Wandering the City of Detroit

Being on the road lesson #1: don't expect yourself to get as much done as you planned. I had this grand plan to write about each of the places I had visited right away, publishing a post a week, doing them all justice... alas. You'll just have to settle for my retrospective. We'll start where I just left:, Detroit. Eventually I'll get to San Diego, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Indiana. Now let's get moving!

I've been walking for days. Not having access to a car in the Motor City makes it pretty difficult to navigate the spread-out landscape. My pedometer cheerfully chirped out that I was a marathoner yesterday - a real neighborhood Olympian.

I've been taking a breather here to reflect and rest. I'd come from a writer's conference in Indiana that was jam-packed with inspiration but after a 5 days on a tight schedule and surviving on campus cafe salads, I needed something else. It's easier to sleep in when you don't feel like you'll miss out on some life-altering piece of information shared by your lecturer.

In my walking, I've seen a great swath of town. One one day, I went from Wayne State to John K. King warehouse of used books and back. Some pockets are going strong - the fancy coffee shops and pocket art galleries, the student areas with newly paved sidewalks - while others are a study in contrasts. Like the buildings downtown where, at one end of the block, you can order a $7 coffee drink and at the other stands a beautiful roped-off building with all its windows shattered. There's endless construction and demolition.

As a reader from afar, I romanticized Detroit for its arts and activism scene. Radical possibility rising from the collapsed heap of a capitalist ruin is an incredibly sexy metaphor. But, as I should come to expect, the lived reality is a lot more complicated. What I've loved here so far are the neighborhoods. Walking past houses where people say 'hello' from their porches. They have fancy brick turrets, most of them, even on the boarded up houses. I've loved going to free outdoor movies and participating in that DIY life with my host-friends. I'm privileged enough to see how the Motor City does Pride.

But I'm a little embarrassed to say that, of the five cities I've been to in the past two weeks, Detroit was the one I had the most expectations about. I didn't come with any plan other than to see what's here, but I did want this city to answer my question: what does it look like to build something new? And the answer I got was just another question, humbling and unexpected: what does it look like to live when no one's looking out for you?

New Zine: Loving Ghosts!

It's been quite a long time in the making, but I've finally finally finished putting together my art zine: Loving Ghosts.

The theme is on support networks - people in my life who have been invisible loving supports to me as I walk my journey. I wanted to do a lot of mixed media work, so I started out by doing pen portrait drawings, then adding colored pencil, and finally pasting them onto watercolor backgrounds. I added a little bit of cut-and-paste design to it, but not much.

Print copies of this zine will be on sale for pay-what-you-wish with a suggested $5 minimum per copy. All the proceeds will go to paying writers at As[I]Am, the Asian American social justice online magazine that I founded and currently edit. Please take the time to support us with your donation or just by reading the submissions! Speaking of which, we still have an open call for submissions for our spring issue on "Resistant Bodies." Check it out and get your work in by February 1st!

Thanks to everyone who was willing to be featured in this zine. It is really one of my greatest accomplishments in the new year.

(psst, you can now buy my zines on Etsy! Check out how you can get Loving Ghosts and back issues of my other zines there)

Getting Back to the Process

I've been writing this post in my head for over a week now:

It's about moving worth away from material successes - finishing a manuscript, getting the job you wanted - and finding that worth lies more in the intangible. In things such as how your commitment to the work, your gratitude for daily life, and the love of your friends keep you going. Something meaningful to remind you (and myself) that there are greater forces at work.

But the post has been caught in my throat. Despite all my New Year's resolutions and meditation, I haven't magically woken up one morning with all the right words in my head ready to jump out. Instead I've been on deadline knitting up gloves and editing short stories: I've only been thinking about the material, and that's made it a challenge to feel like other types of worth are more substantial.

I started looking through posts I've written in the past when I kept this blog more frequently (something I want to go back to as we move forward in 2014), and I realized that many of them were written under pressure. When I was in school, I only had a few hours that I could dedicate to my own work, versus the days and weeks I can let things drag out for now. Projects were time-sensitive by necessity, because I wouldn't have access to the photocopier or I wouldn't be able to meet up with certain people during winter break. When I produce work, it's like an explosion, but the editing process is a slow burn.

I am learning a lot about my own working style now that I have more unstructured time and - with a few mishaps - I've been trying to work with myself and create those same generative conditions. Like making sure I have a day to plan, a day or two to produce, and a week or more to edit. Like making sure I work outside of the house (even if it means going out in 9 degree weather!). Like making sure I don't get sucked into reading articles about productivity/inspiration and not actually getting through the things I want to accomplish.

Because writing and art for me are not just about the finished product, the worth is in the process. And if I avoid my process for too long, I start to feel sick. I become agitated when I lay down to meditate (another 2014 goal) and consumed by the ever-building pressure inside of me. I hope that on the exhalation that the words would come.

How do you work? What are the things that you just can't live without? Tweet me your answers.

Posts from Memory Lane: Sifting Through Old Papers...

These posts were written during the summer while I was in Bangladesh, in preparation for the upcoming academic year. Long story short: when I looked back at the archive, I didn't have the desire or the time to put them up. But now, since I'm coming back to the blog, I decided that some of them aren't half bad. Read on!

Sometimes, I get into a special fever where I need to organize my papers and/or computer files. Right that instant. Even if there's something else more important going on, I just can't tear myself away from this organizing task. And woe to the person who tries to interrupt me in my quest.

I recently got into one of these manic moods and started reorganizing my computer folders. Needless to say, things had been piling up. Labels were all out of wack. There were things from high school in the college folder and tufts of Word documents that had no proper place, just floating in my less-than-infinite computer memory. And there too, amidst all the debris, were the glowing embers of The Past.

Posts from Memory Lane: Some Lessons I've Learned About Self-Image While Drawing

These posts were written during the summer while I was in Bangladesh, in preparation for the upcoming academic year. Long story short: when I looked back at the archive, I didn't have the desire or the time to put them up. But now, since I'm coming back to the blog, I decided that some of them aren't half bad. Read on!

My favorite drawing subjects are people. I like to draw faces and bodies; shaded grey pencil drawings surrounded by pen and full colored pencil images in all sorts of poses. Throughout my Basic Drawing class, I focused heavily on drawing different parts of peoples' bodies - legs floating in mid-air or a torso completely detached from its limbs. And if there's one major non-technique related thing I've learned while drawing from life, it is this: it is a combination of what your eyes are seeing and what your mind interprets.

That is a highly critical point. It means that, no matter how much I try to draw "objectively," I will still carry with me all the interpretations/biases that I have when doing anything else. And that includes body image perceptions.

In Transition: An Exploratory Art Project

As I hinted about on my blog a while ago, I will not be entirely ineffective this winter break. Rather, I will be "doing it big," as we once would say at my high school - I am going to embark on a multi-level creative project that involves joining the very disparate elements of my creative life and synthesizing them to the best of my ability. Which begs the question: what does that look like? Below is a preliminary recording of me trying to figure that out.



Transitions. The broadest theme imaginable, but one that has fascinated me more and more as I have looked through my old work and started new projects as well. I hope that this art project will summarize a lot of the transitions I've been making personally and that others have gone through in their lives as well because, often, we don't know what a transition is until we've passed through it! Why not highlight them in medias res*?

Art for Art's Sake

I've been thinking about the distinction between working art and art that is just for its own sake. I make art of both types, and often the line between the two is faded and blurred (pardon the pun).

For instance, this drawn collage of my left hand (hand-lage!) was created for its own sake. I wanted to draw hands, so I did. But functioning art, such as zines about a specific topic or an informative video piece, carry both entertainment and a purpose beyond being interpreted by the viewer.

But who determines that a piece has this special meaning? Does it have to be a direct one? These questions I have yet to answer for myself - what are your thoughts?

Take a look at some of the different types of art I myself create, such as my DIY collage, photographs, and Creative Every Day project roundup.

Reviving Creative Every Day (CED)

This weekend, I had a brief time when felt like I was starting to lose it. Life was jumbled with work and work with life so much that I felt restless and in need of some quiet creative time.

Hence, I returned to that little gem of creating every day, but in a very different format than during the summer.

Summer days pass long and uninterrupted, generally, so I had set no time for specific creative progress. Now, I've set aside two fixed hours during the day where I just sit around and do... well, anything. This week, I've written a poem, planned out a zine to be entitled Letters to Myself, and drawn a "hand-lage" (pictures coming soon). And overall its kept me a little more sane than before.

Artists and writers never have time enough for their craft - if there were three circles in the Venn diagram of my life (school, work, and creative pursuits), I would say that creative pursuits is the one I long to do the most, but gets the least attention. For now, I'm fighting back with a schedule and a raised pen.

How to Value Your Work

This summer, I set myself the goal of going multi-media with the blog, so I am excited to present my first vlog post! The subject is valuing your artistic work and bringing it together with your identities. I apologize that there is currently no transcript because I did not yet have time to create one. After the jump, you can read some fast facts about the video-making process. Enjoy!

You may also enjoy 5 Ways to Find Balance in Productivity and some other lessons.

Creative Every Day (CED) Roundup

After listening to this great presentation by Nick Campbell on the "creative gap," I have decided to take one of his main points to heart and start creating a short project everyday. So, as of this Monday, I have been creating new work by the bucketloads (or, at least, once a day, everyday), and would love to share it! I hereby deem Thursdays as my new roundup day for all the creative things I've done for the week.

 Monday's project was to use a pen and grease pencil to create a drawing. This is what came out of it! Also, the weird lens flare was my camera having an awkward flash moment...

"Taligunge watched the man sift through the drawer; his hands lingered over bits of cloth, pieces of paper, all the little odds and ends she had collected from surveying at different meet ups and gatherings. His fingers on her possessions made a spark jump inside her."

Tuesday, I wrote about 250 words of my first serial fiction experiment. This is a teaser sentence from it, so expect more of the story on the blog in weeks to come!

Wednesday I decided to start using the mannequin I bought to do some creative Photoshop work. This is a work in progress cartoon figure that hopefully will be starring in some later work.

Interested in other creative projects I've done? Check out the DIY Interlude series to see both tutorials and works in progress, or my Project by Project series to see the final results.

Caught My Eye: A4 Papercut

While I didn't have any breaking new work for you yesterday (as I am still chugging along on my two papers - just citations to go!), here is a great artist that caught my eye this week.

Peter Callasen's "White Hand"

Peter Callesen's artwork* is amazing. He cuts up paper and makes it into 3-dimensional shapes! I encourage you to check out the entire gallery. It is truly amazing what some innovative people can do with just a normal sheet of paper.


*Though it should be pretty obvious, I don't own any of the artwork displayed here!


Absorb some more media with the on-going Caught My Eye series.

DIY Interlude: Process (Part IV)

Alright, we're back on track. This post is all about the concept art that will go into the final collage edits - I chose to work it out in Photoshop beforehand rather than draw and erase over and over (I'm much better at vectoring than using hand-eye coordination!).

I used two reference pictures for this one, both taken during my high school years. One is of me attempting to eat a balloon and the other is of a friend of mine jumping through the air.

DIY Interlude: Collage Process (Part I)

In this post, I want to begin take you through my process of making art through the example of making a collage. I have been wanting to start this project for a while now, so I think it will be interesting to track my steps over the next few weeks. Hope you have a good time watching it all unfold!

First Stage: Ideas
I always struggle in the idea process. I have an idea, think it's great, revise it over and over, and stress about what was reallythe best iteration of that idea. For example, here are some sketches that I did in thinking about this collage project (click for it to be bigger):

If you multiply all the sections of these sketches by about 1000, then you will get the amount of re-workings that I performed in my head. One big one was that the slogan I wanted to use changed from "EVERY WOMAN IS A REAL WOMAN" to "COME AS YOU ARE." I am also still not sure about the pose that I want to use.

I also laid out the large pieces of paper I'll be working on in several different configurations until I came down to this one as my favorite:

Take a look at the rest of this collage process in steps two, three, four and five.
You can also check out some more posts featuring my photography.

Art Crash!

Sometimes, when you work on a project for too long, it starts to look like a mass of craziness. You heave an internal sigh whenever you look at the thing and hope to God that it passes for something not hideous. That, my friends, is what happened to me with my negative space note card project.
Negative space, defined to us Basic Drawing students as "the spaces around an object," is hard to see if you're not looking for it. Shown above in its final form, the assignment was to isolate negative space, draw 100 note cards of it, and then paint in a colored ink around the negative space you drew. But, in this pursuit of exalting negative space, many mishaps may arise.
The first one was that we were supposed to isolate negative space rather than draw the entire area around an object; that means that what you get are non-distinct shapes rather than something that looks like, say, a necklace or something. I had already finished 10 note cards by the time I knew this.
My second mistake was underestimating the drawing time it takes to make 100 cards. I spent a 2 hours during the week and 5 hours at the Met on Saturday working on drawing those cards - it catches up with you if you don't plan ahead!
Finally, my third mistake was thinking that taping and painting was going to be the quickest part. While it took 3 hours less time than drawing the cards, a few issues arose. I couldn't get the studio door lock to open. My tape ran out. I didn't bring any music. My brush skills make me cringe... but, after 4 hours in the studio, this piece was finished.
Looking at it now, I think the whole looks much better than the sum of its parts. It is a work of art when looked at not as a laborious process of 11 total man hours, but as a piece that I myself made from start to finish. Overall, I am glad that all the individual mistakes did not hinder this project's outcome - but I am mostly glad that it is now finished for good!

Take a look at further art and drawings that I have created.