the life of an artist is not always pretty

I'm giving in to a winning retreat today. What does that mean? Oh, I moved my main PC and router and stuff back up to the penthouse, computer lab and artist's retreat.

It's for artistic freedom and what not because a certain well trained older artist individual with Alzheimers in my house is so critical and insisting I take their tutorship, I must relocate myself. They have never worked on a computer, ever! But I can remote into my upstairs PC via TightVNC on my laptop. I can be seen and then escape when necessary. So peace of mind and so far my Wacom Graphics tablet which has unusable jitters on my laptop, works fine on my desktop. That is a win too!

Trying to turn assorted PC stuff into artist tools can be a challenge. With flash drives and notebook drives cheap this shouldn't be a problem. But times are tight and making due is the game today. In my collection are 10gig, a 20gig and one 300gig hard drives. You can't always be sure of the longevity of them when they are 2nd hand. I plug them in and listen to the noises they make. Whining is good and clicking is near bad about to be really bad. I never have enough of the right kinds of cords, or long enough Ethernet cable or phone cable or power cord adapters. I have two crt monitors 17" and 14". I have my laptop which is a big 15" and not wide screen. I'd have to get a 19" widescreen to have the height useful for art work. The widescreens seem so squinty. My daughter has a huge rear projection TV, that would be wonderful for digital artwork. Dibbs on that girl!

The missing piece for me is printers. My office printer is mainly for fax and scanning. I think I wore the printer part out. What I need is a wide inkjet that can handle paper and canvas. I can use commercial print services but I need to see and handle my own work to get the feel before I commit to 3rd party printers.

I think my life would be easier if I was doing web graphics, but I don't seem to have a heart for that kind of art. I wouldn't need a printer and it would seen by thousands, millions. but perhaps not so ever present as a pic over your sofa.