Artists Have Layers

Like onions, or parfaits. I was thinking about this last night as I downloaded my camera for the first time since last week, and realized that as an artist, I sort of have a split personality. Or maybe it’s just that I’m a butterfly who won’t stay on one subject for more than about 10 nanoseconds before I get bored. For whatever reason, my photos were all over the place. There was one unifying theme: Everything I’d captured was ephemeral.

The art I do for work is fleeting, it’s there for a few moments, or on the older and more careful people, a few hours. I’ve had folks tell me they took home a balloon animal and put it on a shelf, where it slowly shrank for a month until it was gone. Even without popping, a balloon won’t last forever.

Balloon Ray Gun
The First Reader agreed to model for me… and then had me in stitches with his antics.

I’d learned the new design from a Hungarian twister, Gergo Csatai, and if you want to try it, you can go here.

Balloon Ray gun
Someone pointed out I ought to photoshop the laser tip coming out his other ear!

The faces I paint last even less than the balloons do. I tend not to paint on the mouth and chin, or the child is right back to ‘have it fixed’ after the eat and drink. Besides, masks work well.

face painting
Monster Mask

 

But the other thing I took pictures of yesterday was something I really wasn’t happy to see. I was hoping, on my first real day of Spring Break, to take a walk and find flowers. Instead, I heard the tickety-tick of ice on my window. I was fascinated when I ran out to take pictures, it was spherical, with little bubbles inside the iceballs.

Ice pellet
Tiny iceballs, with bubbles inside. I wonder how that happens?
Some were round, others not quite.
Some were round, others not quite.

Comments

9 responses to “Artists Have Layers”

  1. Just like artists, onions, parfaits, and Shreck, paths to a server have layers. And I know that you said that your new server person told you that the reason your page was loading slowly wasn’t their fault, but I’m gonna call shenanigans on that.
    I pinged cedarwrites and madgeniusclub, and I got 72 ms for you and 32 ms for MGC. Then I ran a trace route (it’s tracert in Windows systems) and it appears to me that you have one single bottleneck in your data stream.
    And that absolutely exhausts my technical know how. If you have a residential guru, if you think you can get an honest answer from your new host, then I would go there. If not, I KNOW some of the Mad Genius fans have wicked IT skills, and they would be able to tell you if my small attempts at looking for the reason cedarwrites is loading so slowly are on target. They may not be; as I said, my technical know-how is absolutely exhausted.
    But the balloons are cute, the mask is scary, and I want the little ice balls in my freezer so I can throw them at my kids.

    1. Madgeniusclub isn’t my site – my sites are this one, cedarlili.com, and facepaintoh.com (which redirects to facepaintnh.com). I am currently waiting to see what happens with my current hosting provider, but I will likely migrate to a different host soon, a friend has reliable services he’s offering me.

      Unfortunately, I’m the resident guru here at this house, and I’m tapped out for what’s going on. My provider is telling me they are having latency problems, and something was wrong with my cPanel (which seems to have been fixed, I was unable to access the site at all for half of yesterday).

      1. Yup, I just included the ping and traceroute to MGC for comparison purposes. I pinged all of your websites and got the same results. The good news is that it isn’t because your site is graphics-intensive, because you put up some GREAT pictures on your site.
        Tracert identifies godaddy.com as the bottleneck.

        And I will now get my nose out of your business, with apologies for intrusion….

        1. Well, that is VERY helpful. Godaddy finally admitted yesterday that they were having problems, before that they were telling me it was my site configuration. And it is very good to hear about the graphics, I like my pictures. 🙂

  2. I might humbly suggest my host as a dynamite good-guy: DreamHost.

    Layers: I hear ya. I just did a pass system for the Moody Blues in the style of Peter Max (how bizarre). I’m teaching myself chalkboard signage and Zentangle as illustration techniques and design aesthetics, and am contemplating building myself a drafting table. Seems that the demands on an artist and our independence in the market require us to learn a lot of stuff on the fly and wear many hats.

    it feels strange coming to your site via LinkedIn.

    M

    1. Dreamhost was one I’m contemplating, yes.

      And my wearing many hats wasn’t by intention. Unless you count that I like hats. And I like learning. But mostly I think it’s that I have the attention span of a gnat most of the time.

      Why strange? I know the site is being odd… is that the only place that’s showing up?

  3. The strange thing is — I suspect — how I look at LinkedIn, as associated more strongly with my day job and the music industry than with writing and my friends outside-of-work. Finding YOU there feels as though one of us got lost — in a good sense, as in you explore to find your way back to more familiar locales. Or something. Have I stopped making sense? Did I ever?

    M

    1. I think I understand. We’re used to living in a Venn diagram, with rare overlaps, and when we stumble into those intersections it’s like walking through the veil into a parallel world. You feel just a little off, but it’s all familiar still.

  4. That.

    It seems a one-word comment with an initial for a signature is too short for your WordPress installation. So, let’s try this one.

    M