#my feelings about this are complex but i think textile craft is a good example of what i mean

[uncanny-tranny]

I just find it very interesting that all the labour classed as lesser (most often seen as "women's labour") becomes indispensable in moments of crisis. It's just interesting to see how quickly people turn to that labour and then discard it in moments of peace or prosperity, devaluing it until another crisis hits.

#politics #feminism #yes this is me reflecting upon the knitting and war video #it's interesting how a 'feminine' craft like knitting became recognized only in tangent to the violence of war #my feelings about this are complex but i think textile craft is a good example of what i mean #because textiles are revolutionary to humanity - just like the discovery of fire. and yet it is so often devalued #especially when it comes to profit over human welfare #look the textile artist to even stauncher hater of capitalism pipeline is real and i'm barreling down it faster than the speed of light #complex feelings on this but this is my general thesis i guess #(context: i was watching a video about knitting and how it supported war efforts in wwi and wwii) #(and while i did know a lot about the topic in that it was a huge part of war support propaganda it was still interesting) #i feel like that video encapsulated a lot of angst i have about crafting labour especially #and also by 'interesting' i actually mean infuriating and stupid

[maddiviner]

Hello everyone. I’m enjoying a warm, rainy February day here in Krakow. I’m excited, though, because today I’ve finished my two-part series on color magick! In my previous installment, I covered the basics of why color is useful in magick, and described some of the traditional systems for working with it in the Western Magical Tradition.

I recommend reading that article before this one, just because it includes a lot of historical context and tidbits about getting the most out of color magick. In this second article, I’ll be focusing on practical techniques for incorporating color into magick and spellcraft. 

The practices I’ll be describing will work for a variety of skill levels and life situations, running the gamut from simple to complex, and I do hope you find something to your liking amongst them!

Visualization

Visualization is one of the most useful skills to develop as a witch or magician.

Indeed, it can be quite powerful if used effectively, and is also quite fun and enriching. In terms of color magick, you’ll find that colors are some of the easiest things to visualize. While it can be difficult to visualize a complex symbol or even a simple shape and hold it in your mind, many people find it rather easy to visualize colors and fill their inner vision with bright hues. 

As you might expect, visualizing a color for which you’ve a strong association can easily change your mood. Even many non-witches will visualize (or just stare at) something red and feel invigorated, for example. Visualizing the color flooding your inner sight is one simple and effective way of causing change in yourself, requiring no tools or overt actions.

If you want to extend the influence of your color visualizations, try visualizing colors in your immediate environment. An easy way to enchant an object is to visualize it surrounded by a color associated with your intentions. You can also visualize the entire space around you filling with a color to invoke the color’s energy into the situation.

You can also help and have fun with your friends using this technique, visualizing colors surrounding them and seeing how it affects them. All you need to attempt this is a partner to “receive” the color, and your own ability to “send” to color by visualizing it around your partner. This is a fun exercise, but requires some practice.

Many witches talk about seeing, sensing, and directing “energy,” and many of us manipulate magical forces by adding color. A good, direct way of getting in touch with the subtle forces around you is to visualize them flowing and changing in conformity with your intentions. This can include taking on a particular color for specific spellcraft, such as green for a love spell. 

If you’re interested in working with sigils as well as colors, you can visualize sigils, glyphs, and other symbols in vivid colors aligned with your intention. This is terribly difficult when you first try it, but becomes easier very quickly if you practice. As is the case with most, if not all, visualization techniques, this can be done with your eyes either closed or open.

I particularly enjoy visualizing a helpful glyph or sigil in bright colors with my eyes closed just before falling asleep. You might find, though, that you yourself get better results visualizing with your eyes open and seeing the symbol in your immediate environment. Everyone is different! 

Many witches undertake astral journeys to other levels of reality, a practice commonly known as hedgeriding. While visiting such places and realities, it’s quite possible to enact meaningful changes around you by visualizing different colors in different contexts. 

It is, as a rule, kind of difficult to alter astral landscapes themselves, but your fetch or astral double can easily take on a particular hue for a certain purpose, such as keeping away negativity.

Sketchwitchery

I use the term “sketchwitchery” to refer to witchcraft performed with the aid of nothing more than a writing utensil and paper. Most people probably think of sigil creation when they think of this, but the possibilities are actually quite vast, and even more so when color is added to the mix. 

Just as you can visualize a sigil adorned with colors, you can create a physical paper talisman featuring a colorful sketched sigil. This can be as simple as just sketching the symbol in colored pen or marker, or as complex as coating the talisman with bright watercolor paint, and there are many other possibilities. If you keep a grimoire, you can incorporate color into your witchcraft records, both for magical and practical purposes. 

I personally color-code my current grimoire based loosely on the four elements, but other approaches are easily imagined. Write love spells in green, red, or pink, and money spells in rich purple, or any color you associate with those things. When you add art supplies beyond just colored pens, this becomes even more intense and interesting. 

I, for example, have a small set of soft pastels that I use to add color to my Book of Thorns (a hedgeriding grimoire), and I’ve also experimented with using watercolors to highlight specific spells in my notes.

Going beyond obvious witchy sketching, consider the possibility that one could weave intent into an otherwise ordinary work of art while creating it, thus making it a visual spell cast by you, the artist. 

How you go about doing this would be deeply personal, so I can’t really give specific instructions, but it is possible to enchant every brush stroke of a painting or every line of a sketch to manifest your goals. Some authors call these complex works of art hypersigils, and a good way to incorporate symbolism into them is through choosing pertinent colors.

Many of us have probably dreamed of creating our own divination deck. While it can be difficult to sketch or paint a full seventy-eight card Tarot deck, ambitious witches do make it happen. If you’d rather try something smaller, consider creating your own Lenormand deck based on your personal color associations for each card. 

You could even create an oracle deck unlike any in existence. Another fun activity is divination with color swatches. If you can get a batch of them from a paint retailer, you can associate meanings with the colors, and read them as you would other divination decks.

While this section is about sketchwitchery specifically, I do want to note that techwitches can do a lot with color, as well. Sigils and hypersigils can be created digitally just as easily as physically. You can apply color filters aligned with your intent to photos you’ve taken, using the image as a sort of digital taglock to help you connect with the subject of a spell. For example, you might apply a bright orange filter to a picture of an ailing friend to help heal them.

Ingredients

If you find yourself with more materials, there’s plenty that can be done to incorporate color into your magical workings, as well! Almost every witch has at some point worked a candle spell, and these almost always incorporate color symbolism when choosing the candle. 

A red candle might represent passion, or a pink one, friendship. As a wide variety of candle colors are available nowadays, you’re likely to find one that suits your purposes.

Color can be incorporated into other spells, as well. Any time you find yourself sewing or creating something with fabric, thread, yarn, or cord for your Craft, you can choose a color of material suited to your aims, if it’s available. Charm bags are a fairly common type of spellcraft, and they can easily involve color symbolism in this fashion. Cord magick, as well, can have an element of color.

Acrylic or simple dyed wool yarn is usually inexpensive and comes in a variety of colors, which works great for cord magick. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could even dye your textile materials yourself! Naturally, as was the case with painting and creating works of art, you can also weave spells into fabric garments and articles you knit or sew, and color magick can play a big role in doing so.

On the subject of garments, many witches wear special ritual attire, such as robes. Certain traditions prescribe specific color robes for their aspirants, such as the A.’.A.’.’s requirement of a black robe for Probationers. Beyond any advice provided by your own tradition, you can choose your own robe color based on what traits you want to embody in your work, or based on what you feel you need in your life. 

A shy person, for example, might choose a vibrant orange robe as a symbol of their desire to become more outgoing and gregarious, and someone working to become more artistic might choose a green one, symbolizing Venus and beauty. If robes aren’t your style, you can still dress for magical success by wearing colors that harmonize with your intent, even if they look perfectly ordinary to most people.

Cosmetics can even be a way of bringing color magick into your life. Wear eyeshadow in colors corresponding to your goals for the day, for example. The image below describes some more possibilities with this.

Food and drink are another vehicle for color magick. If you’re not allergic to it, you can add drops of food coloring to your clear beverages and baked goods to give them a nice hue. 

I don’t recommend doing this often or in large amounts, but it can be fun to make a potion that’s simply Sprite or water with a drop of red food coloring. Sounds silly, but with proper intent and focus, and of course, empowering the beverage, it can be quite effective.

Obviously, more traditional witchcraft practices also involve color symbolism. Though it’s not a rule, many plants gained their magical associations due to their appearance, such as yellow chamomile flowers being associated with the Sun. 

Most, if not all gemstones garner their correspondences from their appearance. Moonstone is called such, and associated with the Moon, due to resembling the color of moonlight. Bloodstone is associated with battle, strength, and protection due to the blood red flecks on its surface. 

Many man-made or dyed crystals and gemstones have even brighter and more evocative colors than those found in nature. Though some witches prefer natural substances, some of us (especially those who put a lot of emphasis on color) often hold that the origin of a thing doesn’t matter as long as it evokes the proper associations. 

For us, using simple glass beads (available in many different colors and usually sold for aquariums) can often be as powerful as working with a traditional gemstone.

Finally, I want to add that home decoration and the creation of altars can involve color magick very intensely, as well. Many cultures and schools of thought have existing approaches to decorating for positivity, and will paint certain rooms in a home a particular shade for specific goals. 

If you can’t paint your area, you can always add colorful posters and knicknacks to brighten things up and bring a little color magick into your daily life.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this gave you some new ideas for color-based spellcraft. Keep in mind that everything I’ve said here is based on my own experiences, and is just my suggestions - you, no doubt, will find your own unique and creative ways of manifesting your Will via color magick!

#magick #witchcraft #spell #grimoire #witch #color magick #eliza.txt #techniques #practices #practical

[elevatorupcompany]

Design to 9th Graders

A few months back, a friend reached out and asked me to Skype with her ninth grade art classes about my job as a designer. I didn’t prepare myself. I figured, I do this for a living, how hard will it be to explain? To prepare for our Skype chat, my friend asked her students from both classes to write their questions on a whiteboard.The questions ranged from smile-inducing curiosities such as, the size of my desk to plenty of questions around how to find inspiration and how long projects took. As I looked at the questions and stared at the group of students in front of me, I realized answering their questions about inspiration or desk size would satisfy their curiosities, but it wouldn’t educate them on the breadth of what it means to be a designer or the amount of paths a career in design might take you.

After the realization that I did not do justice to explaining my job the first go round, I wanted to find a way to better articulate myself. I was inspired by a bit I read on explaining graphic design to 4th graders and began to think through a loose framework for how to talk with young creatives:

What is design and how it applies to everything

A high level look at the array of careers that exist in the creative field

Advice on pursuing a designer lifestyle

What is design?

In the same notion of teaching design to 4th graders, similar lessons in the basics apply to all ages. It’s important to understand what “design” means, regardless of context. At the core, design is often defined as a tool for understanding, communicating, and problem solving. Making the complex digestible. In the article previously referenced, he describes design to 4th graders as:

“Design is about making something easy to use, or easy to understand.”

It's important to find an example of design and tie it to something to which 9th graders can relate: Social media platforms. Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, were all created by a team containing all different types of designers, people who made decisions to make the apps easier and enjoyable to use. Industrial designers planned, designed, and tested snowboards so they can ride through deep snow or if you live in Michigan—cruise on ice. Graphic designers, illustrators and photographers came together to make the graphics on the board. The clothes you’re wearing—a team of fashion, textile, product, and graphic designers, all came together to decide how they’d look, how they’d fit and how they’d be made and produced.

This could go on for days, all coming back to the (sometimes overwhelming) notion that indeed, we live in a world that is designed and shaped by humans.

Opportunities to work creatively

Not always, but often, designers are associated with making cool resumes, killer business cards, and heaps of logos. While this is true for plenty of designers, it barely scratches the surface of what designers are doing now. If we are being broad, even within the term of graphic design, there are many different types of designers with focuses unknown to aspiring creatives.

Relate the variation in design careers like you would surgeons. There are general surgeons, neurological surgeons, plastic surgeons, the list goes on. They all went to med school, had a similar learning foundation, but have branched off into areas of speciality that suit their passion. With slightly less blood and guts, apply this idea to graphic design as a career, knowing the word, “graphic,” will be changed out depending on the work.

Factors to consider in choosing a creative path

Type of work The two high level distinctions of designers are typically print and digital designers.  

Print designers work in a much more tangible world than web designers. Their work uses the building blocks of design such as typography and color theory to communicate to different audiences. The work done by print designers tend to have deliverables: posters, business systems, reports, billboards, invites, the list goes on. Often the work of a print designer overlaps with digital designers, creating web assets such as advertising for the web. They tend to work more in branding and often have a more keen eye for typographic details than digital designers. Print designers have a fine eye for print quality and paper quality and use texture and structure to better tell their story.

In short: Print designers use creative solutions and an understanding of design principles to efficiently communicate, tell stories, and solve problems.   

Digital designers come with all different titles: user interface designer, user experience designer, interactive designer, product designer, the list goes on. For sake of a 9th grade audience and brevity, let’s talk about what it means to be a designer who works in the digital sphere. Digital designers work in a world of lots of moving pieces and the work itself is a living, ever changing, piece. Digital designers are designing interfaces for apps, websites, and software, but more so, they are making product decisions. They're ultimately designing what someone will experience and how those interfaces interact with the user and the overall product.The work of a digital designer often starts far before anything hits the screen. Wireframes, sitemaps, and user research are all tasks digital designers do to ensure their work is validated.

In short: Digital designers use their understanding of the user and the client’s business to create an experience that solves a problem and / or helps users accomplish their goals.   

____

Type of environment Whether you're part of a small agency, a massive corporation as an in-house designer, or a freelance designer, your role and responsibilities will vary. A small agency and a freelancer will have more involvement at every stage of the process whereas a designer at a larger company may have a more targeted role. There is no right or wrong and trying out different types of work environments will help shape your preferred work style.  

____

Different roles of designers This will come in time as you develop your skill-set and know what drives you as a designer. Some designers transition from being hands-on in production to being the lead in setting the direction and overseeing a team of designers. Some designers will focus on a company’s brand alone. Some designers design very little but focus on setting strategic direction and architecture of a product. If you can’t tell by now, as a designer, the world is truly your oyster.

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Working creatively in another role You don’t have to be a designer to work in a creative environment. A team has many roles that are involved in the creative process. I’ve worked on teams with copywriters that use language to craft the story and build a brand. I’ve been alongside UX strategists who are integral to building and informing the foundation for the entirety of a project. Product managers make it happen by finding creative ways to keep everyone and everything aligned on a project. There are too many roles to name (and celebrate!). The short of it, if you’re inspired by design and being in a creative atmosphere, don’t feel discouraged if you don’t consider yourself creative.

The heart of being a designer

Beyond the complicated web of types of designers, varying environments and roles of a designer, there are a few points that resonate with me every day as a designer.

Know a career in design means you’re always learning. It’s fast paced and you’re going to learn a lot. Yes, you’ll learn a lot about design and bettering your practice, but you’re going to learn a lot about every client you work with and the industry it pertains to. It’s a part of your job as a designer to fully understand the user and the industry and to empathize with whoever your designs will impact.

Work where you’re happy and know you’re never alone. Good team dynamics are the real deal. Being able to jive, communicate, and share ideas freely makes for better days and far better outcomes. Collaboration and diversity of perspectives and skill-sets are what make for meaningful results. From college to the workforce, you realize you’re never alone on a project. You’re no longer responsible for every piece of the puzzle. In fact, you’re working with people who are better than you in different areas. It’s their skill-sets that heighten and make what you do validated and possible.

Learn to step away. The creative process isn’t science or clockwork and accessing the creative part of your brain can’t be forced. Luckily, this is celebrated in most creative environments, but it takes self awareness, control, and intention to step back and to get out. There is power in stepping away from it all. Many great ideas and moments of “ah-ha!” are born out of the mind’s stillness. In an article based off the book, Too Fast To Think, the author talks about our society's growing obsession with our devices and the distraction of it all. The more we’re taking in the more our brain starts to filter, for better or worse. The more our brain is busy filtering and taking in the content, the less time our subconscious has to solve problems and bubble up with epiphanies. Learning to be aware and take control over these distractions is important. Make time for yourself to be still, relax, and let your brain do what it does best. From the author of Too Fast To Think:

“Stop staring at your phone and stare into space. You might be hit with something far more valuable”.

Armed with a better framework in mind, I’m filled with excitement for the next time I chat with young students looking to be creative for a living. To give them a better idea of what design means and broaden their awareness for design that is all around them. It wasn’t until college I understood the breadth of opportunities in a creative career, and it wasn't until I was working as a professional that I understood what it meant to be part of a team. With much to learn, much to practice, and much to celebrate, it’s an ever interesting career to have and to share.

~Emily, Designer

#designcareers #students #teaching #emily