#im autism so it becomes a bit more of a technical obsession than a casual interest

[daftpatience]

What do you like about stationary? I loved reading your analysis of Kim's notebook and it made me realize there's a whole world of stationary I had no idea about haha

ohh drawing is a big stim for me, i adore the sensation of writing instruments on paper. plus im very much an art supply hoarder and love love love having pencilcases and notebooks and pens and markers and erasers and all that stuff. stationery shops are one of my many happy places! i could browse jetpens for hoursss lol

also the process of papermaking is fascinating to me! ive done a little myself and it just makes me really appreciate what nice paper feels like, which goes extra for archival and fountain pen friendly paper. i love the glide of a nice pen on some good paper that doesn't feather or bleed, and as a kid i was super obsessed with finding the ~perfect~ gel pens and markers and stuff like that. i remember obsessively hunting down copic markers and gelly rolls and that one white ink gel pen people use for highlights on their drawings and stuff. most of my work is digital nowadays but i still do a lot of scribbling on paper!

i got into fountain pens as a teen when an old guy gifted my mom a bag of old pens and ink and stuff - there was one fountain pen in there, it was all dirty and clogged so i was using it just as a dip pen for awhile and i absolutely loved the writing experience! i tried to clean it and broke it (it was.... a two hundred dollar pen.....cries) so after that out of guilt and fascination i got really into researching about fountain pens and using them. now i have my little collection of babies, and that fancy old pen is in a box waiting to be shipped to the original manufacturers for repair someday when im super rich or something.

[moosecustomizations-blog]

Its all in the twist

So I decided to make a tumblr. Maybe its the paint fumes getting to me but since I’m not really working on YouTube content any more, I wanted a place to kind of just talk about what I’m doing. Also since I’m a quote-unquote artist now it seemed like the proper thing to do since the only good art I’ve seen on the internet has come from here. That and horribly designed pages that take 85 clicks to get to the actual content. Let’s just call my previous experience with tumblr as “mixed” and move on.

So I mentioned being an artist earlier. Well unfortunately while I have always appreciated art and loved doing it casually, I have absolutely no talent whatsoever. Like seriously look at my logo. Its from years ago but it still looks like shit but its the best I could do. Drawing, sculpting, making fancy pancakes that look like pokemon, I can’t do any of that. But where I lack technical talent, I make up in understanding and feeling. Not that emotional bullshit; but rather I have a knack for knowing not only what looks good or bad but also the nuances behind WHY it looks good or bad. So I’m more like a judge of art than an artist. Arrogance at its finest.

However recently I realized that I can take that understanding and apply it to my art, and holy shit I can actually make something that doesn’t look like autism incarnate! I wanted to start flipping video games and came upon a very sad looking gamecube as one of my first flips. Pretty sure the guy I bought it from immediately bought meth with the money I paid him but hey it was a fucking phenomenal deal. 

I took that little gamecube home and cleaned him til he almost sparkled. I spent about 8 hours cleaning dirt, stickers, possible excrement and dead bugs out of this gamecube and enjoyed every minute of it. But even with my ludicrous time investment into something as worthless as a crappy old gamecube I still wasn’t satisfied. 

Poor Jorge (that’s the gamecube’s name) still had many battlescars that, despite my best intentions, I could not get rid of. Even cleaned I knew that nobody would want him, he wasn’t hardly worth the shipping it would cost to sell him. So I decided to make a great sacrifice and attempt...ART. The only way I could truly make Jorge presentable again was with a fresh coat of paint. But not black like he had been all his life, but beautiful bright RED. Seriously how did Nintendo not make a red gamecube officially? It seems so obvious. 

Being the self appointed judge I am though, I knew that most attempts at painted peripherals looked like shit. Overly glossy, uneven hand painted designs, sprayed on stencils, horrible color choices. So many good intentions, very few successes at least at the amateur level. I was determined to not let Jorge become one of those rejects. So I began to research and learn. I had officially become a student of the arts.

Scrapping the idea of a paintbrush entirely, the obvious best way to paint Jorge that didn’t involve any voodoo hydro-dipping magic was to spray paint him. Ejecting a high speed cloud of paint and hoping it lands on what you are aiming at seems precisely the kind of painting I could accomplish since it didn’t involve any fine motor skills. But it did require technique, and could go very wrong very quickly. I didn’t want to reimagine the gamecube or paint the Mona Lisa’s ass on the top, I just wanted him to look nice and red, and in the end that was/is the secret to my success: simplicity. I chose paints based on what I thought would not only give me a good color but also give me a realistic tone. Why is everyone obsessed with shiny gloss? High gloss looks like shit, and lasts a week; that’s why nearly every gaming that still looks good to this day has had a matte finish. And so would Jorge.

Squatting over a box on my back porch, I nervously went through the process of painting Jorge. Primer>Primer>Paint>Paint>Clear Coat>Clear Coat. I couldn’t believe it, Jorge looked brilliant. 

He had a nice, matte finish that closely resembled the original Gamecube’s look. Granted the paint wasn’t completely even and I was a bit more passive during the painting process than I probably should have been but he looked like something unique and proud. And not the kind of unique and proud that makes your parents embarrassed to acknowledge your existence to their friends. Jorge went from abused and abandoned to a glorious representation of what a man and a can are possible of. 

For the first time outside of YouTube I felt like I had accomplished something artistically that wasn’t in the A-for-effort category. By keeping Jorge simple and sticking to the original design scope of the gamecube, I had come up with a winning strategy that suited both my skill level and my standards. So naturally I had to do more.

That’s where this tumblr begins. In the time between now and Jorge’s redemption I’ve purchased another 5 GameCubes that are all being painted in unique styles, investigated into decaling (which is a bitch and is preventing my AWESOME Pokemon themed cube from being done), set up partnerships with upcoming gaming events to present/sell them locally, and made an etsy shop to take commissions. Seriously go commission one, it would make my day, I’ll even name it for you, no extra charge. Basically its become my life, outside of, you know, regular people stuff like going out at night, working, and finishing my degree. I even have a painting shed now that ensures I increase my risk of cancer 10 fold every time I step in there. So follow me on my journey to not only become tumblr artist #9384839, but also someone who isn’t going to accept pity praise as an acceptable level of artistic quality. Because for the first time I feel like a real artist, and won’t accept anything but the best out of myself considering how critical I’ve been to others.

This is the part where I come up with something meaningful that ties back to the title involving twisting the idea of what constitutes good art to something that doesn’t involve precise wrist movement. Seriously I had a plan here but its 4am so Im bailing on that.