Irak the Oracle

A room of my own

So this is the new place. My own domain, my own corner, nobody else's rules about what counts as a real post or whether the algorithm thinks today was interesting.

I kept putting it off because a website felt like a claim. Like you have to be someone first and then you get the address. Turns out you just buy the address and then you're someone with an address. That's the entire trick.

Everything lives here now. The art in one tab, the thinking in the other. If you followed me from somewhere else, hello, and thank you for the walk.

Commission notes: the collar

Spent most of a week on a detail nobody will consciously notice: the way light catches a studded collar when the head turns.

This is the part of the work I can never explain to people who ask how long a piece takes. The figure took an afternoon. The collar took four days, because it kept reading as jewellery instead of as something with weight, and the difference between those two is the difference between a character who chose it and a character wearing a prop.

Got there in the end. Client didn't mention it. Correct outcome, honestly. You only notice this stuff when it's wrong.

Nobody notices

Realised on the bus today that I hadn't thought about it once. Not that morning, not the day before. Whole stretches now where it simply doesn't come up.

There was a period where every interaction was a small examination. Shop counters, phone calls, anyone saying my name. You brace, you assess, you file the result. It's exhausting in a way that's hard to describe to someone who's never had to run that process in the background of every ordinary errand.

It stopped. I couldn't tell you when. There was no day where I noticed the noticing had ended, which I suppose is exactly how you'd expect it to go.

Three years ago I'd have taken this and been suspicious of it. Now it's just Tuesday.

Nightwood, and painting with light you can't see

New animated piece up on the art page. Bioluminescent forest, character walking through it, sixteen seconds that took an embarrassing amount of iteration.

The problem with glowing environments is that everything wants to be the light source. Mushrooms, water, the air itself. Push it too far and you lose the face entirely, which rather defeats the point of a character study.

Ended up treating the whole forest as one soft blue key from the left and letting the glow be almost decorative. Restraint. I'm told this is a thing artists develop eventually.

Three years

Three years this week. I didn't mark it. Realised two days later, doing the washing up.

The first anniversary I made a whole thing of. Wrote a long post, took a photo, felt the weight of it. The second was quieter. This one went past unnoticed until it was already behind me, and I've decided that's the best possible outcome rather than a failure of sentiment.

What I'd tell the version of me who was counting weeks: the goal was never to arrive somewhere impressive. The goal was for this to become boring. Boring is the win. Boring is what everyone else has and never thinks about.

I'm boring now. Absolutely thrilled about it.

On giving advice

Someone messaged asking how I knew. Not the first time, and I still handle it badly.

The honest answer is unhelpful: I didn't know, I just ran out of other explanations. That's not the clean origin story people want. They want the moment, the realisation, the scene with lighting. Mine was a slow process of elimination that took about nine years and involved a great deal of pretending to be fine.

So I've stopped trying to give the answer and started giving the only thing I actually have, which is: you're allowed to try something and stop. Nothing here is a one-way door as early as you think it is. Most of the terror I carried was about a permanence that didn't exist yet.

The oracle who has advice for everyone except herself. I got better at both halves eventually.

The tools I actually use

Asked often enough that it's worth a post. There's no secret. There's a generation step, and then there are hours of ordinary work.

The model gets me a composition and a mood. It does not get me a character who looks like the same person in two consecutive frames, it does not get hands, and it has opinions about anatomy that I spend a great deal of time overruling.

So: generate wide, cull hard, then paint over. The cull is the actual skill. Being willing to bin forty near-misses to keep one that has something is most of the job, and it's the part nobody puts in the tutorials because it isn't fun to film.

The box of old photos

Cleared out the spare room and found the box. Everyone warns you about the box.

I'd braced for it to hurt. It didn't, particularly. What I felt was closer to how you'd look at photos of a cousin you were fond of but lost touch with. That person was doing their best with what they had. They were not, on the whole, having a good time, and I know things about their internal weather that the camera doesn't show.

Kept them. There was a phase where I'd have burned the lot and called it hygiene. Now it seems unkind. Somebody got me here and it was them.

Second Christmas

Second Christmas at my parents' since. Vastly less eventful than the first, which is the highest praise available.

Mum has fully switched over and now corrects other people, occasionally with more force than the situation requires. Dad still stalls slightly before my name, a half-beat where you can see him check. He gets there every time. I've decided the half-beat is fine. He's seventy-one and he's trying, and trying is a verb.

An aunt asked something clumsy over dinner and I answered it plainly and everyone moved on to the parsnips. A year ago that would have taken me out for the evening.

Dorian finally asked

My brother asked, after two and a half years, whether it had been hard. First time he's raised it unprompted.

He was the easy one at the start. I'd rehearsed a fortnight of arguments for that conversation and he said 'yeah, alright' and asked if I still wanted to get food. I walked around all evening carrying an unused speech.

But easy meant we never talked about it again, and I hadn't realised until he asked that I'd wanted him to. So I told him about the waiting lists and the voice practice and the eighteen months of feeling like a project rather than a person, and he listened, and then he said he wished he'd asked earlier.

So did I. But he asked.

Drawing hands badly, on purpose

Doing a hundred hand studies. Not for accuracy, for character. A hand tells you more about who someone is than a face does, because nobody poses their hands.

The way somebody holds a mug when they're not thinking about it. Whether the fingers curl in or splay out at rest. Whether they touch their own face when they talk.

Twenty-three in. They're bad. That's fine, they're supposed to be bad, that's what a study is for. Posting a few of the less humiliating ones eventually.

Voice, still

Two years and change, and voice is still the thing I work at. Nothing else has needed this much sustained deliberate effort.

There's no dose for it. That's the part I wasn't ready for. Everything else had a prescription and a timeline and a doctor who'd seen it a thousand times. Voice is you, alone, in a parked car, running pitch exercises and hating the recording, and the only variable is whether you keep doing it.

It's good now, most of the time. It goes when I'm tired and it goes when I'm upset, which is precisely when I'd most like it to hold. Working on that. Probably always will be.

The letter came

Paperwork finished. The name is the name now, on everything, legally, with a document to prove it.

I expected a rush. What I got was a very boring envelope containing very boring text, and a strange flat feeling of the world's admin catching up to something that had been true for two years.

Then I changed it on my bank account and the app said good morning with the right name on it and I sat down on the kitchen floor. So it did land, just not where I'd been watching for it.

Waiting rooms

Another beige room, another clipboard, another stranger who needs the story in the correct format.

You learn to tell it the way they need it told. Not lying exactly, just editing. Emphasise what scans as clinical, quietly file away the parts that are actually yours, the specific ones, the funny ones. It's a strange skill to develop and a stranger one to be good at.

Drew the room afterwards from memory. Beige chairs, a poster about handwashing, a woman opposite doing the exact same held-breath thing I was doing. We didn't speak. I hope she got what she came for.

Colour and memory

Noticed I use the same violet in everything. Went back through two years of work and it's in almost all of it, usually in the shadows where you wouldn't clock it deliberately.

I think it's from a lamp in a flat I lived in years ago, during a period I'd describe as difficult. Which is a strange thing to carry forward as a signature. The colour of the worst year, quietly load-bearing in everything I've made since.

Not going to stop using it. Just interesting to know where the furniture came from.

Two years

Two years. I marked it this time by doing absolutely nothing, which felt like progress.

Things nobody warns you about: your centre of gravity moves and you will misjudge a doorway for about three weeks. You cry at adverts, properly, not ironically. You smell different. Your feet change size, which seems like an administrative error on the part of biology.

Things that don't change: I'm anxious about the same four things I've always been anxious about. I procrastinate identically. Transition does not come bundled with a personality upgrade, and honestly, relief. I wasn't trying to become a different person. I was trying to stop flinching at mirrors.

The flinch is gone. It went so gradually I can't point at the day.

Winter, and the shape of a year

Bad few weeks. Not about anything in particular, just February doing what February does.

I mention it because there's a pressure in writing about this stuff publicly to make every entry a milestone. Progress, gratitude, hard-won insight. And the actual texture of it is that some months are simply grey and you do the work anyway and nothing especially meaningful occurs.

Drew almost nothing. Ate badly. Went for one very cold walk that helped more than it had any right to. That's the whole report.

What I thought would happen

Found an old note to myself from before I started, listing what I expected. It's revealing mostly in how much of it was about other people.

Almost every line is a prediction about how somebody else would react. Barely a word about how I'd feel. I'd spent so long planning the defence that I hadn't budgeted any thought for the actual experience of being myself, as though that part would sort itself out once everyone else was handled.

For the record: about a third of the predictions were right, a third were far too pessimistic, and a third involved people who simply stopped being relevant. The ones who mattered mattered more than I'd guessed. The ones I feared mostly just drifted.

Drawing myself

First self-portrait in about six years. Took four attempts and the first three went in the bin for being flattering in a way that wasn't accurate.

There's a specific failure mode where you draw who you want to be rather than what's in front of you, and it produces something with no weight at all. The fourth one has a slightly crooked mouth and tired eyes and it's the only one that looks like a person.

Elven ears though. I'm not made of stone.

Starting again

New blog. I've had several. They tend to die around the four-post mark, when the novelty goes and the work starts.

This one has a narrower brief: what I made, and what I thought while making it. That's it. No lifestyle content, no attempt to be useful to strangers.

For context, since it'll come up: I'm about a year into transitioning. I'm not planning to make this a transition blog, partly because there are people doing that far better, and partly because I'd like somewhere that's about the work. But it's the weather I'm making things in, so it'll turn up.

Anyway. Drawing again, properly, for the first time in a while. That's the actual headline.