I storified a 30ish tweet rant about the nothing at the bottom of all human action, as exemplified by rich people buying garbage from each other.

Back in the studio today after a long time away. Two models at the same time, which was a new challenge, but look what happened! About a half hour warming up led to a two and a half hour sprint through to this:

I think struggling with oils unkinked my artbrain.

Oils? Yeah, I’ve been working with those too:

Those were alla prima attempts done all in one sitting each, separated by a couple of weeks. You have to go fast, and the paint is always wet so you can’t fuss too much with fine detail because you keep smearing it away accidentally. Alla prima favors the bold.

Something I haven’t seen talked about much is the way working in different media helps you improve in the media you aren’t using. Every time I take a break from pastels, for example, to do a bunch of inks or watercolors or oils, I come back to pastels and suddenly they work so much better. This has even worked with photography. Focusing on one form of making images pays off in other forms.

I’m guessing it’s similar to the thing that happens in your brain when you practice something right before sleep. You go away from one set of problems and practice against a different set, but both problems use the same wiring to solve. What you learn in one is useful in the other. But the real key is that unless you jump to a different related problem, you don’t learn as much because you keep hitting the same routine solutions in the problem set you are familiar with.

It’s almost as though we are wired for a kind of altruism. Fix someone else’s problem to fix your own.

These are hard lessons for an introverted functional nihilist to absorb. Sometimes focus doesn’t pay. Sometimes play does.

Oh! Also I let loose another one of these:

The Occasional Bitslice: Volume 3 Number 1

It’s a newsletter I sometimes do, when I have something worth talking about. It tends to be more personal, sometimes, than the writing in this blog, though this one is split about evenly between recriminations and a long pep talk about the virtues of branding yourself. Lots of the people who read this are my friends, but it’s aimed at a wider audience. I like the idea of there being a channel of writing that slides into your inboxes rather than sits out exposed, staring off into the empty horizon, contemplating it’s loneliness.

The bitslice is too needy for that Clint Eastwood routine. The bitslice needs to be warm, inside your mail client. Read the bitslice, so it stops shivering. And if you like it, adopt it by subscribing:

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That’s all for now. Stuff is being worked on. There’ll be more soon.

To celebrate spring in a very NSFW way, here is the picture story of a very bad Easter Bunny.

Click the little pictures to see big ones, if you dare.

This was another fun shoot with Zelda, who is always down for zombie contact lenses and a mouthful of sugar blood.

Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age

Confabulation Engine is a podcast of Speculative Fiction conversations, with digressions. Book talk out of alignment with consensus reality. Featuring William Cunningham and Catherine Weiss.

We did a trial run on this concept about a year ago with this hour and a half meander through all of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books.

For our first official episode we enthuse our way through the baroque future described in Neal Stephenson’s girl power epic, “The Diamond Age”.

Noteable digressions include:

A Video of DNA splicing.

MakerBot.

Solving three mysteries at the same time.

Turing Machines.

Genesis P-Orridge

We’ll be releasing these monthly for a while, we hope you enjoy them!

I’m paralyzed with intentions. Every time I move toward one action the pull of five others stops me. There are a dozen photoshoots, three web projects, a comic, some videos, two audio projects, and lots of physical artwork.

If even two of those get done this year it’ll be an accomplishment!

Patreon

Inkshares

Wattapad

Goodreads

saatchi online

And a map of the galleries of Los Angeles that does not yet exist.

And because you read an out of context list of links, here is a recently made picture.

These rabbits are going to be important.

They are still being drawn up from somewhere convoluted in the thinkmeat. They are like the manikins, but completely different. These manikins.

They come from the same place, down in the wet convulscape, as he does.

They are among the roots of a show.

Oh man these old notebooks full of old dreams and poems. They are embarrassing in wholly entertaining ways now!

Some more visual notes to myself, absent context.

hat tips to Demonagerie and discarded image for the details, which I came across in an article on io9.

This happened on twitter, I found it brilliant, so I’m putting it here because my site my rules ok?

Commute = two hours, five minutes. I went to a dark place.

— Tycho Brahe (@TychoBrahe) November 8, 2013

@TychoBrahe i’m a wreck. this was not what i wanted out of today

— Kris Straub (@krisstraub) November 8, 2013

@krisstraub I don’t really remember this feeling.

— Tycho Brahe (@TychoBrahe) November 8, 2013

@TychoBrahe i remember this one. there is a numb, fist-sized weight at the base of my brain and i only feel anger

— Kris Straub (@krisstraub) November 8, 2013

@krisstraub “satan’s prostate”

— Tycho Brahe (@TychoBrahe) November 8, 2013

@TychoBrahe traditionally milked via the nostril

— Kris Straub (@krisstraub) November 8, 2013