Tiny Tea Dispatch #021

Published:

Oct 31, 2020, 01:00:00

Autumn

It fought the changing of the seasons valiantly, but our little garden has finally succumbed to autumn. A few patches of leaves are still hanging in there, brightly coloured and optimistic. The grass has gone wild as the weather deterred me a couple of times from getting the lawnmower out. Maybe tomorrow will be the day I get to it.
Today is for writing this newsletter and settling into a new lockdown.

# Made

I hope he will forgive me for sharing this progress-shot, but I’ve been working on this linocut for a friend. (I won’t share the printed end-result here until I’ve handed it over.)
It’s been a while since I last made one so this was a fun project.

Every time I play around with lino, I learn different things as I run into new difficulties. This time, because the drawing has some specific details I wanted to preserve, I experimented with different ways to transfer and cut the drawing.
The transfer techniques didn’t pan out very well, so in the end I had to settle with redrawing the (mirrored) bird directly onto the lino with pencil and felt-tipped pens. I used to worry about not being able to draw accurately from life or when needing to copy images by hand but ironically, that’s the 1 thing I’ve always been very good at. Years of redrawing and keeping sketch books when learning graphic design only enforced that skill.

The second worry, is capturing the ‘life’ from your initial sketch into the subsequent and final versions of your work. That is a lot more difficult, as I’m sure a lot of illustrators will corroborate. All in all, I’m pretty happy with the results.

# Listened to

More than 20 years after finding out about them, I revisited the albums from the Simpsons TV show that came out in the (late) 90’s. You know, back when the animated show were still bitingly relevant and entertaining. Turns out there are more than just The Simpsons Sing the Blues and Songs in the Key of Springfield. But those will always be my favorites.
The Blues album is mostly original songs with a few covers sprinkled in, the Keys album is a mix of songs sung in the episodes, flanked by short bits. If you haven’t heard (of) these, you can find them on YouTube and other online services.
Some of my favorites are Bart weaseling out of things and Burns’ “See my Vest”.
Highly recommended.

# Organized

In a previous newsletter time, I threatened to write a bit about the systems of organization I use, given my interest in keeping & cataloguing information. But the most important task of these systems is simply to offload the stuff going on inside my brain.

Sketchbooks: During my studies, we were required to keep a sketchbook and I kept doing it ever since. It’s the first place I turn to if I want to visualise an idea, need to think about a design or illustration, do layouts for a comic, …
Paper journal 1: Since I can barely remember if I put on the kettle or not, I use an A5-size booklet to keep weekly and daily overviews of any given thing that needs to happen. Why not digital? Because I need it to be in view at all times or it simply disappears from my mind.
Every spread has 8 spots: 1 for each day + an extra one at the start of the week to list stuff I didn’t get to in the previous week or that I can’t put an exact day on yet.
At the start of each month, I also keep a spread for list of potential projects I want to tackle in the (near) future, new and recurring chores.
Online calendar: For anything that needs reminders or is time-sensitive (meetings or appointments), I use Google calendar with its apps installed on all my devices. It’s the only way to guarantee I actually see it in time and don’t worry about it constantly.
Paper journal 2: I also keep a bullet journal but probably not in the way you’re “supposed to”. I use it without flourishes and only for 2 purposes: The first is to organize my thoughts on a subject and explore ideas through brainstorming, making lists and quick sketches. The second one is for scrapbooking places I go to, from travels to museum exhibits. Looking at the contents of my current one, I have entire chapters on autism and fountain pens but for obvious reasons there’s very little on going places.
Paper books by subject: For specific subjects, I have dedicated books or booklets. One example, is one about the hot sauces I make. It’s purpose is to have the ‘data’ from my experiment all in 1 place. Be it the recipes I try or my findings (what did or didn’t work) or conclusions. I don’t keep it in a bullet journal because I want it to be easy to look back at older recipes. Other examples are: an idea book (quick thoughts on what to work on next or funny ideas for a comic) and a book with the names and writing tests for my vintage pens.
Evernote: A type of note-taking software. I use it to clip notes from articles I read online, save bookmarks & pdf’s, write travel lists, save recipes, etc… in an easy way because it’s also accessible offline + from all my devices. Basically I collect anything I find interesting and classify it through the use of Stacks & Notebooks (equivalent to nested categories) and tags. It functions as my knowledge & inspiration library, also know as a Commonplace Book. Or a little bit like ‘Zettelkästen’ but Evernote’s way of connecting and filtering notes is somewhat limited.
Notion: Similarly to Evernote, you can use it to write and organize your notes but it has at least 2 things Evernote lacks: it saves in Markdown format + you can organize, browse and connect notes in different ways.
So I’ve been using this to do my actual note taking and doing some writing (such as this newsletter or the Transmissions that ended recently). It might have the potential to replace Evernote completely but I haven’t explored it that deeply yet.
Because it’s all in Markdown, it also handy for writing Readme’s and keeping code snippets. Which I do a lot of in the day job as a front-end developer.

Extra’s:

Too many bags: This could have it’s own chapter in the newsletter. In short, I always carry my notebooks and some drawing or writing supplies when leaving the house so I like to have different types of bags for different occasions. There’s different sizes backpacks, messenger bags, metal boxes, pockets, … to guarantee I can carry this stuff with me in a comfortable way.
Home-made corner table: About 200 years ago, before the zombie pandemic, I made a bit of furniture to house all the crap I use at home on a semi-daily basis, from the paper journals to my watch box, some electronics and pens. I have a desk I can work at but I prefer to just sit at the kitchen table. There’s more light and together with the living room it’s a large open space.
The layout has changed a bit and it’s a lot more full since the picture below was taken but this is what it looks like. I added an extra plank in the bottom part to split it in 2 and added a bit to the side where I can keep magazines, letters and papers.

Well, that certainly looks like a lot, when put into a list like this. But I swear it works out very well. 😀
What are some of the systems you use to organize or get things done in your life?

# Final notes

I don’t do well with the shortening of days, especially right after the 1 hour timeshift we get inflicted upon us every year. I’m just look forward to the vitamin D pills kicking in and to January when the days slowly start lengthening again. It doesn’t help that Belgium is entering another lockdown because people are absolute idiots and one of them decided to reopen schools in September without providing any help.
Generally, I’m fine without having to see people IRL or having to work from home but now I can’t even go to a museum anymore. One of the safest public spaces we have around here since the whole Arts & Culture sector has put in so much effort to make things as safe as possible.
As someone at work said recently: there’s some pretty dark days ahead so take it easy on yourself and each other.

Hope you’re staying sane out there, see you all next month.