Abel A Kay

Every art speaks from the heart. Creative writing. Sculpting. Music. Dancing and theatre. Radio, television, and film. The list could go on forever.

And, of course, there is drawing.

I draw. Here are some samples.

I created drawings to display on my podcast “El Cuento de Roma”

The complete work is more than 1,500 slides long, with family trees in light blue , chronological known people in white, and battle slides in red background. All these files were first conceptualized by hand, on paper, then moved onto Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop.
If you would like to see a FREE sample (sneak peak, or “partial”!) of this work, click here to download the PPTX file.

The picture above was made in about two hours, from scratch, and without any picture as model or inspiration.

Eleven days, during evenings, with my little daughter watching and learning.

This is part of a complete series of the COVID-19 pandemic as I was living in China when the lockdowns started. in fact, we couldn’t leave our apartment in Beijing for six months. There are a few more maps here, but if you want the complete collection, feel free to contact me at my LinkedIn profile or here.

During COVID we had to get creative, and so my daughter and I made a full-blown world map game, with a set of cards, dice, and a rule booklet. In English and Chinese, so her Chinese kindergarden friends could play along. She learned to draw ice (look at Antarctica!) using a paper as a mask and applying different pressures to get the effect right.

 

Websites were my main occupation for many, many years. I visualize them. I prototype them. I talk to them. I often argue. In the end, it always comes down to one true premise:

Websites speak for themselves.

Here are a few samples, with some explanations (if needed).

This is a sample of an interactive map of ancient Rome, shown in a timeline (also completely interactive via a custom dragger add-on for leaflet). This can be viewed live here. Another file, smaller in size where I was just doodling with Leaflet is shown below and can be seen here.

More samples of simple web design are here:
Ética – El Cuento de Roma and here: Episodios – El Cuento de Roma

I also delve into creating bots for Discord (coded in Python), for my own little Discord channel, which is linked to my Patreon and my YouTube channel.

Just like it is industry standard, I use Visual Studio Code for web development, but that wasn’t always the case. There was a time when Dreamweaver did all the work, and even before that, I used Microsoft’s FrontPage (probably before some of the younger coders here were born, haha).

As a sidenote, I was quite strong at Flash, ActionScript (both 2.0 and 3.0) and I still miss the fact that browsers had to kill the beast, because of obvious security issues.

Looking forward, I am now toying with AI tools that will accelerate website and web page creation, and that will make our job all the more fun. And for those who fear that AI might leave us without a job, here is a thought:

“In order to get a website done by AI, a client will have to tell ChatGPT exactly (!!!) what he or she wants. That means, we (programmers and designers) are safe!”

Letters make words and words make sentences. These create short ideas, and the result is simple.

The lightbulb sparks.

There is nothing like seeing a lightbulb turn on above a student’s head, the moment he or she understood a concept. The illuminated face, the involuntary smile and the wide pupils keep making me believe that creative teaching, art, and creative writing go hand in hand.

I have taught for many years. In Miami. In Birmingham, Alabama. In China’s Urumqi and Beijing, and several other places.

My students came from the most diverse backgrounds. Cuban refugees who needed English for survival. Well-to-do Chinese students who needed Spanish for cultural reasons, as an expansion to their already quite cemented English. Company CEOs who needed English just enough so they could mingle in circles they loved to find themselves in. American students who knew that Spanish soft power is on the rise. And above all, Chinese children who would, or could, become the very first member of their families to become fluent in a language, their parents and grandparents always knew important, yet never had the resources to tackle in any serious way.

Sure. Some “had” to go to class because “mom said so” but most of them never stopped gobbling up English vocabulary, learning about its Latin roots, and spitting out copied, well-rehearsed sentences, until one day, creative thinking would kick in and all those prior copycat sentences would become creative statements of their own.

This is teaching! This is creativity at its best.

Partial reproduction of my self-published book “American English” (in PDF format here) which I often see as extremely useful when teaching people who are not immersed in the English language on a daily basis and have therefore no idea of terms like “he acts like Simon Cowell” or what the cultural importance of Jay Leno vs. David Letterman were. Numbers like 420, 101, 411, and abbreviations like SCOTUS, FLOTUS, ROI and even MILF may be mentioned in their routine conversations if they lived in the US, and yet, they don’t even trigger a facial reaction in them, simply because they are not aware of it.

Remember. Teaching is learning. Learning is teaching, eve nif just yourself.

Speaking to people that you never see is like screaming towards a mountain, from a quiet valley.

Podcasting is empowering.

I embraced speaking into a microphone in 2017 and never looked back. And my knowledge of drawing, design, and creative writing, were nothing but a good stern wind.

El Cuento de Roma | Podcast on Spotify 

El Cuento de Roma – YouTube