Hey… uh… hello. How are you doing? I’m fine.
Yeah things aren’t bad. Everything is fairly ok. I mean, I’m really busy with work stuff, which is good, but really I don’t have much to write about. I suppose that is good for me but not so much for you, kind reader/internet robot.
I have been getting up earlier to spend more time with my daughter. The oldest one. We usually watch some Adventure Time together before her little sister gets up, but lately we have been drawing together. My Fearow drawing is coming along nicely. I didn’t want to just post an update of it because I hope to post the final later this week early next week. Did you know it is Inktober? This is the first year I’ve heard about it, but it is a cool idea.
A few years ago an illustrator, Jake Parker, came up with an idea. Make a drawing everyday for an entire month. It is a good exercise. I find that I get a little hung up on the inking process and spend far more time than necessary developing a drawing. I personally view it as a kind of meditation. I’m sure a typical artist could finish my current Fearow drawing in a couple hours whereas I have already spent at least 4. I can work faster but I like taking it slow. I did an exercise much like this a few years ago where I challenged myself to finish a painting a week for an entire summer. I was into painting huge paintings at the time. One of my canvases was 13′ x 6′. There is a point where you run out of room. Then I decided to change my focus. Make smaller, more intimate paintings. This turned out to be one of the most creative and productive periods of my life. I also should point out that I did not have children yet. While working through the paintings I was developing ideas and thinking about the next paintings. I was doing sketches when ever I had an idea so I could move on to the next one as soon as I was finished. One thing I’ve always liked about ceramics and throwing clay is the immediacy of it. When you make a bowl you can immediately make another and another and another and if, while making the fifth bowl, you slip or bump the side resulting in a nice curve, you can make the next bowl and incorporate that curve. My goal was to use that idea for painting. Let’s put it this way, alot of family members got paintings for Christmas that year. Some of the paintings turned out really great while others were utter crap. I didn’t focus on the crap because I had already moved on to the next. I would try to figure out what made the painting bad but I wasn’t upset that it painting hadn’t turned out.
Anyway, what do you do to stay creative? My wife was interviewing a recent graduate at her work and that was what the applicant asked her. My wife laughed and said, “I’m just trying to keep my head above water.” That makes me worry about my wife, but that is another issue. Someday, someone will read this, maybe. I would like to hear about others’ processes.