My 61^st acrylic is another in my projected No Idea series.

( the 'story' behind it )

an easy fix

Last night, when I removed my hearing aids for their overnight recharge, part of one of them stayed in my ear. (Wuh-oh.)

This morning, I took them back to Costco for a repair. And it was simply a matter of unplugging the broken cable and plugging in a new one — literally took less than thirty seconds. (Oh, and it was free: “Everything is covered by your membership.”) Gotta love it.

getting my headlight fixed — I hate having one out

Someone posted a piece of AI art somewhere and asked for thoughts and comments. It's the first time I tried to nail down my vague feelings on the subject. Here's what I came up with:

I'm still coming to terms with AI art. On some levels, it's just a new manifestation of something that has long been with us... for example, the human artist who repeatedly paints variations of the same picture and sells prints of them to people who are easily satisfied. It makes visual pleasure affordable and readily accessible. Similar to the way that portrait photographers [as opposed to portrait painters] did. In a way, AI art is a fancier form of clip art, I guess.

This doesn't mean that I wholeheartedly approve of it, just that I recognize that it arises from economic and cultural forces that are not new. It means that original human art will be obliged to become more sincere, less of a commodity and more ars gratia artis. That's bad for artists and their livelihoods, but it's not bad for art per se.

The year is not off to a flying start, inasmuch as I am beset by oddities:

• I woke this morning with a migraine [not a hangover, I didn't drink] and unexplained dizziness which took a few hours to ease off
• My cellphone started misbehaving, by not displaying the correct keys I need to operate the current screen I'm using. I needed to pull the battery out, then back in, to get it to smarten up. It's never done this before.
• One of the smoke alarms started giving random false alarms. Time for a new one, I guess. However, since it's today, nowhere is open for me to get one.

It feels a lot like living in a Road Runner cartoon...

Electricity -- look at how many things we use it for, every day!

Yesterday we didn't need to put our A/C on. Today we do need it, and it's working. Opposite things, but I am grateful for both!

finding out how to put a SIM card into a phone for myself

also finding out that they still make new flip phones

learning a valuable lesson — today in particular, a valuable art lesson

Almost every book on drawing or painting stresses the value of values [lights and darks], and they are an aspect of art I have long taken for granted. But, now that I've started painting [and working in colour as opposed to the black and white of my comics work], the whole concept of value becomes more challenging for me. Learning to see the lightness or darkness of a colour is not always trivial for me. But all my recent lessons have been emphasizing the importance of this learning, so I finally reached the point where I am trying to pay more attention.

Almost every painting book recommends the exercise of painting a value scale, which looks something like this:



However, since my art skills are surpassed by my procrastination skills, I have never done so. I always handwaved and said yeah yeah I get it. Until today.

I approached the problem logically, and figured that a half-and-half mixture of black and white paint should give me a middle value like 5.

Not so.

It was with considerable consternation that I discovered a 50-50 mixture gave me a result barely distinguishable from 9. In fact, a 90% white - 10% black mixture gave me a result much like 7.

Up until now, when I painted, I mixed what I needed but never paid too much attention to how much of what I used. I just mixed til it worked. But today, by approaching this in a systematic fashion, I have learned a new appreciation for the darkening power of paints. That's gotta be worthwhile knowledge to have, right?

getting back an all-clear result on my FIT -- sigh of relief for another two years