Workouts, portraits, figure drawing, and small software tools
January 27 ā February 2, 2025
Still taking a new portrait every day. Hereās Neil, a carpenter, and his custom van.
I just play around with āem. Iāve got another one that Iām gonna build out. [ā¦] The wife and I live on a boat, Iāve lost count of how many vehicles Iāve owned.
Working out three days a week with Kyle and Avvai has been top, and today I added a small bonus kettle-bell workout in the morning. Kyle swears by the kettle-bell and today it finally clicked why, it barely takes any thinking about and you can work muscles hard pretty quickly.
Iāve been wanting to get more drawing done outside of the weekly 90āminutes with Ania, so last week I plucked up the courage to ask everyone in the class ā Ewan, Olga, Ondrej, Natsuki, Nasim, and Cesar ā if theyād like to meet up once or twice a week outside of class and practice our figures. Iāve been anointed leader by default which is an interesting role for me. In a working environment itās normal for me, but less typical in social organising. Wednesday (29th) was the first meeting of the imaginatively named Drawing Club. Nasim and Ondrej joined me, others were working. Surprised myself by drawing for five hours straight, which got me thinking, prior to that session Iād probably only done ~12 hours of figure drawing before, all of it over the last couple months with Ania. More practice feels good, and Nasim showed herself to be a great practice partner, always pushing for more challenging poses.
We met again after Saturdayās class,
Yesterday I proposed the Drawing Club meet again immediately after todayās class and Iām very glad I did. Ondrej couldnāt stay and Ewan wasnāt in class today so initially it was only going to be Nasim and I (which would have been very fine), but as the lesson wrapped up and I got talking with the new people, we found four new members for the club ā Marika, Anju, Tori, and Lidia-Lucia. Lidia, from Peru, couldnāt stay today but Marika, 29, from Japan, Anju & Tori, two 16āyearāold high school students, also from Japan, and Nasim all did, and we did 90 minutes of mostly 3āminute figures, but with time to talk and compare in-between.
In the classes weāre always against the clock so thereās never time to actually watch how others draw. We get to see the result, but not the work. These less formal practice sessions let us learn from each other a lot more, perhaps even more than the classes themselves.
Anju and Tori, here on high school exchange from Japan, are both very talented, almost scarily so! I levelled up just by watching Anju draw the first four lines of a figure on the page.
On Wednesday night I ātreatedā Kyle and Avvai to poutine, my first experience and I gotta say, pretty yum!
Project wise, itās been a week of mini-programs. On Thursday I knocked up an interactive program for wrangling my old plaintext journals into structured TOML. So far Iāve converted this months, and all of last year. Iāll continue back to my earliest preserved journal (~2012). Once I had over a years worth in the new format I worked up a local webserver and viewer so I can read and search through the whole lot at once. Usually I just grep through my old journals, but for extended reading a proper UI is nice too. Ultimately Iāll add location filtering/plotting of my journals via an interactive map, and embeddings-based semantic similarity search, but this v1 has already been nice.
Friday, for my January review I wanted to include screen-grabs from Severance, Kyle and I just finished season 1. In the past Iāve done this by scrubbing through a film and picking out scenes, but because I wanted to cover a whole season of a show I opted to write a little program to extract a frame from each episode at 5āsecond intervals, from there I could scan through the whole lot very quickly and pluck out the frames I wanted.
I wrote a second script to stitch all the frames together into a video as an experiment in recap/memory-prompting ahead of starting the second season. The result was okay, but I have a feeling it might flow better with fewer frames (every 10th second?) playing back at a lower frame-rate (15fps? I chose 30 for the tests).
On Monday I knocked out a couple short posts:
Iāve almost finished my January reflections, which Iāve just now decided Iām going to try and do every month this year, in a very similar style to this, basically summarising what Iāve been up to. Not entirely decided on month vs week. This weekly scale feels nice, but maybe itās not a broad enough view for more connective reflections, so Iāll experiment with both. The vague goal then is to have month-notes or week-notes, or a combination thereof, covering all of 2025.
Jamie is going through a particularly dark patch back in England, Iām trying to support him where I can. Kyle and Avvai have asked a few times if thereās anything they can do to support me, but Iām so used to coping with my family on my own, and so pathologically averse to being a burden that I havenāt managed to draw on them much. But tonight, unexpectedly, Kyle and Iās conversation drawing on his reading of Byron Katieās self-inquiry method aka The Work, and my reading of The Book of Joy, led to some meaningful insights about what supporting my brother means to me. The iterative process of so called turnaround statements proved itself out, and Kyleās capacity to synthesise ā both the essence of everything he reads, and the truth of what I said ā continues to inspire me.
A snow day! Sunday has brought the week to an end, and the city to a standstill, with 10cm of snow. I went out early and just wandered around in the blizzard in bliss.
Kyle is playing the piano and around midday weāll trek across the city to Samās apartment for a craft day on the 24th floor, with a panoramic view of Stanley Park and English Bay under snow.
Safe to say, itās been another good week in Vancouver.
