Small Paintings, Old Selves
Old Hobbies
Another goal of last semester was to find my earlier hobbies and start them again. It didn't quite get there, but my solution was to find another analogous hobby.
My previous hobbies, in no order whatsoever:
- writing. I loved creative writing in the forms of poetry and short stories. I never had a daily habit of it, though. I also blogged; I had like four blogs at one point, including one which was an exercise in duel-blogging with a pal of mine.
- drawing. I used to go around with a poster-sized newsprint book, charcoal, and pencils, and I would do minute sketches of faces. I took life drawing classes. I never considered myself an artist, though.
- photography. I used to do black and white photography, with film, develop it myself, and chill in the darkroom as much as possible. It was so nice in there. So calm. And after that I used to use my DSLR a lot, even for paid gigs.
- ceramics. I used to love doing wheel stuff. I could do sculptural stuff, too. I really enjoyed raku firing when we did it in my classes.
- movies. My father taught English lit high school classes and didn't agree with me that movies were just the same as books. I watched so many movies I have no idea the number I've seen. I used to review them, too, on one of my websites.
- acting. I miss theater. I picked it up in university; a predominantly-female student body would take any boy for any play, and I was any boy. I wasn't great but I was good, and it was fun. I even had a job as an actor, which is a story for another time.
- reading. I don't read for pleasure any more, and the lack is an ache.
- languages. I can no longer view Spanish and Japanese as hobbies; they are more intrinsically- and extrinsically-motivated activities. I miss the days when my friends and I decided to (re)learn Latin for fun.
Maybe there are more I'm forgetting. Can I count travelling and road-tripping? Maybe others.
The past year and painting
I couldn't commit to restarting any of these hobbies, so I learned a new one.
At my university there are obligatory hours we have to do non-class things. One of them is Maker Conversation, where the teacher decides to do a hands-on project and students drop in and do it with them and talk in their L2 while doing it. I think it's fantastic for the students, but it's even better for me.
I chose to do watercolor and acrylic painting on ACEO-sized pieces of paper. If you don't know, ACEO stands for Art Cards, Editions and Originals, and it's exactly trading card dimensions, that is, exactly 2.5 × 3.5 inches (63.5 × 88.9 mm). Small enough to finish in an hour or less, legitimately made by many professional artists today as a way to get a small stream of income on reasonably-priced art.
In any case, I decided to do this for my Maker sessions because I'd never done painting before, it was close to the art hobbies I'd done before, and I wanted to teach myself how to do it while helping students. I called them Art Trading Cards instead of ACEOs. My only conditions were that they had to sign, date, and title it on the back, and they could either keep it or trade it with another artwork. It was great fun and I'm excited to do it this coming semester as well.
Here are a bunch of my own from this semester.
Presents
My kid likes Totoro and Ponyo, and he loves picking up chestnuts. So I made these.
And the first plush I gave my wife when we were dating was of Jiji the cat from Kiki's Delivery Service. So I made these for her.
Then for Mother's Day I thought about a dragon for my mother and a tiger for my wife, for their respective birth years.
This one wasn't really a present, but I made it for my students to show them how to illustrate a story from their own life. It's a firefly squid (hotaruika), a bioluminescent squid found off Toyama Bay in Japan. It was for a story from my own life... but that's for another post.
Inspired by Others
A student made Calcifer, the fire spirit in Howl's Moving Castle, so I was inspired to make one, too. This in turn made another student try it. The inspiration chain was cool.
We have some yellow sofas at our university, where spontaneous conversation is encouraged to happen in the L2 (English). A learning advisor came by and painted the yellow sofas. I then made them in blue, and he said it was like someone had photoshopped his painting. I thought that was a good compliment.
A frequent visitor to the makerspace started to make a crow, and I thought I wanted to make some crows in flight, so that's what inspired this. I wish it had more perspective, though.
Another frequent visitor came to me one day with some washi paper her grandmother had made by hand. I tried to put some sumi ink on it to reproduce a hydrangea (ajisai) I had taken a picture of that morning. It was too delicate and soaked up ink too quickly, but it's kind of nice the way it turned out.
These two were me practicing illustration for a children's book my wife imagined a few years ago. But her artist friend is probably going to do it for real. It'll be called Mermen Like Cereal.
Finally these fish were inspired by other students who wanted to make something related to summer. And I was thinking of my family's trip to an art aquarium in the previous winter. Anyway I liked how these turned out, though I wish the pretty whiter one had the personality of the fat one.
Personal Explorations
These do deserve their own stories, but maybe another time. They are just reminiscent of important, almost deadly, things that happened to me.
So that's it folks. I hope that inspires someone out there to pick up a brush and make a hobby come back to life.