creative work

Works in progress

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I’ve hit the ‘too many things, not enough time’ issue again this week so haven’t got a huge amount of thoughtful things to write about. We had a lunch out today and there basically wants anything vegan, or vegetarian on the menu that wasn’t full of gluten or cheese heavy. We ended up eating meat. And we didn’t really really enjoy it. This time last year we were total carnivores so that’s quite a change. I think when Veganury ends we’ll be staying mostly vegan, which is a decision I feel pretty happy with. So that news I guess.

I’ve been picking up some of my bigger projects and trying to push them a bit more. I’ve been working on some images for a documentary film I have been working on for a while. Some sections of the doc will take the form of animated sequences set to audio narration. I’ve been working with my papercut work in these animations. It sucks up time as each thing has to be drawn and cut multiple times, but I like effect and I think in the long (very long!) run it will be worth it.

Spending my time twice 

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I’ve not really had much time this weekend to blog. In my mind I’ve managed to spend my time twice. I don’t know how many people have the same problem but this is a frequent problem of mine. This weekend I planned to go for a walk, go to the cinema, see some friends, work on my documentary, and see some friends for lunch. And blog. And work on some other creative projects. And cook some elaborate dinners. We actually managed to tick quite a few of these off the list, but was never going to get all of these done. So, short blog today.
A few years ago I found that milk didn’t agree with me and so I started cutting it out. I don’t eat a huge amount of sugary or sweet things, but one of the things I did quite miss was rice pudding. Turns out that Vegans already had this covered. Coconut milk rice pudding for supper this eve. 

New project in progress: Poor Boyfriend

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My boyfriend and I have had this quite long running joke now that he should start a blog called ‘poor boyfriend’ because he does a lot of things that free up time and space for me to be creative, like chunks of the house work. I’m probably a bit challenging to live with, given the old artistic temperament and my love of indulging in childish and playful things at times that aren’t always that well chosen. He’s also super tidy and I’m…. not. The concept was a kind of diary from the point of view of a rather put upon boyfriend living with a ‘creative’. I really like the idea and think it could be turned in a little series of animations, which would also give me a reason to get familiar with another aspect of the creative softwear I am paying a subscription fee for and totally underusing at the moment. I’m thinking a little series on Vimeo or YouTube could work.

Here’s a little ‘poor boyfriend’ sketch for now. I’ve chosen a super simple style to make it easy to play around with the idea for a while before I settle on things like style, tone and mood. 

New Year Plans

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It’s the beginning of a New Year, I hope everyone is feeling positive about making this year kinder and more inclusive than the last. I don’t tend to make New Year Resolutions as I don’t feel like they work particularly well for me. I tend to see my self as a work in progress, and in need of far more regular check-ins and course corrections. However it is a good time to take stock of what was achieved in the previous year and make some loose (and less loose) plans for what to do in the one to come. On Christmas day I wrote this post about actively practicing kindness and holding onto liberal, pro-diversity principles in the face of what feel like grim times. I feel like this is a pretty important perspective to go into the new year with.

Here in the Magpie nest we have a few other immediate plans:

Dry January – we did this last year (and did dry October too) and found that we felt much better for giving our bodies a bit of a rest from the sauce, so we are going to be doing that again this year. On both occasions we found that our wallets emerged in a better state too, so that’s a bonus.

Money – we are going to try to save up a bit of a financial cushion this year as we feel that we may want to start thinking about making some lifestyle changes of the ‘work less, live leaner’ variety pretty soon – it will be good to go into those with a bit of cash behind us as we work things out. I’ve been inspired by reading some of the posts at Frugal Health for Life in approaching this endeavour and look forwards to reading more of these.

Veganuary – We’ll be trying to go vegan for January. This morning we had our first vegan breakfast of home made baked beans and avocado on toast. It was yummy. I have to be a bit careful about eating well as I have a health condition that could lead to diabetes (I don’t want that), and my partner is gluten intolerant, so there will be some nutritional kinks to work out as we go along. I’m not sure how well we’ll manage this one, and imagine that after January we may well settle into something that looks a lot more like vegetarianism, but my partner and I are doing this together so it feels like a fun project to work on.

We’ve been watching quite a few documentaries on a range of things ranging from global warming, to animal cruelty, to many health issues, to the nutrient poor foods that have become dominant in the market, to antibiotic resistance. When you look at major contributors to all of these problems, the road seems inevitably to lead back to industrialised, factory style farming of animals. We’ve hit the point where we have a stack of reasons to give veganism a try, and only our own laziness as a reason not too. We generally cook lots of vegetarian meals from scratch anyway, so I feel we’ll get on ok with that side of things. We used to eat lots of bacon, and couldn’t imagine not having a bacon breakfast on a Saturday, but we’ve not really eaten that way for a while, and haven’t really missed it. We have been phasing out other types of meat and lots of forms of dairy for some time, but I think I may struggle with not having eggs. I really like eggs. Eggs could be a problem.

Building a creative business – I’m still exploring ideas for this. I’ve not even begun to think about starting trading yet, but I think I have some good ideas now for a set of art pieces, and may be in a position launch something later this year. Until then I’ll continue to highlight any useful resources that I stumble across on my route there.

Other creative stuff – I have a play and a film to finish, and ideas for another play, and another film (that relate to each other) to get going with. And a little animated series. Plus some art. Lots and lots of art. Oh gosh, what a list.

Mental health – I’m going to reduce my hours in the day job in April, I’m really looking forwards to having a whole day a week to myself to work on creative stuff. Let’s see how that works out.

That’s about it for a round up, but who knows what other opportunities may crop up as we go along. What New Year Plans do you have?

Christmas creativity: Something pretty to do with those empty booze bottles

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I hope everyone is enjoying some down time over the festive season. We’ve had some family staying. They left today and we have a night off this eve before another round of family arrives tomorrow. I’ve not had much time for creative things but was able, in an idle moment, to put these beauties together. This is super easy so I wanted to share this with any one who had been working up a recycling mountain, which you can now confidently rename as a ‘stockpile of craft materials’.

So you will need:

Empty glass bottles or jars – you want to wash these out and let them dry thoroughly before you do this. Keep the corks, screw lids or wire cages. You’all need those later.

A small/ light weight string of fairy lights. I have been using theses Starry String Lights from YIHONG. I really like these and had them in the house because I bought a load in for a completely different project. They are a 2m strand of tiny LED lights sealed in blobs of glue on delicate copper wire, attached to a battery pack fitted with an on-off switch. The sales info suggests the batteries should last for 72 hours. I’ve not had these going for that long to test that out yet but we’ve had them on for most of Christmas and they are still very bright. The batteries are replaceable. These lights are designed to be worn in clothing so don’t use a high enough voltage to cause a shock. I would avoid using fairy lights that draw power for the mains – I’m not at all sure how you would use these safely with bottles that have metal caps or lids.

What you do:

You want to uncoil the length of the fairy lights and then feed them slowly into your glass bottle. I’ve deliberately let mine coil up in a very uneven pattern as I think this looks quite magical but I’m sure that the more ingenious among you could find a way to get them to sit evenly in the glass. I’ve been really lazy about capping these off, and have just pushed the tops back in or on over the wire – mine stick out a bit. For a better result you probably want to slice a channel down one side of the cork for the wire to sit in before you push the cork back in. You can also screw screw caps over the fine copper wire if you run it down the outside of the neck of the bottle. And that’s it. Done. 

Happy Christmas. 

Musings on Mark Kermode

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I’ve not felt like writing so much in that last few weeks, I’m not entirely sure what that’s about, but I’ve been doing making type things so maybe I only have so much creative energy. But I have just started reading ‘The Good, the bad, and the multiplex’, by Mark Kermode. It’s a book that has been out for some time. It’s been lurking in my kindle library for some time. I’m not about to do a book review. I have yet to make it past Chapter 2, so have little substance to base any review on. But I am enjoying it so far, and wanted to share a musing prompted by the book.

It’s a little ranty for my tastes. I like to see a skilfully executed rant, and in his film review work he is known for some excellent rant work. But in his description of what sounded like an excruciatingly irritating visit to a multiplex cinema, I feel he may have reached peak rant. That said, the book by very elegantly explaining the role and the importance of the skill the projectionist in the art of cinema, and I liked this beginning very much.

The projectionist, he explains, is a vital part of the art work, not some who presses play on the DVD player. He then goes on to explain how the profession is slowly being wiped out across the UK by the introduction of digital technologies coupled by the arrogance of large multiplex cinema managers. Cinemas are slowly bleeding their projectionists. If you have ever had the experience of sitting in a cinema where half of the picture is slipping off the screen, or freezes half way through the movie never to start again, this is probably the explanation. You have been denied the proper care and attention of a projectionist.

He goes to to begin talking about how the desire to make money has taken over from the desire to make good art in much of commercial cinema. For me this brings together a few themes that have been floating around the news lately. One is the increasing likelihood that robots and machines will replace more and more humans in jobs, and the second is the idea that the thing that is human about artistic work is somehow unimportant, and should be subservient to the thing that makes money (any thing that makes money). As humans we are fundamentally wired to be social, and to connect with other people and understand them. At a basic biological level, we like there to be other humans about, doing things and helping each other. As a species, much of what we are about concerns this. This helping, this tending to each other’s needs is an evolutionary, competitive advantage – we tend to die if we have to do it all on our own. That there is no longer a projectionist taking care of each screen in the cinema may save the cinema money, but it costs them in skill and expertise. With the projectionist disappears it costs the cinema that very human ability to care for and respect the audience.

If going to the cinema begins to feel less special than snuggling up with a buddy on the sofa with a pizza and Netflix, why go to the cinema at all? You only pay (a rather large chunk of cash) to go to the cinema because it is meant to be a special experience. The stripping out of the things that feel human may make things seem more efficient, but it may also make audiences forget why they should show up and pay up in the first place.

 

Business for bohemians by Tom Hodgkinson

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One of my guilty pleasures over the years has been reading the books of Tom Hodgkinson. I read both How to be Idle, and How to be free while I was studying and working in a relatively competitive environment and found them to offer both light relief and an idea about a different way of living. I may have not quite got to that different way of living, but the idea persists for me, a number of years later.

I was pretty intrigued to know what he would do with a ‘how to’ book of business. The core theme of Hodgkinson’s body of work has concerned working out how to do not very much at all, and how to ensure that what you do do is enjoyable and mind enriching. Tax returns and VAT aren’t either of those things, so I imagined it would be a stretch to continue in the same light style.

Business for Bohemians is actually a pretty sensible, pretty amusing book about starting a creative business. The book is in part an instruction manual, with very sensible advise about writing a business plan and keeping accurate and up to date accounts. But in the main it is memoir of his own attempts to publish a magazine, run a coffee shop/book shop, organise cultural events and run online courses. His style is self deprecating and aside from the numerous name drops, funny. He is generously candid about all of the mistakes he made along the way. The message, I think, is something along the lines of ‘look at the mistakes I made so that you don’t have too’. Anyone looking for serious advice about accounting, tax and VAT should look for something far more specialist. As a guide to beginners thinking about what it is they are trying to do, and what they are trying not to do, it is I think very helpful.

Putting things down, picking things up, starting again

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been making a slow return to working on two projects that I started last year. At the beginning of last year I took a course in documentary film making and I took two courses in play writing. I’ve been interested in the process of documentary filmmaking for quite a while. A lot of my formal training has been in research methods and in the social sciences, and have some frustrations with the way that academic work gets communicated (or doesn’t) to the wider world. At the time this seemed like a good thing to understand a bit better, and a good fit with my existing skill set. I took the play writing course because I was stuck with a novel I was working with and thought it would be helpful to look at it from a different approach. But then I got hooked and decided I had to write a play, obviously. And I did, sort of.

But there were problems. The film school that I enrolled with decided to change the dates of their course without really giving me much notice and I ended up trying to do both things at the same time, and have a full time job too. It worked for a while, but then I went through some crappy nonsense in my private life, and started a new job, and it didn’t really work anymore. Up until the beginning of September I’d not really worked on either project for 12 months and was not feeling great about that as I really wanted to finish something well enough to send it ‘somewhere’. I also have a film maker in my family, my dad, who kept gently reminding me that I should, ‘Work on my film’. And he’s right, I should be working on my film, because I got lucky with a really good story and could do something really interesting with it.

It took me a bit of time to work out what the blocks were on continuing with both projects, but I think I have a list now.

  1. Space – I was living with a friend of mine at the time and didn’t really have a huge amount of space. I’m kind of messy, and didn’t want to leave my mess all over his flat, so I ended up with a kind of squashed psychological space to work in.
  2. Teaching style – on the doc film course at least I felt a little as though I didn’t gel with the tutor. I think she’s great film maker, and loved talking to her about films. But she’s very much from the observational documentary style school. I wanted to work with other artistic things, like animation and set up pieces of film. I think I felt at the time that I wasn’t really able to make ‘my’ film so I did’t make a film at all.
  3. Time and Timing – the timing was bad, I was sad and exhausted. I was still getting used to living in London having moved from Cardiff, which is a much smaller, calmer city and one that I knew very well. I did’t have time to feed my creative self and that meant I couldn’t really put the work in that was needed.
  4. The fraud police – would anything I produced actually be as good as I thought they could be?

Above are some images I finished off yesterday that will part of an animation for the documentary. I’ve been writing new scenes for the play. So what’s happened? What has changed? I can think of two things that have really worked in ‘unblocking’. The first is that I cut out a load of things that I was doing, including socialising with some people that kind of drained me a bit, and carved out that time for doing creative stuff. Small, achievable projects first, at which step by step led me back to the ‘big’ ones. I’ve also come to realise that part of my creative process involves giving projects long ‘down’ periods as this enables me to come back to them with a new perspective. So not working on either project for a year doesn’t feel un-natural with hindsight.

Second, and I think this is the big one. I moved in with the boyfriend. We got a place together that gives me more space, and that helps. But I think the real key here is him. He’s constantly and consistently supportive, and frequently cooks the dinner so I can get on with something else. He’s such a tidy organised person, and yet he tolerates my creative mess everywhere, and he does it all with humour. He’s always happy to listen to my ideas, and talk to me about that, while never once said ‘you should do this’. I think that’s enabled me to regain some creative confidence. I had been told in the past that picking the right partner was really important, and I had been a bit dismissive of that, because at the time I was single and thought I could do it all myself. Turns out that advice was pretty good advice, after all.

You are here by Jenny Lawson

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So being ill can have an up side sometimes. I’ve been unwell with some awful head cold [wo]man flu and haven’t been able to do much work. I’ve been mostly sleeping, drinking honey and lemon, and watching telly, with a little web surfing on the side. The web surfing turned out to be a little too exciting for my ill brain and I’ve had to wait a few days before I was able to form a coherent thought about this.

I came across Jenny Lawson’s memoir Furiously Happy, at least a year ago through one of those Amazon ‘and you may also like’ recommendations.  I loved it, having been bought up in the country with my own bunch of eccentrics, and from there I went on to read Let’s pretend this never happened, which I also loved. These books are very funny, and great books for anyone who has ever wanted to hide under a table at a public event (or regularly finds themselves taking a ‘time out’ in the office loo). Earlier in the week I wasn’t very well and couldn’t do much more than sit in bed and surf the internet. I spent some of that time diving into the Bloggess website and it was the first time I was able to have a really good read about her colouring book You are Here.

I really think this post is worth looking at for anyone who uses arty creative things as part of their efforts to manage mental health. Jenny Lawson writes vividly about her own arts practice (I have no idea if she would call it that, but her drawings are works of art) continually using drawing and doodling as a way of channeling negative or distressing thoughts or emotions. She is releasing a colouring book based on these drawings, alongside some short stories that work with the drawings, and what a beautiful thing it is (at least it looks that way from the pictures – the physical book won’t be available for a few months). Just go and look at the sweeping curves and swirling lines of some of these drawings. I really love how these drawings are intricate, and delicate, effective in evoking fairytale and myth. Somehow exciting and soothing to look at at the same time. I’ve ordered my copy, and I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying getting creative with this set of drawings. Or just owning them. Anyway, go and look. Now.