Sunday, December 1, 2019

Update: Dates in a Life Project 2019


One more month to go working on the Dates in a Life Project, my year-long painting project documenting the number of steps I walk each day. This photo shows my walking through November 2019.

Now that the clocks have changed and it gets dark before 5pm walking is a bit of a challenge. As it goes colder outside in this winter, it'll be even more of a challenge.

I use a system of symbols to represent each thousand steps. Instead of showing exactly how many I walk. The black icons represent up to 9999 steps walked each day, red represents 10,000-19,999 steps and yellow represents 20,000-29,999 steps. 
To keep track of steps, I was using the Health app in my iPhone. Now I'm using Pedometer.
The daily background color changes season-to-season in this painting. I changed the daily background color from a bright yellow for the summer, to Indian Yellow Hue on September 24th. It was Teal Blue for Winter, then Green for Spring. When Winter starts on December 22, I'll change the color back to Teal Blue.


I use the daily background color to document my daily steps in fractions of 250 steps. As an example, after 2000 steps (which would be the icon with no paint), I'm painting colors to show as close as I can to 2250, 2500, 2750, and then up to 2999, instead of then rounding up to 3000 steps.
One note about the yellow icons for walking over 20,000 steps and the yellow background color for summer. It's a problem differentiating the steps icons next to the background color. I will most likely repaint the background color to a lighter yellow before I finish the year. I also think the bright yellow is not working well with the Teal Blue for Winter and the Green for Spring. I think the lighter yellow will be much better, but I'll make my decision about it after I start using the Indian Yellow Hue in Autumn.
This painting measures 47.5" x 34" and is created with monoprinted textures of a construction fence as the background, handstamped rubber erasers on fabric which are collaged on the background grid, as well as handpainting and stitching on stiffened fabric.