Last night while I was at the library I scanned one of the art journal pages I’ve been working on.
Which is good, because I’m not going back to that library any time soon after the way they’ve treated my mother and me.
I just don’t want to be stuck here forever. Acrylics, collage, ink and gel pen.
Originally the mammoth skeleton was because being stuck in a rut feels like straying into an antediluvian tar pit. But then our car got hosed, literally stranding us, and then we got trampled by the fossilized attitudes of the local queen bee and her minions.
So, you know. Check out my layers of meaning!
Maybe in a few million years whatever life still exists on this miserable planet will dig up my skeleton and find it educational.
The thing is, every time I feel moved to get back into blogging and otherwise sharing my art, I get stymied by my technology.
I don’t have a smartphone, or indeed a dumbphone. And I don’t really want one, but there’s apparently no way to use Instagram without one. You can’t set up a Flickr account without one, either, because Yahoo won’t let you. And anyway the only photos I can take are with my Kindle Fire, which as you have seen doesn’t really cut it as a camera.
I don’t have a camera, and I can’t justify spending money on one, especially when I’m not sure how well it will work (because I definitely can’t afford a good one).
I can scan stuff, but to do that I either have to rummage around in the downstairs studio/guest room/storage room, or go to the library, and scan what I need onto a flash drive and then take it back to my computer and I just don’t have the spoons to do that most days.
Technology used to be my friend, allowing me to do stuff I couldn’t do in real life. Now it’s increasingly just another obstacle.
Still no camera or scanner in working order. But I did make 31 index cards in January (and so did my mom!).
I’ve had better months, but I’ve also had worse, so I’m not gonna complain. (Much.) I’m trying to think of the index cards as being like taking my meds — I don’t always want to do it, and if I miss a day it’s not the end of the world, but I really will feel better and more able to cope if I keep up with it.
I’m trying to get back into art journaling too. It’s hard. I feel like I’m always forgetting how to do it — the way I’ve forgotten how to write creatively — and have to keep re-learning, which is infinitely frustrating. Some days I feel almost like I’ve got it together, and then the next day I’m feeling desperate and trapped and incompetent again.
But I made it through January, one card at a time. Now I just have to make it through February.
I am so peeved, O blog reader. You do not even know.
Okay, so I made these little mini coloring books, right?
Volume 1: FLOWERS. Volume 2: BUGS.
I could do these all day. They’re what the kids call “zines” — a regular sheet of paper folded cunningly into a little 8-page booklet. They’re super cute and fun to make and I thought how fun they’d be for you, the bloghopping public, to print out and stick in your purse to give to the kids at the doctor’s office or whatever.
Isn’t this cute? Don’t you want half a dozen for your kids?
So I got them all carefully inked in, scanned, cleaned up, and printed out to test how they’d work as printables.
You’d think scanning in a piece of paper at its original size and resolution and then printing out same, yielding two identical pieces of paper, would be a simple operation. But you would be WRONG. Because the computer has an opinion on this, see, and its opinion is that it knows better than you. Did you already carefully lay out that page, including the margins, with nearly mathematical precision? “LOL w/e,” says the computer, and messes around with it until it fits the COMPUTER’S idea of correct margins.
I really hate bugs, you guys. But I drew six of them. FOR YOU. And what do I get?
Which would be merely irritating if you were just printing out a flyer for your lost dog or whatever, but in this case I am trying to print out a page to be precisely folded in eighths. Not to have all the edges cut off at some arbitrary distance and then folded in eighths, COMPUTER.
Tell it to just print without margins, you say? Oh ho ho ho, my sweet summer child, that would be way too easy. If I do that the computer says to itself, “O! so I take this scanned image that I arbitrarily shrank, right, and stretch it out again by, eh, it doesn’t really matter how much, I’ll just eyeball it even though I don’t have any eyeballs. Close enough!” And lo, I get a printout that’s cut off in random places.
A photocopier can handle this just fine. I don’t understand why three hunks of arguably higher technology between them can’t get it right.
So, long story short, I don’t have any cute free printables for you today. But at least I have photos of my cute drawings.
damoiselle 