new zines! consent!

 I made these for Take Back the Night this year and am finally getting around to uploading them. 

The first one is called Consent Questions to Ask Yourself and Others, and it's a bunch of conversation prompts/questions to ask and think about in order to better understand what consent looks like for you and people you're close with. 

The second one is about the Stoplight System, which is a useful tool to help practice good consent!

Check them out and download the pdfs for free or pay what you want :) 

sometimes self compassion is acknowledging how much it all sucks

 that's it. Right now, I don't want to hear that it's going to be okay - I know it will, and I also don't care, because right now, it sucks. I don't want to find gratitude right now - I have a great many things I am very grateful for, and none of that matters if I can't talk about how much things suck sometimes. 

this sucks, this is hard, I am doing my best to get through it, and it's hard that it's hard. 

social media

 is the worst. I mean, I love scrolling instagram or facebook, but then I don't know how to stop, and I don't process any of the feelings I'm having while I'm scrolling, and then afterwards, when I drag myself away, I realize how shit I feel about myself. I feel a sense of urgency to do more, to prove myself, to drive engagement and other buzzwords that I hate. 

I don't know how to have a healthy relationship with social media. I've never been able to regularly use social media without it becoming an unhealthy energy suck. I've tried using it differently, or using different social media platforms. I always end up comparing myself to everyone in the world and feeling like I'm constantly coming up short, even though I'm so often doing the best I know how to do. 

I hate that in order to have an online presence, you are expected to be on social media. And yeah, you can technically exist online in other ways, but people want to know your instagram, and don't know what to do if you don't have one. So now I have one, that I'm committed to being inactive on, that directs visitors to this website, which is annoying and indirect, but I don't want to do social media, because it's not good for me. 

Thanks for venturing into slightly new online spaces, if you're reading this. Here's a bunch of stickers I made: 

new design, new sticker in the works

 I think it might need to be on a yellow background, though. 

feedback on the yellows is mixed so far

self-acceptance and looking goofy

I am appreciative of times when I feel an abundance of creative inspiration. 

There have been long stretches of life where inspiration was sparse. Times when it felt like I was bursting with pent-up creative energy but no outlet for it, nothing to pour it into. I'd feel frustrated, trapped, powerless. I wanted to be a creative guy that created STUFF that was COOL and GOOD but I didn't know what to do. That tension oozed out into my life in the past more than it does now, I think, making my brain itchy and my demeanor irritable. I knew I identified as a creative person, but simultaneously felt that my lack of creative inspiration and follow-through were evidence that I was mistaken, and the dissonance of that resulted in shame. 

It turned out that the inspiration has always been there, it's just been hidden - by anxiety, by my own self-doubt, by a desperation to be accepted and approved of by others, by so much else. In getting to know more of the different parts within myself, I am learning how to creatively collaborate with myself, and it feels like finding a voice. (i immediately have the urge to undercut that by noting how pretentious it feels to talk about ~finding my voice~ but also sometimes cliches are cliche for reasons).  

Doing scary and vulnerable things can look and feel a little goofy - that's the inherent risk you take in trying something new; you might misstep, and then you'll have to learn how you deal with that. I used to think that if I just believed in myself enough, I would magically get to avoid looking goofy. I think the actual trick is to let yourself look goofy. Accept it as the cost of growth. Recognize that looking goofy is uncomfortable, but usually not dangerous. I am working on believing in myself enough to know that I can handle looking goofy. 

featuring a lil not-quite-finished papier mache version of me from a craft I made a few years ago - no particular reason why, I'm just awkward about pictures of myself

reflections on self-acceptance and artistic voice

Doing art more regularly has meant noticing new things about myself, new patterns. Often in the early stages of an art, I end up tracing the same thing over and over again. It happens as part of image transferring, exploring different iterations of ideas, trying to assess the difficulty of a design I'm planning, etc. I struggle with fine motor skills, however, so every time I trace the thing, my lines are just slightly off from the original line work. Often I'm tracing the most recent iteration of my own tracing, so as I trace them again and again, the image shifts to something similar to what I started with, but slightly different, like a very uneventful game of broken telephone. But in the final version, I'm starting to recognize my own ~artistic voice~, and that's kind of cool. It also feels very pretentious to talk about it. 

That was a bit of a revelation for me - I imagined 'finding my voice' would happen at the culmination of an arduous journey full of trials and hardship, like a reward for all my toil and labour. I thought about it like creating a flip book - painstakingly drawing each page, each image almost identical except for the tiny differences that eventually create the illusion of motion, until you've amassed a large enough volume that you can flip through it and bring it to life. That animation, that life, that's your artistic voice, I thought. I imagined it would feel satisfying, triumphant. 

But it's not at all like a flip book. A flip book isn't meaningful unless it's being used; the art only comes to life while in motion. Instead of a flip book, I realize that finding my voice has looked more like a stack of dozens or hundreds of thin sheets of tracing paper, all the lines on all the pages visible through the transparent layers and creating a slightly blurry top image composed of all the arts I've done along the way. Things I've liked, I've traced over and over again, and those lines show up boldly, while things I didn't like and didn't trace over and over again, might look like faint, ghostly wisps. This image is there to see, no motion activation required, and the more you look at it, the more you will notice. This is true for myself, too - the more I pay attention to my own voice, the more I discover about it. 

If you remove any of the papers from the pile, the picture would be different. Each paper in the stack adds to the final image. This layered piece of art, that's actually my voice. I didn't have to earn it or discover it, I just had to give myself time and space to recognize it. Those pieces I worked on and didn't like, they aren't the defining parts of my artistic voice, but they are still part of it - they have to be. And isn't that just an annoying truth about self-acceptance? 

There's this part in Frozen II, when Elsa, on a quest to find out the truth about her heritage and her magic powers, musically beseeches the universe to help her understand the meaning of it all. Throughout the song she repeats "are you the one I've been looking for all of my life?", but at the climax of the song, her mother's voice sings out "you are the one you've been looking for", and Elsa finishes "all of my liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiife" (it's a very dramatic and powerful moment!), signalling narratively that she accepts this wisdom, that there's no missing piece for her to find, that all she needs is already within her. Something about this moment speaks to me, and feels connected to this idea of finding my own voice. Maybe because it turns out that finding my voice didn't take a big momentous ordeal, it took the much harder and more mundane task of getting to actually know and accept myself. 

art art and undermining myself

My friend asked me why I don't sign my art. 

I have been perpetually going back and forth on whether I should sign my art, and then avoided making a decision by just not signing it and pretending that wasn't also a decision. 

On one hand, signing art shows that a human made this, that I made this. But on the other hand, maybe my signature would ruin the art - maybe it's me putting my ego above the art, or something. As I type that, I'm like, Emma, that is a stretch and you know it. I know that there isn't actually an argument that I buy into for not signing my art. The actual answer is that signing my art implies that I think what I've made is art, and it feels very vulnerable to put that out into the world. I guess there's a fear that someone would say "I love this thing you made, but unfortunately your name on it just ruins the entire thing", and like, if that did happen, cool, your energy is wrong for my art then. I don't even sign my name in full! I usually just put my initials and the year. 

I've written before about the journey from "I like to craft" to "I make art", and the power and freedom I have felt in owning that. And yet this signature thing throws me right back into the mindset of "I just make rinky dink lil crafts that probably nobody even cares about, there's no need to put my name on it or take ownership for it". I feel sad about that, and about how deeply I buried that truth inside myself. I really did believe this was a neutral topic, until my friend asked me about it and some parts of me got pretty insistent that I needed to reflect on this more. It's annoying when one revelation doesn't just change everything about how your mind works forever, but I suppose I should expect to keep uncovering uncomfortable truths I've shoved into the couch corners of my brain over the years. 

So anyway. I'm gonna try to start signing my art, as an intentional way to remind myself that the things I create are art. Art doesn't have to meet any standards to be art. It doesn't have to be good - I'm not saying mine is not good, just that whether it's good is irrelevant as to whether it's Art. It's art because I created it with intention and feeling and care, to exist and to say something or to evoke feelings or to be a pretty thing. Boom. 

musings on drawing, on mastery, on confidence

Drawing is hard for me. It doesn't come naturally. I struggle with spacial awareness, and that makes it hard to translate things that I see with my eyes into lines on a page. 

Historically I've worked around this by image searching for "thing I want to draw + line drawing", and when I found one I liked, I'd print it off and trace it and then make it more my own before carving and printing it. 

The problem I started having was that I had clear ideas in my head of what I wanted to create, but wasn't finding good line drawing images of those things. After enough annoyance with this, I finally started tracing over photographs instead of line drawings, because it's so much easier to find photographs than line drawings of things. It took a while for me to try this, because I was certain that it was going to be too hard and I'd just get annoyed and frustrated and feel bad about myself. But then the frustration and annoyance of not being able to create what I wanted became greater, so I went for it. And it turns out that having spent the last year or so doing lots of art stuff, I'm better at doing it than I realized! Instead of feeling frustrated and bad about my skills, I felt like I had super powers. 

I wanted to make some goofy Canada geese. I found 3 photos of geese, and then traced them to create my own drawings of geese.

goose photo I printed

geese I drew/traced from photos

carved goose

It still feels disingenuous for me to say "I drew these geese", because to me, "drawing" means I took a piece of paper and a pencil and I made these lines happen organically from within my own brain. I put a thin piece of paper over a photo of a thing, and traced the general shapes and lines, is that drawing? I'm not trying to be self-deprecating, I'm trying to be precise with my language. I suppose the nuanced answer is that I've found ways to make drawing accessible to me, and the ways I draw might or might not meet someone else's criteria for what counts as 'drawing', but it's still the most accurate word I have.

It is kinda thrilling to see myself get better at this thing. To look at drawings I drew and feel happy with the outcome. That's newish for me. It's nice to let myself have that, the warm fuzzy feeling that comes with recognizing that I've gotten better at a thing that I care very much about. 

Monthly art club!

 I'm gonna do an art club instead of a zine club, because I love zines and make lots of them but I feel cranky when I have to make them on a schedule. But I'm ALWAYS making and amassing art, so that's fun to send out. 

Anyway sign up here if you want, idk I'm not the boss of you https://gaygoblinart.square.site/monthly-art-club 

Every month get a piece of mail with art in it - prints patches embroidery stickers zines and whatever else random art creations I've got going on.

i made a stamp for business cards!

 

and i'm excited about it. that's all.

Lies Capitalism Tells Us, Volume 4

download as a pdf for free or pay what you want!