First Blog - Greece Trip!

It has been a very eventful Summer, hasn't it? On my end, the company I spent the last three years at went under in June, I made a neocities portfolio in July (Hi, by the way!), then dropped everything and went to Greece for the month of August!

I'm slowly settling back in to the Montreal day-to-day, and coming back to neocities to finally get this blog started.

This Summer has definitely been one of silver linings, new beginnings, and a whole lot of learning. While of course I'm sad that my time with the good folks at dot big bang is over, it came at a good time for me. I was suddenly free to explore some creative pursuits that have been bubbling in the back of my mind for so long. Having a month in Greece also gave me time to breath, study up, and think about what comes next. But most importantly, it gave me plenty of quality time with the family!

We stayed with my husband's parents, George and Sevasti, spending the first week and a half at their house in Rafina. While it's not too far from Athens, where we landed, we didn't spend any time exploring the city this time around. If you go, though, I definitely recommend seeing the Akropolis and the Akropolis Museum just near it! In my first visit back in 2017, I really fell for the museum. Just as you walk in, you can look below the glass floor to see some of the excavated areas beneath, which really makes you feel like you're stepping through history as you're seeing the collections.

They have a lovely home there in Rafina. You would never know it was even touched by the fires back in 2018. They have a beautiful garden full of succulents, and have replanted olive trees which should hopefully be ready to yield their first harvest this year! I hope they get a good haul.

Since I was no longer taking my work with me this trip, I wanted to really get into learning Greek, and Sevasti has been helping me immensely. We started sitting together every couple of days while she taught me the basics. I think this is the first of my many attempts at learning Greek that really started to stick with me! I have never made this kind of progress on my own. She's always been a great teacher though, having taught french for many years. We plan to continue our classes together online from here on, so I should really finish the homework she sent me home with after writing this!

We all spent the mornings together with coffee and toast in the dining room. Sevasti made a delicious jam from lemons that I couldn't keep out of for most of the trip. I had a nice view of the house next door from here, and in quiet moments, I started drawing it. It was a good excuse to pull the new tablet out and get more familiar with Procreate. It's got a lot of quick conveniences like holding a stroke to straighten the line/make a shape, etc. I appreciate how intuitive it is, even if there are some things that will take adjusting to, like the lack of gradients and other small things.

I am still sticking to the default brushes that come with the program for now while I get a grasp on it all. Introducing too many elements at the start will only confuse me, so I aimed to keep it simple.

The following Tuesday, we took the ferry from the mainland to their summer home in Chios, where we would spend the remainder of the trip. I wish I could have taken some pictures or drawn anything, as I remember there some are nice views from the deck as the ferry leaves the mainland, but I took some medicine to keep from getting seasick, and it knocked me right out for nearly the whole journey.

The house here is wonderful. It's in Emporios, with a five minute walk to Mavra Volia beach. It's also only a few steps away from the Lava Stones tavern where we would spend many evenings at, eating our fill of incredibly fresh and delicious seafood, drinking plenty of ouzo, and chatting with Babis and Patra, the owners, along with the other regular patrons that would come and go.

Hubby and I would go swimming together soon after breakfast, before taking a siesta working on personal projects in the open dining area. My eyes here were drawn to this arrangement of driftwood in a vase on this column, so I drew it! While I didn't pick up the finer painted details that exist on the actual vase, I did want to focus on all the beautiful variety of textures across the three objects. Still sticking with the default brushes here, I started getting the shapes put down using Mercury like a pen, which I turned density off on, later swapping to 6B for lines as I settled into something sketchier. I used a lot of Burnt Tree, which would give a good initial scrape of texture, and went in with Little Pine to fill in some gaps and have some more complete shadow shapes. From there I would use the 6B Pencil for cleaning up the sketch.

I think it's clear that entirely too much time has been spent on this column, eh?

As week three rolled around, our friends Sebastian and Lu arrived from Germany to visit us for a week. We rented a car to explore the island with whenever we weren't swimming. In what was quite a high-energy kick-off, we visited the painted village of Pyrgi for a coffee, stopped for some loukoumades in the medieval village of Mesta, and still managed to check out the Mastic Museum all in one day. If you ever visit Chios, I recommend this museum, as you'll see these trees everywhere, circles of white powder at their feet, dripping with pure mastiha that will eventually be turned into soaps, gums, and my personal favorite, ice cream, among other things.

We spent another day climbing the mountainous heights of the village of Anavatos before stopping in Avgonima for lunch at To Asteri, a hotel with a restaurant tacked to the side of it on a cliff which faces out to the sea. Eating great food with great company surrounded by such an awe-inspiring view was more than I could ever ask for. If you are okay with eating liver, their kokoretsi was delicious.

I know it's overly dark, but I hope you can see this last little slapdash, beer-addled sketch embodying the final evening we spent drinking together on Mavra Volia's shores, shooting the shit and staring up at the incredibly clear sky. The Milky Way was visible from here, and it had me starry-eyed.

When Sebastian and Lu left to fly home, things calmed down in the final week. I got a little sick, so I spent more time inside. While there was no more swimming or drinking for runny-nosed, little old me, I did get to catch up on some books I was reading. I also got to check out the more mobile version of Affinity Designer, which was actually really nice! Since I've recently moved to Linux on my main computer, I've missed having Affinity, as it's one of the only programs so far that I don't really have a reasonable way of running yet. This version seems more than suitable for me, though! I made a couple of notepages with it, so I could keep my Greek notes in style over on Goodnotes. Feel free to download and use these if you'd like, as a little thank-you for reading!

The trees I drew from I believe are called Artemis Cyprus, which I think is really cool. I'm told they're typically planted in graveyards.

Of course I was a little sad to go, but we were both ready to get back home after being gone a whole month. On the bright side, we had a one-day layover in Toronto, so we had enough time to see hubby's sister Iphi and her family. We passed along some souvenirs, mostly clothes and toys for her kiddos, before finishing the long journey home.

Now that we're back, there's so much to do! It's time to really get into this job-hunt, work on my blender skills, and with any luck, blog some more! I'd like to write about the big move to Linux, so if you are interested in following the journey of a humble creative spirit who is eager to improve her relationship with tech, stay tuned for that!