshop with my laptop trackpad (my new best friend!). Lulls in lectures and commutes on buses have regained a sense of whimsy and color when I’m able to fill it with goofy little stars and apples. It’s been almost meditative this week: pulling up a blank canvas and going with what my heart tells me. Recently, I’ve dedicated these doodles to becoming new icons for my desktop (shout out to the Gargoyle for being my first muse). The doodles on the page are my shiny new folders that live amongst the picture of a double rainbow over my camp’s shimmering Half Moon lake. Through drawing these doodles, and drawing with my trackpad in general, I’ve found myself to grow a new form of patience and mindfulness with art-making. It brings me back to my early days of digital art when I could only use my trackpad to make various drawings of colorful My Little Pony characters. Nowadays I have a plethora of resources that would make my 11 year old brain pop! Trackpad drawing has brought me back to my roots, while also forcing me to learn how to draw again in a kind of way. There’s a certain kind of method and resilience needed to constantly press undo and redraw the same line over and over again until it reaches its best potential. There’s also a kind of acceptance that is required to come to terms with when something doesn’t come out exactly how you envisioned but it still doesn’t look bad. It’s similar to printmaking in that way, the apple of my eye lately, to where you learn to roll with the punches and how to take something both simple and meticulous to new heights through experimentation in tandem with trial and error. I feel more connected to my creative process in my trackpad doodling and more aware of what I’m making, how I’m doing it, and how I can play with ideas of shape and form. These doodles are simple, yes, but they bring out a joy in doodling that I’ve been missing lately. I encourage everyone to pull up their drawing program of choice, stretch your fingers, and play around with making fun little characters and creatures. Even if it looks like a hot mess of lines and color, keep playing around with it! Find what works, find what absolutely doesn’t work, and enjoy the process as you do so. Exploration, experimentation, and process are so important to art making, and also life living, so try it out and see what joy it sparks in you.

To take into our next week:

Ins: Simple syrup, my bright orange hoodie, copper and brass, little dogs, limes, tomatoes, bunny slippers, reaching out.

Outs: Timezones, cracked heels, freezing rain, the crust on a milk jug, the smell of room temp coffee, hit snooze a little tooooo long, sleeping with only one pillow.

Enjoy the last full week until break (as much as one is physically able) and appreciate that trackpad!

Industrious Illustrating #54 – Progress Pictures

Robin Leave a comment

This week’s column is a day late because I’ve been tabling at Isshocon, a new 3-day anime convention located near us in Novi Michigan! So far it’s been going fairly well considering that it only has fewer than two thousand attendees — I’ve made more money than at Motor City Comic Con Fall for a much less expensive table, though my work is much better geared to anime conventions. Here’s a picture of my table:

The main topic of this week’s column is going over some work-in-progress pictures from my recent drawings, which has been on my mind because the application for Fanime Con (a large anime convention that happens in San Jose, CA on Memorial Day weekend) required a signed work-in-progress picture to weed out AI “artists” and art thieves. I’m in a group chat with a bunch of other artists who sell at conventions and seeing everyone else’s progress pictures was really interesting for seeing how other artists work. I won’t use the work-in-progress images I used for my Fanime application to keep it private, so I’ll instead go over a chibi mecha design I drew last year with WIP screenshots I took during the process.

My typical digital working process starts with “blocking” out the drawing as a color sketch, working more on getting the general idea down rather than having perfect proportions or coloring.

As I work on this base colors sketch, I freely use the lasso tool and eraser to resize and edit parts I don’t like in addition to working more with the default oil paint brush tool I use for my work.

Once I have a baseline I’m happy with, I start doing lineart from the top to the bottom on another layer, working more on the rendering and polish as the lineart solidifies what I want the drawing to look like.

Compare with my finished drawing:

Would you guys like to see me do more breakdowns/work-in-progress sequences of my drawings in the future? I’d love to know if you do!

Industrious Illustrating #52 – Experimentation

Robin Leave a comment

Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! It’s now 2024, which opens up a lot of new possibilities and directions for the rest of the year. That means I want to highlight a few drawings I’ve made recently that are more experimental or different from what I usually draw.

This was more of a graphic design-esque drawing I made for some zippered coin purses that I ordered from a supplier during a sale depicting a plastic file, two different types of plastic nippers, and two hobby markers that would all be common tools for building model kits. I wanted to go for something simple yet bold, as my usual style focuses a lot on details and elaborate painting.

This, meanwhile, is a quick digital doodle of the cell towers disguised as palm trees that I saw all around the Los Angeles and Orange County areas when I was visiting family there over winter break. I wanted to convey the feeling of driving home after a long day and realizing something is slightly off with one of the freakishly tall palm trees lining the freeway. I also wanted to free myself from needing every drawing to be highly polished, so I set myself a time limit on this one and stopped drawing once the 20 minutes was up.

That’s all for this week, but I want to wrap things up with a quick question. What ways have you personally experimented with your artwork recently — and if not, how will you experiment with it in the future? I’d love to hear about it!

Mixed on Campus #16 – Alice Conner

Alice Conner Leave a comment

Name: Alice Conner
Mix: Japanese & White-American
Major & Year: Industrial Engineering; Junior

Q: How has being mixed affected your campus experience?

A: My racial identity and the racial/ethnic identities of other mixed people are often scrutinized by others. People choose to accept or not accept my racial identity based on when it is convenient for them. Constant scrutiny on my appearance and the validity of my experiences is alienating, exhausting, and psychologically distressing. How you look is not a choice. Before joining the student organization Mixed@Michigan, I did not have the vocabulary to defend myself and other mixed people. People did not listen to me until I educated myself, even if all I learned were the “proper” words to explain what I already knew was true. Mixed people should be heard even without statistics and well-spoken words.

Q: What do you wish more people knew about the mixed experience?

A: I believe a lot of the prejudice towards mixed people is a result of ignorance, which is why it’s so important for mixed people to be able to speak about their own struggles and experiences. I want people to understand that the mixed experience is a real lived experience and not just an interesting debate topic. I’m tired of hearing arguments on whether or not a mixed person is allowed to identify with or represent a specific racial identity based on the percentages of their racial makeup and opinions on what the person looks like. How a mixed person is perceived by others will depend on the mixed person, the person perceiving them, AND on the context of the situation. In the end, monoracial people do not have authority on how a mixed person chooses to identify.

+1: Mixed people are not buffers between different racial categories. People should not be measured and judged based on their perceived proximity to whiteness. Oppression is often discussed in binary terms (a person either experiences it or they don’t), but reality is not so easily categorized. Mixed people are used to this idea– they are good at tolerating contradiction and ambiguity.

Q: What is your proudest moment?

A: I’m very proud of this project. What I wanted to do with Mixed on Campus was provide other mixed people with the opportunity to speak up about things they might not have been able to before. I’m very grateful for all the responses I’ve received and the opportunity to use my platform to provide a voice to the mixed community at this university. Mixed@Michigan is a club in which we are bonded not through a specific racial or ethnic identity but because we have all experienced what it means to not fit into the monoracial paradigm of racial purity that society expects. We are able to support each other and provide a safe space free of judgement and questioning. There is so much diversity in experiences within the mixed identity and I wanted to be able to show that by providing other mixed people with the chance to tell their story.

Mixed on Campus was inspired by the Humans of New York project. The purpose of Mixed on Campus is to give a voice to this university’s mixed community and shed light on its members. Being mixed means to be multiracial, multiethnic, and/or a transnational adoptee. Through Mixed on Campus, mixed students have the opportunity to have their portrait drawn and share their experiences!