The new ballroom of the local wheel chair dancing group is on the second floor of a building without an elevator.
One would think that this will lead to a few problems…

Is this true?
No it isn’t.
But I do come across a lot of these kind of stupid situations where you would think that it’s obvious what is going wrong and that someone should fix it. But nobody ever does.
For instance 40% of the employees of sheltered workplace Promen have back problems.
So you would think that we get very little assignments that demand heavy lifting. But we have a lot of them.
Or you would think that if there’s a need for heavy lifting people would help each other. But they don’t.
They complain a lot about pain in there backs but they never seem to realize that they can change the situation.

For years I’ve been wondering why that is.
There seem to be several reasons.
For one thing people want to fit in. So instead of trying to change the circumstances, they try to change themselves to fit the circumstances.
But there are also a few other reasons.
Some people don’t recognize the problems as common problems, but feel that everybody should solve it for him self.
Some feel that since it is a common problem it isn’t their responsibility to solve it.
And some simply feel that isn’t possible to solve common problems; you can’t change the world.

In fact it is quite possible and fairly easy to solve common problems.
It is as easy to complain about common problems as it is to complain about personal problems.
The trick is to never lay blame and never expect anyone to be grateful for your efforts.
If you do that people really appreciate the fact that you are calling attentions to their problems.

The next step is to suggest ways to solve the problems. By changing the way they behave and the way they do their work people could make life much easier for them selves.
It take a few months but at some point someone will try it and find that it indeed makes his life easier.
And since it’s a common problem it also improves the lives of his colleagues. A little. But as the circumstances improve more people are willing to change their behavior. And little by little common problems get solved.

I’ve been doing this for the last 20 years with ever more success.
It won’t change the world, but it does change my corner of the world.

This may sound funny but I’ve been using it for the last couple of months and it really works.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve finally finished my drawing of my chair without the pillows and as you can see I’m not very satisfied with the result.
It is a difficult drawing. Especially the curved lines that must be drawn at an angle.

I’m not sure what I should expect from myself with this kinds of drawings. But I keep seeing a lot of details that aren’t drawn the way they should.

Probable it just means that I’ll have to revisit this drawing at some point.

Naked chair
(For those who can’t read the comments (starting at the top and going clock wise): wrong angle, to thick, wrong shape, wrong angle, wrong angle, should be further forward, lost my patience)

I almost forgot.
This is more or less the negative space drawing assignment for the right side of the brain book. Of course the drawing for the book should only have an out line were as I tried to draw the details on the in site of the chair.

One trick that the book teaches and that I found to be something of a mix blessing is how to judge what the proportions of the different parts of the chair.
You just pick a line on your subject that is of a middle length. That line is called “one unit”. Then you compare every other line in you subject to that unit.
To translate it to your drawing you pick a unit that is nicely proportionated to the size of your paper to measure your subject.

The nice thing about this method is that it’s very easy figure out how to get the interesting parts of your subject on the paper without it being to small or to large.
I found that the down side is that it’s very hard to judge the length of lines that are much shorter then your unit. Is a line 1/5 or 1/6 of the length of the unit?
For this kind of drawing it does matter.

Stumbling into a new technique.

I wanted to experiment with a few blue colors just as I did for green in a study a few days ago. Finding a few colors I could use in clouds or in a sea drawing.
When mixing colors I always like to mix in some white. Even though I wasn’t clear on the effect it would have.
In the study a few days ago I used thick layers of pigment and although the white gave the color a softer feel it didn’t make that much difference.

This time I mix thin layers of pigment. Blending them with a white pencil had an astounding effect. The blending pencil pulled the color out of the paper.

Blue patches
Especialy with the four lower patches you can see the result of blending with a white pencil.You can, of course, get the same effect if you use a tortillon but a blending pencil has a sharp point that can create interesting effects. In my next drawing I will show you what I mean.

What is it for

A tortillon is a conical piece of pressed paper pulp. It is used to blend colors when you are drawing with graphite pencils or color pencils.

When you use a tortillon to blend a color, pigment is transferred from the paper to the tortillon. Which means that the next time you try to use that tortillon you can’t use it for a different color. If you would it would ruin your drawing.
For that reason I’ve been using pieces of toilet paper to blend colors. You can trough them out when your done.

Mixing colors

But when you mix colors you have to apply much more pressure while blending. That means that you really do need tortillons. So I’ve done a little bit of experimenting and I found that it is in fact very easy to clean a tortillon if you rub it over a sheet of middle grain sanding paper.
The tortillon gets a little shorter and the pigment is left behind on the sanding paper.

Mixing colors 5C

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Mixing color 5D

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Ford Smith is a contemporary artist who paints very beautiful colorful landscapes