occasional.email

After many years of kind of hating email, I turned a corner about them recently. The thing I realized was that the emails I hate are all of the notifications, unwanted newsletters and random noise you have to sift through daily. After signing up for some newsletters I have really enjoyed, I started to see the value of a nice email from someone you actually care to hear from.

It’s a minor difference but that’s kind of the plan with occasional.email. An email from me every couple of weeks with some links to nice stuff or whatever I’m working on lately. That’s it.

Painting 3

A few months ago I was talking to Kaitlin about how my studio has a ton of extra space that she could paint in. Then I realized that I could also paint there. Only problem was I had never really painted anything substantial before.

Against better judgement I started out huge. When you want to paint something that big it presents a lot of problems that just keep spiraling.

  1. I guess I will have to build a canvas because canvases that size are hundreds of dollars. How do I even do that?
  2. Watch some bad tutorials on YouTube
  3. Oh great, turns out all of my tools are actually bad. Now I need an even more elaborate way of doing this.
  4. Ugh now I need somewhere to actually store something this big. The finished thing won’t even fit in our apartment!

You get the idea. Eventually I just had to bite the bullet, start mapping things out, and try to do it. Amazingly, that first canvas turned out extremely well. The ~8 after that were more of a mixed bag 😅

I’m enjoying the challenge of figuring out the process of painting. How to build solid canvas frames, stretching and priming canvases consistently, making a really nice off-white, etc. Lately I’ve just been trying to paint extremely clean lines. It’s been difficult to pull off at this scale. The painting I just finished was all about just taking the time to make all the lines nice:

inside baseball dot zone

Making email templates is easily my least favorite web development-related task. I tried my best to keep this template streamlined (and still look nice). It still took way too much trial and error. I blame Gmail.

Anyway, let me know if anything looks weird 😄

doodle.zone →

recommendation.zone →

obsession.zone →

render.zone →

This has been your sorta regularly scheduled occasional.email.
Paul 👋

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