Thursday, January 7, 2016

It's a new year!

And what a year it was. Above all, it was filled with change. Everything changed! Many times!

First I was unemployed, fresh out of the army. In that void of activity, I once again picked up the noble art of blogging, after what had basically been a years break. I went on to find work at a cafe, which I thought was a very exciting and interesting thing for me. It was a taste of adulthood, perhaps. I left a relationship, and I found dear new friends, or rather, it were like they found me for indeed I had felt alone. Come late summer I stopped working to move hundreds of kilometres south to the Aalto campus in Otaniemi. There, a new life began and has since been taking shape. While time flies here at school, this year has felt long. 

Longer perhaps than any before it.

It's said our perception of time accelerates as we get older. It's a scary thought, it really is. But I don't necessarily believe it to be true anymore. Or, atleast, the effect hasn't been significant. When I was in the army, time passed quickly. Quicker than ever, really. The week sped rapidly towards the weekend, which seemed to last only a heartbeat. The passage of time slowed, and my time at the cafe flowed only leisurely.




Christmas went by at my parents place. It feels very strange. I've changed so much since I left home 4 years ago, but somehow I feel precisely like my old self when I'm there.

Anyhow, I bought paper for myself for christmas! A most fabulous present for oneself, I know. So the drawing above is the first one I've done on A4 size paper since back when I went to school in Vasa. I've grown to love my A5 Canson 120g/m^2 sketchbooks maybe a bit too much, but the fact is that many of my projects felt cramped on that small area. I've gone through 3 of those sketchbooks by now. They're specifically Cansons Sketch pads, at 120g/m^2. It's the paper itself, the grain is exquisite. I bought two new pads, one Canson Mix Media A4 at 200g/m^2 and one A5 Canson Drawing, at 180g/m^2 - I was suprised to find both had a weaker grain structure than the Canson pads I had been used to for so long.

Which I think is a shame. I find a rough paper texture both pleasing to draw on, and a subtle but important part of the stylistic direction of my graphite drawings. Anyhow, I had a lot of fun with this one. I used two references, a nude for the outline and rough proportions, and a picture of a goat skull.

2 comments:

  1. Life sure is interesting. It changes all the time, as do we. Nice drawing, btw. I just dropped in to say, (though I think you might've heard it before in this Vsauce video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxb5lSPLy9c) that there's a reason people tend to feel like time accelerates faster the older they get. And that is, because humans apparently tend to think in logarithmic patterns. That is, when you are 3 years old, those 3 years are your entire life. But when you're, say, 60 years old, 3 years are but 1/20th of your life, thus your brain interprets the time to be shorter. That said, this is no absolute, just a general explanation. There are many more things that impact on our perception of time, be it different hormones, boredom, events in our life, etc. The say that time flies fast when you're having fun. Ironically, it goes fast if you're bored for a long time too, as events melt together in your memory later, if not enough varying happenings are occurring. On the other hand, if a lot has indeed happened, as it has for you, it makes for more unique memories, which may make it feel as though everything lasted longer. And obviously, that'd only be part of the whole, too :p

    I, on the other hand, feel that 2015 flew by incredibly quickly!

    Let's hope that 2016 turns out to be a nice year :)

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    1. Yup, I have seen that video. Luckily, it's just some explanation, not scientific theory. I don't want to believe my years and days will get shorter. Which they won't, of course. It's just the way we remember them that gets skewed. Which is still scary to think about.

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