All posts by Jen D

Around Town

Working on my art and on myself.

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Lately, I decided to work on my art skills. I obtained a book (later purchased for me by my fiancée Emma) called You Can Draw in 30 Days. I’m on the twenty-third day and I think it’s going well. I know some very talented artists who are giving advice from time to time.

I also realized that I will not be them, or any of the artists I appreciate, without practice and sending time working on it. So this is also part of doing that. It’s something I’ve wanted to do and I finally took the time to do it.

To keep myself accountable, I posted them first to my my DeviantArt account, then to my Facebook. Every day. To make sure I did it.

And I’m going to keep on doing it. And then more drawing and books about it, like Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and a few others.

I’m also reading a book called Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking which is teaching me more about myself, and what I need to do. I’ve lived in the fear of failure, of being seen as not good enough, in the place called Imposter Syndrome for a long time. This book, and actually trying, is helping.

I should do a post about Imposter Syndrome and what it’s been for me. Maybe that’ll be the next one.

What I'm Up To

Resume update!

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So I figured I’d mention that my resume has been updated, looking a bit spiffier, thanks to the assistance of the Reverend Doctor Barbara Ewton of The First Congregational Church of Verona, who my dearest Emma lives with, helps and who is giving us a lot of help in the wedding preparations! It’s down to one page, the fonts are updated (Segoe UI), and it’s really looking much better. I probably need to update the infographic that I’ve had going with my resume, as well, to make it a bit more punchy.

I hadn’t really thought about it in quite a while, but it really needed a revamp. Next step is to put it up on the job sites, get a push on my visibility.

Around Town

Recent activity summary for my current state of advancement

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  • Spending some time at Codecademy getting my JavaScript skills back up to par
  • Attending the Start Next Quarter seminar, in the hopes of returning to school
  • finding out there how much my math skills have devolved over the past decades, and how much I need to do to get them back in order
  • poking at Photoshop, to try to work out the pen tool some more (it’s a very weird tool)
  • trying to get a couple of things in order to handle some of the school return issues

So it’s been kind of a busy few days, but they bode well for my personal and professional advancement. Hope things are going well for you.

What I'm Up To

Dinnertime!

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So the people I live with have been having a tough kind of few days. I decided to make dinner, and looked around the house for what we had. Thankfully, we had stuff from a Costco run recently, so I just asked for someone to please get me some mozzarella cheese, and boom it appeared.

So I thawed three of the very large chicken breasts we got from Costco (the house brand), then got out one of the larger pans. Put some sauce in the bottom, put the chicken in. Put some sauce on top, then sliced up some of the mozzarella cheese (not a lot, and not very thick), and put it on top. Then some more sauce on top of the mozzarella, and sprinkled it with basil and oregano, and baked for about 25 minutes. The cheese got soft, the chicken got done (you’d probably want to cook longer if you used the chicken frozen, but I think that might mess things up a bit), and it went over well. Served it over noodles, a little bread on the side.

There were leftovers (my housemates couldn’t finish the chicken breasts, which are very very large, to be honest), so they have food for tomorrow.

This is how I spent my evening, cooking. It’s terribly calming, in a way, when you have to consider what you’re doing and how to do it, and focus on it.

Writing

Dinnertime!

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So the people I live with have been having a tough kind of few days. I decided to make dinner, and looked around the house for what we had. Thankfully, we had stuff from a Costco run recently, so I just asked for someone to please get me some mozzarella cheese, and boom it appeared.

So I thawed three of the very large chicken breasts we got from Costco (the house brand), then got out one of the larger pans. Put some sauce in the bottom, put the chicken in. Put some sauce on top, then sliced up some of the mozzarella cheese (not a lot, and not very thick), and put it on top. Then some more sauce on top of the mozzarella, and sprinkled it with basil and oregano, and baked for about 25 minutes. The cheese got soft, the chicken got done (you’d probably want to cook longer if you used the chicken frozen, but I think that might mess things up a bit), and it went over well. Served it over noodles, a little bread on the side.

There were leftovers (my housemates couldn’t finish the chicken breasts, which are very very large, to be honest), so they have food for tomorrow.

This is how I spent my evening, cooking. It’s terribly calming, in a way, when you have to consider what you’re doing and how to do it, and focus on it.

Reviews

Tonight's outing.

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Tonight, I headed to the Seattle Photoshop User Group Meetup where they were discussing Lightroom and things to do with it. We got some tutoring and discussion from Colin Smith, who runs Photoshop Cafe (as of this writing there’s some issue with it, and Google’s blocking it, but it’s a fine, solid place), which was pretty interesting.

There were some technical issues, and apparently some comprehension issues (people apparently not hearing each other very well on both sides), but it was a pretty solid night of tutorials and showing how things work, and how the Adobe ecosystem works as well.

So yeh, that was good.

What I'm Up To

The plans for this week…

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Tuesday is the Lightroom panel at the Seattle Area Photoshop User Group meetup, which has the promise to be very interesting. (I’ve played with LR4 a little, and should get to know it better soon.)

This past weekend I watched the movie “Helvetica”, which some people might think would be terribly boring, but if you have an interest in these sorts of things is actually very interesting – looking into how the font developed and spread, along with interviews with fontmakers, graphic designers, and going into why there’s a number of designers who dislike Helvetica’s ubiquity, and why. Really, very interesting (at least for me). I need to watch the other films in the sort of trilogy, “Objectified” (about industrial design and designers) and “Urbanized” (about urban design, including architecture). The third isn’t quite my thing right now, but knowing about it might be pretty useful. (And all three are on Netflix, so that’s helpful!)

Thinking I should ramp up my drawing, too. Just because I still am pretty terrible at it, but there’s only one way to get better. I may just not have the eye for life drawing, but some other kind may suit me.

Around Town

This week's plan:

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Monday: , Patricia Ridenour – The Creative Process: Finding Your Own Approach. Probably going to head out early, take some pictures along the way, then use the Air to make a portfolio kind of thing. Just to make something that isn’t my colored linear.

Tuesday: the Adobe InDesign User’s Group (sorry, site’s not working, no link), where the discussion is about typography and fonts.

Next Tuesday is the Adobe Photoshop User’s Group, which is about Lightroom.

Networking, learning, trying. And still sending out at least 5 job apps a day.

The Tuesday after that is the Start Next Quarter seminar at Seattle Central Community College, where I hope to have a better chance of returning to school.

So. Plans.

(Some of this may be familiar to people, but I’m summarizing it all here, both to tell people and to remind myself.)