The art of overcomplexifying everything

I decided to write this text because, let's be straight, I'm getting bored at the fact that I struggle to keep things simple, compact and short, and I never seem to finish anything (read: blog texts). I will now list some things I am or have and which affect my blogging.

The cat is from Kave, then croc, penguin and laptop came from Lahjakas, the easel was also bought, and I don't know the history of that flowerpot which serves as a seat. The rest is made by me.

I am a perfectionist. Posting a blogtext takes forever, because I don't want to publish them before they're the quality I want.

I am autistic. I got the Asperger's syndrome diagnosed when I was 13, I guess it was 2008. I think that due to my autism I have a habit to think everything the complex and more logical and scientific way that people who don't have this. I analyze, I ponder, I draw images and maps in my head, I think how this and this correlates with that and why and how and what started it. And more often than not it goes out of hand. 

I've made this kind of bridles into functioning 1:9 scale miniatures. I call them fightmore.

I have ADD. It basically means that I struggle to focus on boring things - like applying millions of layers of one color so that the transparent becomes a new color layer. Of course there's also much more than that. But patience, while normally can be achieved by stubbornness, just doesn't come that way for an ADD person. It's like AD/HD but without the... H. 

I am depressed. I think it was diagnosed a couple years ago, or before the pandemic went crazy globally. There have been easier and worse phases, and this disorder is one of the biggest explanations to my current struggle to make art. It's annoying, but I can't do much for it. Do you know what it feels like, when you read about mental issues for ages, and then randomly find out that you do suffer from them as well? It's an absurd experience, but ah so useful what comes to accuracy in pessimistic storywriting.

I have zero patience (depending on thing). Check the ADD paragraph. But this is exactly why I haven't been that much into hair-by-hair coloring on model horses, haven't done much dapples ever and overall don't care that much about really complex colors. I also don't add as much detail to anything as I wish I could. It just isn't possible. 

Drawing on paper is a different story then. I can hone and detail a doodle for hours and not lose my interest towards working on it.

I can make simple things sound overly complex. Check my animal doll tutorial. Or snaffle bit tutorial. None of those are complex, but I make them sounds like that. Apologies, but that's very unlikely to change ever.

I overthink and overanalyze, count "what if"s. This is why I struggle with opinion texts and rants. I love the idea of those, and writing them, but I haven't actually published that much of them. Should I? How many readers are going to throw their computers (or smartphones - hooray!) into a wall if I let them read my harsh and blunt opinion texts? (Didn't you just read my secret opinion about smartphones...?) I want to figure this thing out especially, because I and Kave want to post them more than anything. We want to bring up conversation topics, and sugar-coating is not an option.

I don't double check, I double-double-double-triple check. This means that I'm going to through-read a text at least twice before I publish it. It's not that fun really, and I struggle to through-read with thought,  except when I should focus on everything else. 

You didn't expect this photo. Haha!

I have zero idea what I am doing, more than I just have an idea about what it can be about. This applies to everything. I also believe it is why I have no idea if I've written enough; when to say the text is finished and ready for publishing. How do you everyone else know that?

I hate the fact that I can't lay interest on more than a few narrow topics at once, on one phase. A phase means a time which I can't tell the length of. When an autistic person has a special interest, it often dominates their attention and life for a certain phase, which can last from hours to decades. My oldest passion have been dinosaurs - I've hobbied them my entire life. And my passion to horses started when I was about seven, then it lasted to 2011 or so and eventually modified into the less crazy level (doesn't mean I could not be a horse crazy still...). Examples of short or occasionally repeating interest phases could be this and that animal group (like once pinnipeds - for a few hours) or something else biology-related. 

The childhood me could have freaked our due to excitement if saw this - or learned that they can have dinos like this once they grow up.

Speaking of passions and special interests, one of mine are rats. This isn't a surprise to everyone, I guess? Unless you're a first time reader? I've been crazy about rats since 2007 when we got real ones, and that also is why and when I started drawing them (and got really serious about that in 2011). And because I'm a model horse dork, I also naturally became a model rat dork. I think we're a rare breed. 

Long story short, I struggled to find a nice way to make tiny rats until 2014, when I learned what silk clay and foam clay are, and figured out a logical simplified sculpting technique. Making my own rats has been a big thing to me personally, because I'm really picky about realism, and rat models aren't very common - let alone accurately sculpted ones. After figuring out how to make thumb rats I was able to gain a massive rat collection. Only a minority of my rats are factory made or sculpted by someone else.

Most of these are by myself, but seven thumbies (behind the rainbow ones) and the tiny dragon are by Kave. And that black rat on top of the taller container is by an IRL friend.

Lately I've also been really much into genetics, especially color genetics. I've been inventing totally unreal colors and their genetics for my fictional rats (not only clay rats, but also characters). This got kicked even further when I recently started to do teamwork with my Swedish hobby friend Decors, who I probably brainwashed into making clay rats. (Ooops.) I love pondering these and playing with ideas and writing standards. 

But, suddenly I had a problem in my hands: I had way too many colors to identify, name and describe, yet I should figure out how they are related to each other, how one can breed them, what kind of modifiers exist and all that. And more. I like complex things and science, but this sudden flood of new things to think and write is just too much. It's overwhelming me. Yet I struggle to read certain genetics terms, while I can understand the colors and map their tracks in my mind just fine. I can't explain this in any way, it's so abstract but also so logical to me personally. I understand recessive, dominant, heterozygous and homozygous. But I can't get what a locus is. I also don't remember much about epigenesis, what I read about years ago... 

Don, a rex coated reddish brown "halves-l" buck.

Ulla, a red flame doe.

Horse colors are more or less easy to understand, I think. At least most basics and dilutions, since I've read about them for so long already. Actually, I'm using some horse color genetics as a base to correctly model some of these entirely fictional rat color genetics I am cooking up here. 

I really don't know why my brain can't grasp some things, no matter how much I try. I'm a visual person, so maybe that has something to do with how I learn genetics as well. (When I think how the cream gene in horses does work, I always combine and repeat visual images of the actual colors in my mind, instead of trying to write it. And when I read about these things, I visualize them in my mind meanwhile.)

So, have I now written enough? How should I determine that? 

I know I'm not the only one who plays with their own works before sending it away... And don't worry, I made a braided rope to match the halter after taking this photo.

 

I'm terrible at writing end words for a blogtext. Argh.

What's it like to see performance photos when you don't show?

I came up with this article idea after seeing a continuous flood of performance show photos and blogposts by Americans. I live in Finland and therefore am European, so my perspective differs a lot from the folk far there. 

I haven't heard about any shows being held in Europe during the worldwide disaster which 2020 has been honored to mark as a synonym of. Meanwhile, Americans seem to have some activity in the model horse field, and a lot! Photo shows are a thing now. Some people blog about this stuff a lot (at least at the moment), and I can well say that I enjoy reading that and seeing all the photos about it. 

What do those posts and photos usually evoke in people who are seeing them? Most of the time the reader is most likely another model horse hobbyist, so that explains half of it. According to what I've seen via the blog stuff, people inspire each other and encourage themselves to do the more or less silly photos and stories. They command each other to have fun. 

A fun but technically so outdated photo from 2016.

While American model horse hobbyists have been busy with performance photo show entries, tack, dolls, props and all that, also I have been sitting in my art room, doing miniature stuff. But instead of performance crafts, I've been sculpting mini clay rats, food and water bowls, and most recently I've also assembled a few model rat cages. 

I very recently rebuilt this one.

I have model horse tack projects in mind and I actually HAVE to make some of them soonish. I have ideas for photos. I have a lot of dolls. I have plans. I have stories in my head. 

But none of that has anything to do with model horse showing. I don't do shows. But I like to make tack, put it on the horses, put dolls on the saddles, basically play with my stuff... All this just for fun, as was said in this older post.

Often, when I read those blog posts by American hobbyists, it makes me want to grab some horses, dolls and tack and do a couple setups. I want to photograph them and then blog them. I used to do all that a lot at some point, excluding the blogging part; the most important thing has always been just to have the nice setups and scenes documented so that I can see them later as well. 

Mirrors are nice and useful, but take ah so much space.

Then I remember that hey, I don't even have a photo studio... Anymore... And I do not have any room or place for it. I'm these people who do not lay on the floor with their toys - instead, I need a table or a shelf to place my studio box on, and then I also need some lamps and probably a tripod for my camera. I have no space or resources for any of this at the moment, and it's not going to change anytime soon. I have no idea if and when it will change, but it annoys me to no end to realize that I can't save all the ideas I have in time. 

So, basically seeing those perf photos makes me both fascinated and frustrated at the same time. I'm not blaming anyone here - it was me who decided to destroy my studio box, but there were reasons to why it happened. Now getting a new photo studio depends from two things: 1. I should find a LARGE enough cardboard box (the previous one was too small) and 2. I need something to place it on top of. 

I happen to own a pile of largeish cloths which I have hoarded just for model horse photography use. They take two large plastic tubs to live in. My favorite will still always be the big sand brown/creamy fabric, which can be seen in many of my photos, obviously. 

I seemingly said what I wanted to... In one sentence, after all that useless blabbering. 

As I just said, I lack the resources for good photos at the moment. Despite that I've assembled and documented a few modelverse scenes anyway - it just doesn't look good due to how... I've placed the models on top of a small and narrow shelf where I keep my littlebits. It happens to be black and with a white wall behind it. I can't do more than just some basic wholebody shots, and the light is too poor to allow detail shots (my camera struggles to focus). I also get physically exhausted thanks to this, because it's not even close to being ergonomic. Basically I've simply given up at trying to do good photos, and these pics turn out ugly. A white paper taped on the annoying marks doesn't help much.

Yes, you definitely can see a western guy riding in English tack here. I don't have any western saddles and I have no idea how to make one. The hackamore is also awful... On purpose.

And here is a cat who needs clothes. Removable clothes.

Still, I seem to have a feeling that I am going to have a new, bigger and better photo studio again someday... Meanwhile I take my ugly photos just to save some ideas for the better future. 

By the way, once Braymere did a blogpost where she mentioned that simplified backgrounds are totally fine. It hit me hard, positively, because that is exactly how I have been doing my own modelverse photos for long years! And I have secretly wished that people would make it acceptable... 

Studio photos with a simple background are my "specialty"... If I ever even had that much experience of any other form of photography! (So the specialty mention is a joke.)

There is also more what I wanted to say. One thing which makes me feel like an outsider with model horse showing question is, that I personally have never participated in stuff like that. I've never been into competiting with other people who craft stuff similar to mine. An excuse is that I just don't understand why people would play "being better" than everyone else. I know that model horse showing is meant to be fun and not too serious and this and that, but it still is about placing higher than your fellow showers. I myself would be a bad judge, because a. I have my own really strict views and opinions about what to judge, and b. I simply wouldn't want to place just one first. I would not want to put people's creations into a bettering order. 

That mention about me having strict opinions about judging is... Something I want to talk about, but maybe not here. I don't know how to word it, really. I have never judged model horse shows, and I'm not an expert with different breeds' standards, so it's not about being "too knowing" or anything, but the opposite... I just happen to be really picky about art and realism in it, and I am a total tack spy. I spy details and accuracy. I judge horse photos every time I see them, be them about real or model horses. I think, due to how I look at these photos, I would also be really unfair if I was asked to judge photos by beginners or children, who naturally can't do everything at the level where the more experiences people can do. And let me say, I'm not at that high level myself neither... But as I said, I struggle to word this thing, so I will well stop it here then. I'm afraid people will greatly misinterpret what I say.

So many tack fails that I can't even count... And it is quite the idea of this heavily edited photo.

Anyway, it was good to be able to turn all these thoughts into words for once. I've been wanting to write a post like this for so long time now... More to come? 

Illustrating this post was extremely difficult. Every photo I choose seems to have at least one serious flaw which I am ashamed of. I don't bother to show those in the context of good performance photos... So that is why there are so many "behind the scenes" pics.