Twenty-five years

Posted on September 18, 2012 by Victoria

Fingers of Stone, Pool of Clouds

Twenty-five years ago, my parents and a few of their friends loaded themselves and us kids into several station wagons and headed north to the White Mountains.  The plan was to go hiking for a week.  It was a lot of hiking.  A lot of beautiful country – deep blue skies, vistas, rocks and streams and trees.  A lot of terrible freeze-dried food (and the beginning of my love for hot citrus drinks).

Near the end of the trip, we climbed the biggest mountain – Mount Washington (“Home of the World’s Worst Weather”).  On the way up, we passed the lake that inspired “Fingers of Stone, Pool of Clouds” and struggled up a rock field where my youngest sister nearly blew away.  Literally – someone else had to take her pack while other people held onto her.  On the way down, we stopped at the Madison Spring Hut.

At the top, however, we stopped at the Mount Washington Observatory.  After most of a week where we hadn’t seen more than a handful of people at a time or spent time inside four walls, it was amazing.  They had a cafeteria! And a gift shop!

So I bought some postcards.  Probably ten or a dozen of them.  I have no idea who I thought I might’ve send them to.

Everybody Loves A Postcard

On another trip, out to Arizona, I bought more postcards.  On another trip, out to the Caribbean, I bought more postcards.  And on another trip, and another trip – I bought more postcards.

I kept close friends’ mailing addresses in my wallet, next to to the postcard stamps, so I could mail them postcards at any time, even if I forgot to do so most of the time.  But every time I bought postcards to send from those trips, I bought extras.  I went to London, and asked my friends “who wants a postcard?”  I sent over forty postcards across the pond … and came home with extras.

I’ve got close to 150 postcards.

In truth, the extra postcards I buy are the ones I wish someone would send to me, because I love getting postcards in the mail.

Doesn’t everyone?

The Postcard Project

I’ve got close to 150 postcards in my desk.  Twenty-five years of travel, favorite art, memories, and museums.

A postcard lives for travel – to fly through the mail and end up on a fridge far away.

It’s time to set these postcards loose in the world.

The Postcard Project is coming soon.

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By the power vested in me, by myself

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Victoria

Once more, with self-awareness

Last week, I posted about the Certificate of Adulthood.  It’s shiny! It’s neat! You can give it to your friends!

But, y’know … part of the point of making it was about recognizing in ourselves that we are adults, no matter where we measure up on some arbitrary ideas of The One True Path of Adulthood.  While in some cases it may be helpful to have someone else support us by giving us a Certificate of Adulthood, sometimes we already know we are.

So, I made another one, this time self-certifying.

Because I can!

Certificate of Adulthood

There’s no rite of passage or graduation party for when you become a Real Adult – but you can get this spiffy certificate!

You can use this handy PDF to print out your own certificate to sign and put on your wall.  It’s totally free!  Because I Can.

You can also get this as stationary, on nice heavy linen paper, over at Zazzle right here.  Because that’s how I roll – too many options.

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The power of rituals

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Victoria

Something old, something new

So many things in our lives have (or are) rituals, most especially for the beginnings of things and the ends of things.  We have:

  • weddings
  • buying a house
  • funerals
  • Quinceañeras
  • retiring
  • having sex for the first time
  • divorces
  • bat mitzvahs
  • birthdays (especially big round ones and eighteen and twenty-one)
  • getting a drivers license
  • graduations
  • having children
  • and so on.

There’s one thing we don’t have a ritual for, though.  Becoming an adult.

A Real Adult.

Something missing, something blue

The question “When am I a Real Adult?” is one coming up over and over on the Internet – sometimes seriously and sometimes not (See Also: Hyperbole and a Half, “This is why I will never be an adult”).  For so many of us, life isn’t on that simple trajectory that history and stories tell us it should go on.

We’re past college or never could go or finished grad school or still in school. We’re married or not married or dating or never had a SO or not interested in one or divorced.  We’re living with our parents (maybe even if we’re married) or renting or maybe even owning our own house.  We’ve got small children of our own or maybe one or maybe none at all.  Whether we’re married or not.  We’ve got great jobs or none at all or working hand-to-mouth because the economy or reasons or working at a job we hate that pays the bills or working any job we can and it’s not enough.

And in all of this, we struggle to meet some kind of marker or milestone or ritual that puts rest to the little voice that says “you’re not really an adult yet”.  Because whatever we do, it’s not enough.

Something borrowed, something true

It sucks watching friends go through this struggle, where they just keep waiting for that outside approval.  So – give it to them.  With this:

There’s no rite of passage or graduation party for when you become a Real Adult – but you can get this spiffy certificate!

You can use this handy PDF to print out your own certificate and give it to people you love.  It’s totally free!  Because I Can.

You can also get this as stationary, on nice heavy linen paper, over at Zazzle right here.  Because that’s how I roll – too many options.

For those of you who are self-certifying in your adulthood, I’ll have a version up for you soon.  Stay tuned.  More ideas soon.

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Round Three Imminent

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Victoria

Where ideas come from

I don’t read a whole lot of big public blogs, twits, streams, or whatever the latest social media thing is called.  There’s only so much time and only so many spoons, and I don’t want to waste them.  At least, not on public blogs – there are so many other places for me to waste my time and spoons. The very few I do read, however, are full of awesome.

Some of them have absolutely fantastic commenters.  The kind of commenters that make up a community.  The kind of commenters who are supportive and genuine and open about themselves.  The kind of commenters who are pretty damn good with words and end up saying awesome things.

The kind of commenters I almost feel guilty borrowing ideas from.

The idea factory in my head

The thing is, I don’t use them as-is.  They go into the back of my head, and get tumbled around for a while with all the other ideas.  They get polished and remixed and wrapped up with images.  Sometimes they find callbacks from ideas I had or read about or heard years ago.

Not all of them come back out.  Some are still rattling around back there.  Sometimes one pops up to the front and says “Hey! I’m done! Let me out!”

By then, it’s usually filed off the serial numbers.  At least, that’s what I tell myself.

Hey!  I’m done!

I’ve had a couple of those ideas pop back out lately.  I got one mostly done last week, and have two more in the development stage.  One will probably end up with some variations that are still tumbling in my head.

I’m going to try something new – making some things available in a free way in addition to products on the POD sites.  There may even be a Kickstarter soon.  Maybe I’m feeling guilty about the origin of my ideas, maybe I want to be able to give something back to the communities I’m in, and maybe – just maybe – I think the ideas are cool enough that everyone should be able to get some.

Stay tuned, round three of What Am I Doing With This Site starts soon.

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Inspiration

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Victoria

1% Inspiration

There’s been a “meme” floating around lately in which a friend gives you some words as topics to write on (usually a paragraph or so each).  One of the words I’ve seen floating around is inspiration.

That word’s come to mind over and over this weekend as my partner and I were wandering art galleries (and drinking mojitos).  We’ve seen all sorts of things – from kitsch to paintings to photography to sculpture to comics.

Today, it occurred to me that possibly the most inspirational thing for me – as in, the thing that inspires me to get off my butt and create – is the art other people create.  I can’t help looking at it and thinking “you know, I could do that …”.  Sometimes the rest of the sentence is “… right now” and sometimes it’s “… if I spent years practicing and had a lot more equipment” and often it’s somewhere in the middle.

99% Perspiration

At the same time, I’ve been slowly working on my latest vectorization.  It’s been slow going, even though I am improving with my tools (Illustrator, if you’re wondering).  Longer, even, than the drawing goes. It’s not quite like I draw a line in Illustrator and it’s done and unmoveable, like a pen line is – I get to tweak and fix the lines (well, fuss with).  Here’s a snippet of what I’ve got so far, probably 5 hours in:

a small section of a spiral tree

A snippet for you

It’s kind of a labor of love (and practice).  Someday, maybe it’ll be art.

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A tree made of vectors

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Victoria

Previously, on Ninth Circle …

As I mentioned last Friday, I’ve finally seen a tutorial (youtube, long) that helped me find a way to vectorize line drawings that isn’t LiveTrace.  LiveTrace was, to put it charitably, a complete disaster.  Let’s just say that the Pen tool has finally become my friend.  Sort of.

Clearly, more practice is needful, but this is how it looks:

Sparse tree with two main trunks

The original sketch

A sparse, two-trunked tree made of VECTORS

A flat bitmap from the vector file

Not so bad, eh? Yes, it’s a bit sparser than the original. Partly because I wanted to be done, partly because I didn’t like some parts of the original. It’s a sort of derivative work. :)

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