From an Empty Workspace to a Work of Art

Ok, so I've been working at this awesome new company for a month now.  In that month, I have worked from home a lot of times.  I think I was only downtown for six or seven days in March.

Much has been written about setting up your remote workspace to feel official, and more like you're working, as opposed to sitting on the sofa on your laptop in your PJs.  Remote work requires incredible discipline, and part of that is mentally partitioning your home life from your work life.

But mental partitioning is hard.  It is handy to have some sort of physical partition.  We do have a den with a computer in it, but it's not a dev machine, and that's where Nicole works.  I decided a while ago that I'd make my space in my basement.  But it's an unfinished basement, and there are no physical partitions.

So I decided to physically partition my space.  Not just for separation, but so that when I was on webcam, I wouldn't have an unfinished space as my backdrop.

But I'm not really in position to do a basement remodel at the moment.  So I figured I'd do what they do in the movies and stage shows.  I'd create a set.

I have a couple old stands that I once built for a garage sale.  They were originally meant to last two days and to allow me to hang some rigid 3/4" metal conduit between them to use as a clothes rack.  Instead I've used these two supports over the intervening years for all kinds of things.

For example, I have used them as something for Gamble to paint on.  One day out of the blue, I opened up some cans of old house paint, deck-screwed a plank of plywood onto the uprights and let Gamble go at it. You can clearly see the uprights here.  And this was seven years ago.  And these were repurposed then. Also, this video has one of the best punch lines of any I've ever shot.

I dragged these scraps of wood to our new place.  Since then I've used them as temporary uprights, laid down as a stand for when I'm bottling homebrew (it's perfect for the bottling bucket to sit on), and a number of other things.

As I mentioned earlier, I don't have the ability to do a full room in my basement just yet, but I need something to make it appear I'm in an office, so I repurposed those uprights by hanging a leftover 4x8 sheet of drywall on them.  And then painting it green.

It's leftover green paint from our living room, so it's quite a responsible shade.  I figured it would look very office-y, and it did.  I even hung a plaque and a That Conference camp sign on it.  And then I put casters on it, so that I could roll it in and out of frame as needs dictated.  And it was perfect.

But it was missing... something.   That certain je ne sais quoi that makes it me.  It was boring.

I will be damned if I can find the original art that inspired this project.  I have searched and searched and cannot find it, but if I ever do, I'll link to it here.  I'd seen a beautifully masked wall that was lovingly done up in geometric designs and then painted.  It was a phenomenal piece of wall art, and I figured that if I was going to have a little partial wall, I'd do something like that.

Because when you're presence is mostly online, your backdrop becomes part of your personality.  It's part of the setting.  Ze Frank has his steady backgrounds, and so does John Green, Ray William Johnson, iJustine.  Now, I'm not a vlogger, but if I'm going to spend a decent amount of time online, I'm going to need something immediately identifiable.  It's all about branding.

So I started with the wall, all by itself.  Here's a shot of it by itself from the back.  It's there in place in front of my dev rig.  Yes, I'm using the Peavey amp that I've had for about 25 years as a stand for my third monitor. That's the same amp I rocked out on for Random the other night, so it still sees use.

Here you can see the back of the wall. I've already started masking it.

And here's a closeup of the feet.  They weren't designed to be super stable.  They weren't designed for what I'm trying to do with it.  Yet do it, I have.

The little feet.  They weren't designed for this.  I'm no damned engineer, though I should have consulted with my stepbrothers, who both are.

And here you can see how I got started with the masking.  Gamble helped me at first, because my wingspan just wouldn't support it.  We put the first piece of tape on, then marked some dots an inch from the first piece of tape, put another piece of tape on with those lines, and so on.  The image wasn't really planned, only that I intended for it to evolve organically.

Some of the lines.  The first line placed was the leftmost long "forward slash."

Finished masking and ready for round 2.

So the idea was to paint this, but a single paint color is boring, and two is still kinda boring.  I've always been fascinated by street artists that do spraypaint work.  They get some incredibly realistic and sweet looking paintings from a few minutes of work and a few cans of spray paint.  There's some beautiful randomness here, and some beautiful order.

After all these years, he's still painting on these two uprights.

My vision here was for something nebulous.  Literally like the beautiful pictures you see of faraway space dust. My instructions to Gamble were, "Yeah, put some heavy blue paint there, but make it kinda random, and don't cover the green up completely, so that we get a cloud effect."

So here are all the colors of spray paint that I had and wanted to include.  I can't believe I had so much paint.  I'm sure Home Depot thinks I'm out taggin' and saggin'.

I admit I was skeptical at this point.  I look at the muddle of color there and think, Hooboy, what have I done?  That little random arc of red?  The shades of green and teal in the bottom right?  But I was confident that this was going to work, so I pressed on.  The next step was to add stars.  

Gamble and I had done this before, for a presentation he'd done on Exoplanets, planets beyond our solar system.  We took black poster board, sprayed white spray paint on our hands, and flicked the paint toward the board.  I did this here, too.  I flicked white paint as a star field over every part of the board.

Then I removed the tape.  This reveal was awesome.

This was just amazing when I saw it with the tape off.  

A closeup.  From faraway, you can see the blotchy color from the original, but close up, this really is a thing of beauty.  the strips of tape I took off the wall were as cool as the wall itself.

And of course, one more for the road.  I'm not explaining this shirt, though.  That's a story for another day.

BEAST MODE!

Well, that's how I got my new background.  Nicole insists that I need something more low key for the other side, so I can turn the wall 180 degrees and have a professional setting, so I'll probably do that, too. Anyone have a 4x8 sheet of drywall they can drop off?