Hi there! I’m hoping that today finds you all well. I’m good. Doing some laundry, getting ready to go out for dinner with Emma.

And that means getting dressed and ready. For me, that’s always been a thing somewhat fraught with peril. Click to continue reading.

I’ve been doing some personal improvements lately, and if thought I’d talk about them a bit.

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…the addon for posting to Facebook broke massively, and now I’m trying a new one out. So this is a test.

(also, hello, happily married and interviewing for more jobs since getting married than I did in a couple years before it. So she’s my good luck charm and motivator in addition to being a wonderful person and a glorious wife.)

I haven’t been around a lot, because I’ve been busy. Not at home in Seattle, but back in New Jersey. Helping with arrangements and settings-up and heavy and light lifting.

See, about half an hour before this got published? I got married.

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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.

This is today. July 17, 2013. My dearest lady, my fiancee, Emma, sent me some money for two purposes. The obvious and easy one is: get food at a local restaurant that is really pretty great, Dragonfish.

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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.

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.)

To get out and take some photos of Seattle, and try to put together a photo montage of things in my city I like.

….of course with the weather we appear to be about to have, that may take a little while.

I suppose I should apologize. But, you know, I won’t. I’ve just been kind of distracted by a number of things.

So I’ve been working on the following:

• Working with Photoshop CS6 and InDesign CS6
• Learning a number of Photoshop techniques for doing various things
• Teaching myself to draw and paint
• pestering the Internal Revenue Services for paperwork, to wit a tax transcript.

The last because, well, at this point in time I’m trying to apply to local colleges. Not much luck finding work so… time to go back to school. And the stuff above is all part of it. Because I’m hoping to get into the Seattle Central Community College program in Graphic Design.

Wish me luck.