I’ve been meaning to write, but I’ve just been so busy.
I’ve finished one book, and right now I’m about to finish another in quick succession. So my days have been spent working through page after page of illustrations. When I sat down to write today it really felt like I had nothing to write!
It’s easy for me to write daily, but once I drop that, any other cadence is a slog. This is why I’m such an advocate for a daily practice of making something, the longer you stay away the tougher this stuff gets.
To get the creative juices flowing today, I started by folding paper..
I folded a sheet of paper into four, folding paper commits the paper to the task, it’s an easy way to start. On the sheet of paper I drew comics in the usual way. And here I found myself back in the flow. I wondered what useful think I could share with you, and I thought of some notes I took from a recent Andy J. Pizza podcast about getting the creative juices flowing.
“The acquired taste is so essential to your unfolding as a creative”
He was talking about how it’s essential to consume art and develop an acquired taste.
If feels unnatural at first, even fake or pretentious to read something or engage with art that is outside of your norm. But that inauthenticity IS the creative journey. Andy asked this question:
What is the last piece of creative work that lit you up?
And to be honest it was difficult for me to come up with something, my best answer would probably be a Youtube video by Yes Theory! Or the book about their journey.
I don’t know if that qualifies as real Art though. Maybe I should watch a classic movie or read something fiction. In the mean time, I read some Peanuts comic strips, that lit me up.
How are you doing, let me know in the comments, I’ve gotten a lot of mail from you and I haven’t been able to respond to everyone individually, I hope I will get to do so soon.
For now, I would love if you shared the last piece of art that lit YOU up? And what art experience you might seek out next.
Yes! I'm finding my tastes are developing in 2 different directions, and my desire to create art follows them. Direction 1 is realistic: portraits, landscapes, etc. Direction 2 is quirky, and I've so much of it lately that I love. I subscribe to Inktober here on Substack and a few days ago they posted some of their favourite drawings made on the prompt "Wonky". There was one I absolutely loved by Steven Brahma. The style, the subject, the sense of humour - all the things I'm drawn to lately. I also find when I'm in my office, I gravitate more toward "serious", i.e. traditional art and methods, whereas when I'm drawing in my living room with my coffee in the morning, it's generallly freer and looser, because that's my "10 minutes" that may turn into half an hour. It's also often quirky and drawn from my imagination rather than a reference.I keep intending to post them but that mean's taking my sketchbook to the office to photocopy and upload, and I never seen to get around to doing that.
I'm working on a dummy for a picture book manuscript. My last illustration "sketch" made me happy. I used an underlayer of color in the sketch. Which is something I hadn't tried beforeI'm starting to get some ideas for my next dummy project and I'm excited to do that. It's amazing how your ten minutes a day practice has expanded my excitement for making more art and my ability to just play around with different materials and techniques. Quick question: is it a good idea to post pieces of an unsubmitted dummy?