"Blow Your Own Damn Nose" (and whatnot)

I'm a little cranketty of being inside for a third day, but I'm too lazy to bundle up to go into the killing cold, even though it's beautiful out, with sunshine on snow...

If only a coffee shop were open, it'd be worth layering up, but not for just a walk.
Damn pandemic. Such a bore.

Yesterday I participated in a fun fandom event though--sharing fanworks online for Flower Crown Day.
I posted "(In)Carnations: Betrothal Diptych"--my mashup of 16th cent. betrothal paintings (already posted here) & due South.

FCD came out of the due South group, but any fandom could play, so I also re-posted an old manip of Starsky & Hutch exchanging a bouquet of Picasso's flowers (in the show, the poster is on the wall above Starsky's bed).

This is one of my favorites, even though made without photoshop, it's sloppy. The way I see my fanart is, they're a sketch of an idea. I don't have the patience to make them look perfect. I guess I don't like doing digital arts that much.

[Oh, nice: just now, someone commented on (In)Carnations:
"These made me ecstatic with delight!"
Fandom can be such a balm. Fans tend to be super-supportive of one another. They're effusive with praise if they like something, and if they don't, usually they say nothing. Usually.]

I feel differently about proficiency at toy photography:
I'd don't want a slick Hollywood effect, but I'd like to get better at it--especially lighting. Photography is light.

I watercolored this morning at the sunny dining room table.
The background turned muddy, the way watercolor specializes in, but luckily the painting of the girlette Eeble was fine, so I cut her out as a paper doll.
A friend of my auntie knit her outfit.

 

I'd like to be better at painting too. Not by studying (though there are useful tips I could learn), but by keeping doing it.

I like thinking about things, it makes me happy, but these physical things, like art-making--you have to do them. That's their nature, right?

Cake is nice, but you have to eat the cake.

Who said, If something's worth doing, it's worth doing badly?

A-ha! Here's the scoop, from a slightly annoying pedant.
(I do love finding misquotes, but if it's a good sentence, really, I don't care if it's misattributed on a refrigerator magnet. It's a refrigerator magnet.)

"G.K. Chesterton actually wrote this:
“These things [e.g. ‘writing one’s own love letters or blowing one’s own nose’] we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly” (––Orthodoxy, 1908).

Chesterton’s point here is not that things worth doing are worth doing badly but that some things one must do oneself, however badly they are done. “Blow your own damn nose” would be a pretty good paraphrase and might even work as a refrigerator magnet."

What I mean is--what I find encouragement in is––if you're a beginner, naturally you're going to be bad at stuff. Don't let that stop you. 

Also, some things can't be fixed.

I love in The Dig when a sweet little boy says to the dour archaeologist that he, the boy, has failed to save his mother from pain.
Instead of reassuring the boy with pablum, the archaeologist tells him, "We fail every day."

A perverse kind of comfort, maybe, but it's useful because it's true.
It took me years to figure that out after my own mother took her life:
I failed her . . . because there was no way I couldn't have. There was no way to "win".

Sometimes the only winning to be had is in making the effort.

ANYWAY.

Here's a wonderful thing I repaired---an old carnival prize bear. (Bear?) Cheap and flimsy as it was, even new, it was not repairable, but it was just so dear, I saved it from the thrift-store garbage and mended it anyway.

It's small--the span of your hand.
I sewed a new eye for it and backed its threadbare fabric with felt.

Recently Marz asked if it could come live with her at her new place. I wasn't surprised she likes it, because it's likable, but so are a lot of the toys.
When I saw its photo on the desktop next to a photo of Jack Lemmon, I thought--that's it. Marz loves Jack Lemmon, and I think these two were separated at birth: