Lettering, ornithology and other meditative hobbies for every day
Hand work is pleasant in the first place because its result can be seen. (and touch it) - but a little that just as quickly raises faith in oneself, as a tangible result of one's efforts. In addition, in such cases it is easier to assess your progress, find mistakes and correct them - this also gives a lot of food for thought and does not let you get bored. But any hobby has meditative properties, this is its purpose. We talked with girls who are fond of embroidery, birdwatching, photographing plants and other classroom activities, and asked why they chose these particular hobbies and how they enrich everyday life.
Embroidery
I first tried to embroider when I had a daughter, Aglaia. It was in the late 80s, it was difficult to buy beautiful clothes for the little ones, and I had a lot of free time. I bought a few books on the embroidery technique and began to embroider vests, some napkins, I really liked it, but then I abandoned everything. A couple of years ago, my adult daughter and I decided to try embroidering her T-shirt designs. She is a designer and artist, I really like her drawings and I really liked the idea of popularizing them. We tried - and we did it.
I like the process of embroidery, there is something meditative in it. I like very much to pick the threads in color to the picture. I embroider quickly because I can't wait to see the result. I embroider Aglaia's drawings with stitch-stitched seam and satin, I can cross, but I don’t really like it, because in this technique you immediately see the picture and have to follow the instructions clearly - it seems to me that there is little room for creativity. We, of course, did not assume that what we were doing would be liked by someone else. First they showed it to friends, then they took it to Lambada, it turned out that others like it too.
Embroider is actually not difficult at all, the main thing is to have desire and patience. But we must bear in mind that this is very tired eyes, it is important to properly equip the workplace with good lighting. Well, be sure to alternate this exercise with exercise and walks.
Bird watching
I do not remember when I became interested in Birdwatching. I grew up in the neighborhood, which stood aloof from the city by the forest, and in this forest I spent almost all my childhood. I didn’t know the words “Birdwatching” then, but Formozov’s “Pathfinder companion”, “Following the Footsteps of Robinson” Versilina and “Lesnaya Gazeta” Bianki were my reference books. A modern, adult, countdown begins, probably, about seven years ago, when my friend Pasha and I went to the place recommended by one acquaintance, got confused in geotags and did not go there: there were no mushrooms, where we were, there was a huge peat bog with artificial canals, overgrown with lakes, disassembled by a narrow-gauge railway, left over from peat extraction, and an abandoned ancient churchyard. We sat on a branch of an oak by the lake and saw an amazingly beautiful heron, ejected from the reeds. We did not immediately realize that it was a heron, and we had to google the bird to be sure. Since then, this swamp has become our place of power, and birdwatching is our hobby.
I can’t call myself a keen birdwatcher: I don’t participate in amateur scientific accounting programs that are held by the Russian Bird Conservation Union, I don’t go to the bird rally and bird wedges in my personal list of birds that I have seen and identified in the natural habitat, a total of 52 species. On the one hand, it is more than the average person who is not interested in birds, but on the other hand, it is negligible for the birdwatch. For comparison, in the list of John Hornbakl, the main birdwatch of the world at the moment, 9435 species. That is, he saw almost all the birds of the world in principle. But he devoted his whole life to this, and I just like birds, I like to watch their habits, learn something new.
In fact, I basically love wildlife, just birds - this is the most accessible part of it for an urban person. What kind of wild mammals can you find in the center of Moscow, except for rats and stray dogs and cats? Is that squirrels in the park. And the birds are the sea: gulls, nightingales, blackbirds, finches, starlings, different types of titmouses, waxworms, bullfinches, and so on, cannot be listed because there are 226 birds in Moscow Atlas (created, by the way, by the amateur birdwatchers) species. I always have a determinant with me (the Collins Bird Guide application is terribly expensive, but very cool), because you can meet interesting birds in the most unexpected places. At the weekend, my daughter and I went to the city park of Budapest to feed the ducks and suddenly found among them three cormorants. Now, of course, I wonder where they came from: either they stopped to rest during the passage, or they ran away from the zoo located in the neighborhood.
Birdwatching is a terribly democratic hobby. In principle, it does not need anything but binoculars and a determinant, which can also be free: before buying Collins Bird Guide, I used the absolutely wonderful reference book “Birds of Central Russia” on the Ecosystem website. They, by the way, have a determinant application, but only for Android. For residents of Moscow and the region there is an excellent mail-conference birdnewsmoscow. I, though I left Moscow, do not unsubscribe from it, because this is the most peaceful reading in the world. Already from some of the headers of the letters, the mood rises: "Wagtails are still in Moscow", "Rooks on metropolitan grubs", "Swan at the water tower", "Sparrow sychik. Strokes to the portrait". As they say on Facebook, # all the news should be the same.
Clay crafting
I started pottery by chance two years ago. She took her daughter to a well-known teacher in Moscow, Sonya Israel, to classes, and Sonya offered to stay and try. It turned out that this is a pleasant, meditative exercise, because clay is a living material. Plus, I have not learned any craft for a long time; nevertheless, most of the time I deal with such matters that are difficult to touch. So this is a very important feeling when something appears under your hands, which you can use later.
The very first cup I made still lives at home with my best friend — she drinks coffee from her. It turned out, however, that material properties must be taken into account: clay is different, different textures, shrinks during firing, the product decreases accordingly, the colors change color, the glaze can lie in an unpredictable way depending on the firing conditions, and cannot be read in any book - you can only learn from experience. Well, attention to detail - somewhere a little bit coaxed, then you can’t look at work and you can’t fix it anymore.
Most of the work I gave away to friends and acquaintances, I used some things myself, but the ceramics deal with it - plates and cups beat, providing the potter with new work. Unfortunately, the ceramist will not leave me, I really do not have talent for it - this becomes especially obvious when someone near you sits behind a circle and, for the first time, picks up the perfect bowl, for example. But I began to better understand where the good work is, and where it’s so-so, I see complexity and beauty and meticulously choosing a new cup at city fairs.
Photographing plants
When Instagram just started gaining popularity, everyone started it up for photos of food, pets and selfies. I did the same. Then there was a desire to shoot something a little more artistic (photography and before that was my hobby), and I wanted to have a separate topic for the blog, but nothing came to mind. Everything happened by chance, the starting point was a photo of beautiful dew on the plants, then it came to be understood how it can also be nicely processed. I started to like to shoot only grass and plants, my friends started to like, everyone started asking for original photos to put on the desktop, and I changed the screensaver on the phone to some green one.
After writing on my account on a tip from my Instagram friends, the number of subscribers increased from 5,000 to 10,000, and six months later, when I was added to the category of recommended users, and to 70,000. Then I felt responsible for the content of the account. Of course, some services began to offer monetization with advertising, but I do not see the point. Many people ask me why I only shoot plants. "First of all, it is beautiful," I cannot describe my hobby differently.
I take pictures everywhere, in Moscow in flowerbeds and in the courtyard near the entrance, in the woods, on vacation, there were even photos from my beloved Highgate cemetery in London, but I never go anywhere on purpose, not even in any botanical garden. There is plenty of material for photos everywhere, there would be a desire and the right lighting. On all walks with friends I always lag behind and everyone is waiting for me, because right now I noticed a snail in some bushes and I can not tear myself away. I never know the names of plants (at one time I signed posts with quotes from Krovostok), just looking for pieces of beauty in the midst of green chaos. By the way, I made the first successful photos with a grasshopper in a terrible rectangular flowerbed, which from year to year is planted in my hometown near Moscow, not thinking about beauty and about any landscape design. In general, it looks terrible, but if you get closer and practically climb into it, you can find 10 square centimeters of interesting. I regularly hear testimonials from my friends that they often come to my instagram for the rest, let it be so.
Drawing
My fiance has long dreamed of learning to draw, but he could not decide and organize everything. At some point I enrolled him in the oldest art school in Sydney - 125 years old, by European standards, of course, this is ridiculous - in the course of basic drawing for adults and went myself for the company to support it.
The course of expectations was not justified: we spent 10 lessons of three and a half hours drawing a plaster head with a pencil without any interference or guidance from the teacher. It was difficult, on the street there was a local summer with his +43, the groom was disappointed in the idea of art, and I was upset that drawing would remain in my memory such an unpleasant task, and a couple of years went to another basic course at another school. The impetus was that I got a job working in the design department of large media, and although my personal work does not imply any creativity, I wanted to better understand the people I work with and what they learned - and how they do it all.
On the new course, we drew eight classes in charcoal, ink and pencils, model models posed for us, someone cried at a lesson about perspective, and my colleague liked it so much as I drew a ram's skull with ink, that she took the picture for herself. The setting was very artistic and romantic, it all happened in the building of the chapel of the main former prison of Sydney - in general, I immediately signed up for watercolor after this course.
Watercolor was monstrous, and I signed up for drawing nature, so as not to be upset - and so on. Apparently, in drawing I like his inexhaustibility. I have been drawing for a year and a half at least once a week (plus online courses and homework), and still do not understand what I like, what I want to do, what materials are the coolest. You can go to any class at any time on any course, as in the current river, and understand that a new teacher has a new perspective on the same perspective - which, in general, is pure mathematics and personal views should not be there.
I don’t want to be an illustrator, nor a designer. I like the descriptive part of drawing, the one that is closer to the documentary than to the literature, and at the same time fast and sketchy - well, except to go to the courtroom, thank you, no.
I think I will walk for a long time and just learn - I have no ambitions, humility is enough, and I sit quietly in my inner Mongolia with a pencil three or five hours a week, I really like it, especially when I am being structured in a structured way. And most importantly, my discovery - that expensive materials at the very beginning save a lot of nerves, and if you don’t like drawing and nothing at all, it means you need to look for another teacher, even if it is highly recommended.
Lettering
At the end of last year, I did one project on book design, on the cover of which I had to make an inscription “by hand”. Ever since the days of teenagers and the passion for “Management” and the “Process” heading on the website of Lebedev’s studio, it’s been postponed that giving “handwritten” fonts for written letters is equal to trying to give the shop dumplings for grandmothers. So I made the first microwork at night, with a marker on conditionally white paper, took it off with a telephone and circled it in a vector. Then she got involved and mastered work in conditions of healthy sleep, ruler and normal paper.
I do myself on my own, firstly, lessons, tips, books and good works are much more than time (physically), and secondly, workshops are still in London, either for beginners or 700 pounds - but as soon as the stars come up ok, i'm sure to go learn from somebody. In order not to get bored, I almost daily wrote a kind of gothic fracture (a kind of gothic), some kind of hip-hop quotation, for three months hovering over the gothic writing with parallel handles something began to turn out. Then I looked at the classroom course on lettering, and the focus shifted slightly in this direction.
If explained on fingers, then calligraphy is when letters are written, it is necessary to repeat and memorize movements to full automatism, most of all it looks like fencing. In lettering letters are drawn, and it may include imitation of calligraphic pens and pens. I love both that and another - letters and fonts, though complex, but lively, plastic, work with them fascinates tightly. Immediately, I’ll make a reservation that I’m stinging and doing different designs since adolescence, so I came to this area more or less prepared, understanding the basic principles of shaping in letters. Generally, lettering was a fashionable piece of 2014, so now it’s especially good to do it - all the fashionable guys switched to something else, and there are plenty of resources. Things to be prepared for: a lot of paper is wasted; If you count in the trees, I have already exhausted a couple of groves, and I try to save this. I'm going to go to the streets and walls.
Photo: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 via Shutterstock