For a few years now, I've been wanting a paintbrush tattoo somewhere on my right arm as a reminder for myself to never stop creating. I knew it was the next tattoo I was going to get after my lotus flower (Read about it here), and I was just waiting for the time (and funds) to get it.
When my grandpa passed away suddenly a couple weeks ago, I knew I wanted to commemorate him the same way I had commemorated my grandma with my first tattoo. It didn't take very long to decide what I wanted to get for him - the Chinese character for Eternity. It's the first character in his first name, and it's a nice reminder that he and my family will always be there for me. Even though at one point I thought I'd never get a Chinese character tattooed on myself, I thought it was so fitting - my grandpa has always been good with the language. He's named every new baby (except funnily enough, Hera) that's come into the family with beautiful, meaningful words despite his lack of schooling.
Since I knew I wanted to get the character for my grandpa, I decided to just take the plunge and get both at the same time. I visited Chameleon this past Saturday with my roommate, Emma, after we got brunch at Shake Shack (I highly recommend the SmokeShack because bacon, and also, the guy making the burgers behind the counter was mad cute), and we spent less than an hour in there getting them. Shout out to the tattoo artist that saw me, Jorge Seested!
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| Just in case you were wondering, no, these two images are not to scale to each other. The Chinese character tattoo is actually quite a bit larger than that, although it's not as tall as the paintbrush. |
The Chinese character is on my left forearm. I wanted it to be near the same area as the one I got for my grandma, but I didn't want them to be next to each other - they weren't from the same side of the family and it didn't feel right to not give them an ample amount of "real estate" each. I found out that getting this area of the arm tattooed was actually a really bizarre sensation - you know that game where you walk your fingers up someone's arm and see if they can figure out exactly where their elbow crease was? This was kind of like that, because I kept misplacing where the feeling of the tattoo needle actually was. It didn't particularly hurt more than my other tattoos, although it stung for a really long time afterwards, probably because of the coloring. Also, the skin around it is still a bit red, so it's probably a tad bruised.
The paintbrush is on my right outer wrist. It's pointing towards my fingers, because my fingers are what allows me to create, and it's maybe two inches long and so cute. This one also hurt just as much as the other tattoos (so, not that much) except for the paintbrush tip, which hurt just a smidge more probably because it was a lot closer to the bones in the wrist. However, unlike the character tattoo, this one barely stung afterwards.
All in all, I'm super happy with both tattoos - I think they're both really beautiful and they represent two more important parts of my life.
Will I eventually get more ink? Probably. I've been considering getting a tiny robot because Hera likes to call me her robot, since I do and make everything she asks me to. Is that weird? Maybe I spoil her too much.
I know tattoos are kind of a controversial topic, but these are quite small and fairly easy to cover up with sleeves once they're fully healed if I need them to be hidden. I think they're just another fun way to express myself, and besides, live a little!
How do you feel about tattoos? Would you ever get one - let alone two at the same time?
I've been trying to draw more from life now, to get back into that sketching habit that I, truth be told, never really had.
I was much more of a set up in front of a nice landscape and sit there for hours kind of girl. Once I drew a mansion with gel pens and sat in the sun for 6 hours. My dad got sunburnt waiting for me. Another time my family went on a hike around a lake and I sat and painted the lake.
I work in the Rotch library at MIT, and I thought it might be fun to start documenting all the things behind the desk. Not that there's really anything super interesting, but I do sit at that desk for many hours per week, so why not?
This is one of our trusty bar code scanners. Sometimes it fails at its job. We love it anyways.
I have been a painter and an artist my entire life.
Okay, maybe when I was like four, I couldn't really call myself an artist, although my mom is very adamant that my drawing level was much higher than an average four year old. Something about being able to draw more than just stick figures and smiley faces on butterflies apparently, in mom's eyes, made me a better drawer than my peers. I think it's the mom-ness talking.
However, I never put down my brush after I picked it up for the first time. When I moved to China, my dad found me a weekly art class, where my passion for drawing really began to flourish under a man who was possibly the most caring and invested art teacher I will ever meet. He trained me in traditional fine arts, with still lives and sculptures and art retreats into the more beautiful suburbs of Shanghai, through what began as a rather impossible language barrier. He spoke Chinese, and I spoke almost none of it; he would spend so much time on me, explaining the finer details, only for me to ask him at the very end, "What do you mean?". Once, when we went on a trip to some suburb area to draw from life, he was telling me to add texture to the tree bark in Chinese and I asked him jokingly, "What's tree bark?"
Instead of giving up on me, he actually stood there and spent a while racking his brain trying to come up with a different way to describe tree bark for me because he really thought I didn't understand him.
That's the kind of teacher he was, and this is a story that he still likes to tell his students that end up under his wing.
After a few years under his tutelage he asked me to join his Saturday art classes that he held for a few students. I promptly quit my ballet classes to join the class.
That's how much I loved drawing. I spent almost 10 hours weekly with this teacher, just painting. My mom once said that I spent more time painting per week than I did doing anything for any other class.
When I went to boarding school in Connecticut, I was put into the pre-AP Painting and Drawing class with the art teacher, JP, there. His teaching style was so different, and he taught me to loosen up with my artwork and be less technical.
I learned my foundation in China and I learned to be colorful in the US.
After doing the AP my sophomore year, I opted to take a break from the Painting and Drawing class for the next year. I managed one semester out of three before I was almost literally crawling back to the studio asking JP to let me into his year-long pre-AP class again.
I realized that painting and drawing did wonders for my mental health, even though at the time I didn't think of it as mental health - drawing was just a part of me and it felt like I had tried to rip it out of me for that semester. When I took my break from it, I literally didn't know what to do with myself - I had all this specific energy and concentration that wasn't going anywhere and I needed an outlet for the stress from my APs, but I didn't have one.
I didn't think much of it at the time. I just felt better after I went back to the studio and started drawing again.
At MIT, I didn't have time to draw. I painted for my friends, on their birthdays and Christmas, but I wasn't drawing every day like I had been in high school. I wasn't going out on walks and drawing the landscape despite how beautiful Boston is. I was socializing, making friends, stressing out over psets, not getting much sun, and pursuing other creative things that were more mindless, like crochet and knitting. (Not that there's anything wrong with crochet and knitting, I still love my hobbies. It's just not the same for me.)
As my semesters have finally mellowed out (because I'm not taking studio anymore) I wanted to get back into drawing but the activation energy I needed to begin was enormous. I would sketch things out on canvas and then just leave it for months without going back to work on it, because I preferred lying in bed watching TV - it was less energy, more mindless. Somehow over the course of MIT I began preferring activities where thinking wasn't required.
I had become so burnt out, I forgot what I was passionate about.
When my grandpa passed away two weeks ago, I didn't know what to do. I wanted to be able to say goodbye, but he's in China, and I'm in Boston. I wanted to see him again, so I asked my dad for pictures, and I naturally gravitated towards painting to work through my sorrow.
I had painted my grandmother, my mom's mother, when she passed away, and it only seemed right to paint my grandpa as well.
It took me a week to complete it and it was a horrible painting - the photo I was working off of was pixelated and unclear so I had a poor reference, and my skills are still so rusty, but the painting did what I wanted it to do. It helped me work through my sadness. Studying his face, despite the graininess of the photo, really helped with my mental health.
What a classic Grandpa Lu thing to do, to help me rekindle my love for drawing - rekindle my love for the act of drawing - even as he passes away. He always did try to help me when he could.
Since then, I've been making a true effort to draw more regularly. I mean, when the semester began I told myself I wanted to draw more, but I never really acted upon it. Now I'm actually putting into my planner a reminder for something I should do every day. I'm bringing around my sketchbook and when I have nothing to do - which is surprisingly frequent nowadays because I'm trying to take a chill final semester - I turn to a fresh page and draw something in my field of view.
I forget how nice it is to lose myself in my pen and concentrate on drawing what I see.
I'm still rusty, of course. I'll probably be rusty for a very long time, and even when I get back to the level I was at before, I'll still feel like I'm not good enough. That has always been my constant state when it comes to drawing, and it has always pushed me to improve more and practice more.
Drawing has always been there to help me be happy. I just forgot that it was still an option.
What passions do you have that help you work through your problems?
Recently I've been on a handlettering kick. I've always looked at beautiful brush calligraphy and lusted over the skill, and I've finally decided to kick myself in the butt and start trying to learn the skill as well. I found some Instagram handlettering + doodling challenges and I picked two to combine (just to see how creative I could get, I guess?). The challenges are #hobonichichallenge by @penguincreative and #surelysimplelettering / #surelysimpleart by @surelysimpleblog.
The prompts for this one are favorite fruit (#hobonichichallenge) and Cinderella (#surelysimplelettering).
I just started out so my strokes are still pretty unsure and a bit wobbly. Hopefully this will improve as I continue to practice! Also, I want to try doing different fonts - my writing tends to be commanded by the pen in general anyway (my handwriting changes wildly from pen to pen, and I don't really know why) so that'll be a challenge in itself.
One of the saddest things about college is that you stop reading.
At least, I did.
I used to be a voracious reader. I was the kid that had a flashlight hidden under her pillow and piles of books hidden under her bed, until one day she upgraded to a bed that had a hidden compartment in the headboard (I know, I was so cool) so her current books hid there instead. I was the kid that would have her textbook on the table and a book in her lap and end up getting spanked because of it. I was the kid that had so many books her bookcase couldn't hold them, so she took up the shelves in the DVD cases and in her parents' office. I loved reading. I loved fantastical stories where I could escape and go on adventures with other people; I loved traveling through history on the magic tree house and solving mysteries with the Boxcar Children and fighting the Yeerks with the Animorphs and learning magic spells with Harry Potter.
I still read in high school, but my focus was forced to shift and I read classic literature with my English classes and SAT prep books (I know, how sad) in my sophomore and junior years. I remember loving Brave New World especially, even though I hated it when I had read it a few years prior, and I painted a scene from The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, the beautiful scene on the ocean when he's looking at a girl who has seaweed tangled on her leg, and I enjoyed them but I could never read them as passionately as I had read young adult fiction before because the language never flowed as easily for me. When I could I stole time to read books like The Other Boleyn Girl and Harry Potter (for the millionth time) and at some point I read all of Twilight once and decided it wasn't worth picking up ever again. I fell in love and then out of love with John Green's work. I read The Art of Racing in the Rain and fell in love with the idea of dogs even though at the time I was still scared of them. I read Go Ask Alice and became even more vehemently against drugs.
Books had always been my solace.
When I got to MIT, I stopped reading. I can probably count the number of books I've read out of class on one hand, and even for class I only read a few - the study of architecture is so much more about being hands on than reading literature about other people's works, so the only books I read were for the random humanities classes that I undertook for fun.
And I forgot how to read for fun. I felt so obligated to read books that were "for adults", books that were classic literature and books that were self-help and books that were not categorized as "young adult" because those books were for high schoolers and I was going to be an adult. I felt like I had to be reading short poems and stories with some kind of hidden deeper meaning that I had to figure out and biographies and nonfiction books and all these books that I didn't find interesting because ultimately I have always been a child at heart and I will always want to lose myself in fantastical worlds.
Whenever I go to a bookstore I look at everything that I want to buy and then walk away because I feel like I should be reading something of more importance, but really, what is of more importance anyway? Every well written fiction book has some kind of moral of the story, some kind of reflection on today's society, some hidden thoughts and ideas that only the most committed readers will go and parse through to find. Just look at the huge Harry Potter community - the book series that was written for children and yet somehow, nine years later, adults and children alike are still reading and finding details that Jo hid in her words and recognizing parallels between the Wizarding world and our own boring Muggle world.
I like books that tell me stories and books that I want to go back to constantly so I can read between the lines, not books where I have to spend eons of time trying to understand what it is the author is even trying to say.
When I was in New York my friend Alyssa told me about her reading challenge, where she wanted to read 30 books in 2016. I was intrigued, but kind of scared because it's been so long since I've last picked up a book. I asked her what she thought a good number might be to pick up on, and she said to start with an easy number. We settled on 15.
15.
15 year old me would've scoffed at that number. 15 books in a whole year? 15 books in 366 days? That's about a book every 24 days. That's a pathetic number of books.
20 year old me is wondering if I will even have the time to read 15 books this year. I would love to be able to read 15 books. I would love to be able to read 20, 30, 40 books, but will I have the time? Will I have the energy?
The thing about college is that my brain is so tired from classes that I don't want to spend the brainpower digesting words on a page. It's why I started watching so much TV. Interpreting the body language and having people talk at me is so much easier.
Since I wanted to begin reading again, I decided to start tracking everything I was reading and watching. As in movies and tv shows. I have yet to begin tracking youtube videos because quite frankly, it would be rather embarrassing.
As of yet, I have finished two books (and many more tv episodes than that). If I can manage to read 2 or more books a month, I will be quite pleased, although I am currently working on a French Tintin book that is taking longer than expected because, well, it's in French. I plan on writing a recap blog post once a month or once every two months for what I've been reading and watching, and perhaps that will keep me more on track?
Cross your fingers for me.
Do you like to read in your free time, or are you mainly a tv/movie kind of person? Do you have any book recommendations you think I should read, given what I've said I enjoy reading? Let me know!
