Saturday, December 18, 2004

Testing the opened channels....and railing at Murphy's Law

Alright, I certainly hope this works....last night either my computer connection or this server lost one of the most brilliant and insightful posts I'd ever written in my life, and the only logical reason I can see for it is that the rest of the world was never meant to read it...had too much in it.

Anyhow, this is just a test post, and so I will just flesh it out somewhat by stating that my freelance work is picking up for the holidays--portraits from photographs, for which purpose I've rigged up a homemade lightbox in my studio so that I can trace from the enlargements off my computer. It's installed in a desk with a lowered-out middle section--lined with aluminum foil and clear plastic bubble wrap for reflection and diffusion, with a pane of glass in an old wooden picture frame, and the light supplied by a three-light cream plastic faux candelabra I'd taken out to decorate for Christmas, just laid inside the hollow and shifted as needed.

I'm rather proud of my ingenuity there...always very satisfying to rig up something that works in a pinch. I'd been rather stymied over the difficulties of transferring accurate proportions onto the page--2D to 2D is a rather error-prone translation--so this is a breakthrough, and a very useful one for my present little line of business.

Signing off to go work on the present commission, just as soon as I'm assured this thing comes through as I rigged it up to....


Aurey

4 comments:

WTF said...

A redhead.

Two words:

NO WONDER (lol)

I can remember "Agricultural Mechanics"- a class I took in high school. Never did well with wiring, but I can weld the shit out of just about anything:-D

Aureantes (aka Kagen Aurencz Zethmayr) said...

Welll, actually dark reddish blond, red-brown when I was born.....but yeah, that one was after I'd done some fairly noticeable lightening of my hair with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and henna shampoo--and then gone out clubbing, of course.

There's such a fine and blurry distinction between "dark blond" and "light brown" anyhow--and I think I just naturally go for encapsulating the extremes rather than mollifying them.

Go figure--guess one can chalk that up to being a Libra too, just in the sense of always having/displaying two opposite sides to the coin. "Balancing" them doesn't necessarily mean standing statically in the middle....I tend rather to stand on both ends of the see-saw at once.

(:P)

Aureantes (aka Kagen Aurencz Zethmayr) said...

Oh....on the subject of welding....there was a really great retrospective on Mr. Rogers that I saw recently--honestly, I never realized when I was younger just how insightful and revolutionary his idea of having a TV program focused on kids and their feelings was.

Of course, I always preferred the Neighborhood of Make-Believe back then, and was either a bit too old or too mentally precocious to get a lot of the sheer emotional support out of it, as I tended to dwell more on the aesthetics of the show and where they seemed to fall short. Though there was that dream about the Incredible Hulk that I had after that one episode where he did the makeup....long story. Long and extremely character-shaping story.

Anyhow, in an fairly old interview where he was talking about his show's concept and the idea of kids learning to express their feelings constructively, he mentioned various possibilities there: drawing, sculpting, writing, singing, whatever he said... and /welding/.

Anyhow, that kinda gave me an image, when I heard it, of Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller's role in "Mystery Men") with a huge blowtorch, going at a pile of junked auto frames or something....nothin' like a little constructive self-expression, huh?

WTF said...

I can't say how sad I was to hear of Mr. Rogers' passing. He was such a compassionate, genuine man. His influence changed and molded children in a way that schools and parents can't. He was all about being kind, and reciprocity thereof. It's a very rudimentary message that is virtually extinct.