arlita

november 20th 2023

personal

i have come to hate every aspect of thanksgiving in the past few years. literally the only reason i go is to hang out with my siblings and high five my nieces and nephews. turkey is gross. it is gross and not good food. and cranberry sauce is also not that good, even the heavily sweetened deeply reduced rich cranberry sauce my mom makes. and all the other sides are gross and go cold by the time everyone is sat down. and i do not pray. i stare at the floor while everyone listens to whoever mumble on about nothing, truly addressing no one, thanking someone who isn't present, and asking for blessings like some kind of fool. my family does not mind at all but i sometimes wear pajamas to thanksgiving as a purposeful act of disrespect to the "holiday". buuut unfortunately i can't say no to going, i mean i could, but i am not going to be that brave. i've been tasked with making devilled eggs this year and i actually am excited to do that.

anyways. i got my brother into art a couple weekends ago when we were high as shit, listening to records, and kind of bored otherwise, so i plugged my laptop into the tv w an hdmi cable, flipped the keyboard back to put it into tablet mode, got my drawing pen (dell's proprietary active pen), opened a program i learned about recently called heavypaint, and drew a peacock from a reference photo. as i was laying down blocks of color, erasing and adding to find proportions, choosing somewhat accurate colors, and adding details, he watched and said a few times he was inspired just watching me. as i was switching between brushes on heavypaint to get the effect i needed for whatever part of the picture i was working on, he said it reminded him of how he goes about his 3d modeling projects and how in order to model the object he's working on, he has to go back and forth between tools, making all of those little minute decisions that eventually lead to a finished project. and i knew then that i could gently turn his attention to trying art based on his enthusiasm of that part of the process.

SO! the next morning (he slept over on the couch because he was super tired and waaay too high to drive) after we were awake enough, i gave him a really quick art lesson, and showed him around the program enough to get him started. i opened a photo of some brick european street you see all over websites like unsplash and pixabay, and showed him how i start landscape paintings from reference, which is putting down huge sloppy blocks of color that mostly match the general tones/shapes of the buildings. then i honed in on one building and started to add texture and highlights and shadows, talking about not shading with just black but with desturated nearby hues of the original color, and then started sketching in details like window shapes and lighting fixtures. i didnt feel the need to complete it lol so then i found a very simplistic photo of a lighthouse on a small hill with some fence around it, with just enough detail to get him to play with the tools and enough colors to get him to play with the color sliders.

and he basically freaking nailed it. he even did the wood grain in the fence pretty accurately. he spent quite a bit of time on it, i could tell he was getting a little lost in the sauce of adding detail but i didnt stop him, i just checked on him every now and again as i was getting myself ready. our plans that day were to hunt down a specific record at a specific store, which i'll get back to lol. and at the end he had his very first(ish) completed digital painting drawn from royalty free reference lmao. he has made art in the past, using the path tool on gimp to make characters from shows he was watching at the time. he kicks himself for not making them svg files in inkscape lol but to me, they were actually really good for his knowledge level and have always been curious why he didn't get into art more. so when he showed interest while i was drawing i jumped on the chance to show him art.

soo!! yesterday i went to the art museum with my brother, our dad, and my daughter. it was originally just going to be me and my brother but he invited dad so i took my daughter too cos they don't see each other much; not for any bad reason, just cos we don't really hang out enough. and it was amazing. an absolute blast. oh my god talking about art with someone who gives the slightest fuck feels so good. i love art. obviously haha. usually when i go to the art museum, i find myself taking photos of entire paintings that inspired me, rather than just photograping the specific parts that inspired me, which is what i did this time. there were a few i did take whole photos of lol but i really tried to document the areas of different paintings that made me want to go home and draw. and going through those kinds of photos have been much more helpful and inspiring than scrolling through a bunch of photos of whole paintings that lose detail in photos the more you back up to get the whole thing in frame.

sorry this is a long one but i am not done torturing you yet. gotta ride the motive to write ok. anyways after the art museum we went and got lunch/dinner which was yummy and actually really nice to sit down and talk about nothing that matters with my brother and dad. also my daughter is a brave confident little charmer who loves restaurants which is perfect because i am not brave and confident and i love having her with me. then once i was home my brother and i watched peter draws draws videos where he talks about what he thinks about art, he prints them out and flips thru them and talks about individual paintings and its soo funny and lowkey insightful. i've seen them before but because i'm way too excited my brother is getting into art, i have a youtube playlist started called brother art class (well i used him name but im not sharing his name here lol) and they were the very first videos i put on it.

alright! i said i would get back to the record store. while we were moving and shopping for things for the new place, i spotted a record player and immediately knew i wanted to buy it for my brother for his birthday, so i did. i hand delivered it to him that day in the evening, and soon after he started buying records for it. his very first purhcase for it was the album fashion nugget by cake, which absolutely fucks because it is my favorite cake album lmao anyways. he now owns nearly thirty albums and has plans to buy a bunch more. and a couple weeks ago we spent the entire weeking looking for one specific album, which i suppose was a doomed mission from the start lmao, and he ended up buying uhh 12? or 13? albums that weekend lol. but it was so much fun. we went to 3 different stores and flipped through nearly the entire stock of each one, going from one side of the store slowly to the other, pulling out interesting ones and just talking about music literally all day. then back at my house we pushed the couch right in front of the tv, listened to albums, browsed the internet, and i made art. making art while high on thc is just like making art normally for me but slower and more frustrating if you were curious haha. no epiphanies to be had, no beautiful imagery more realized than when sober. it is ten times more fun tho, and easier to invest yourself in the task. and with music going, and good company, literally nothing else matters.

WOW. i spent a long type typing. i'm done now thank you love you bye

november 7th 2023

personal

agh it's been one and an half weeks since our halloween party. it was amazing to say the least. i genuinely think it's our best one yet. i did go as a fairy, and got a whole bunch of accessories from random sections in the halloween store. i got gear and cog earrings from the steampunk section, a gold leaf armband from the greek section, and a necklace that's a pair of handcuffs from the police section lol. and i wore a bunch of little plastic stick-on rhinestones i randomly placed on my face and arms, i felt so so so so cute hahaha. i also wore a candy necklace. it came with a charm on it that tasted like the stick from fundip lmao but i gave that to my friend. my friends made fun of me that i would have the whole necklace eaten by the end of the night but i actually didnt eat any from it. my friend did, tho. i leaned in and let him nab a piece. i sighed and said outloud that i am the luckiest girl in the world and he laughed lmaoo.

i procrastinated making the playlist so i had to do it while my edibles were kicking in and after i had just done a shot. i think i made a killer playlist despite the trebulations. most people sat around our dining room table but the shy people were in the living room on their phones lol. that's also where i was playing music from cos my tv and soundbar are in there. and once i was faded enough i was happily dancing and singing every word to every song from my playlist. and no one gave a shit. i have amazing friends. my brother and i have a few mutual favorite songs that we listened to by laying on the floor by my cheap little subwoofer. if you've never had into the sun by bassnectar wave through your body head to toe, i recommend it ^_^

anyways ummm idk what else to write about, i don't have much going on lol. i was going to share a picture but i don't have any good ones, i think i literally somehow was having too much fun to think about getting pictures. which is unlike me. oh well U_U