Week 3 Day 7

Today we started decorating our roomba, Rogert (rhymes with yogurt), whose full name with titles is Sir Rogert "The Robogubbe" D'Rockacoonie, Rogue Rover of Roquefort Hall, Hero of Socialist Labor, the Lord of the Dust

Here are some design drawings we did together (mostly to explain our intentions to one another)

And here is the current progress

Week 3 Day 6

 Ehhhh yeah soooo already not off to a great start for the year but you know what we will just do the best we can. Here's a very silly video I made today recreating what my brain did when I watched Chernobyl the first time:

Text description in case the video is taken down or lost:

A scene from the 5th Episode of the 2019 show Chernobyl (outside the courtroom with Shcherbina and Legasov), First shot is a wide shot of a playground type outdoor area, in the distance a man (Shcherbina) is sitting on a bench, another man (Legasov) approaches. The only sound are footsteps. Second shot we see waist down Legasov walking up toward the camera. In the third shot the camera and Legasov are closer to Shcherbina, the audio from Pacific Rim (2013) plays "How sick are you? And why didn't you tell me?" as Legasov sits down next to Scherbina

Week 3 Day 2

Trying to focus in a work meeting (failing)

Week 2 Day 3

 Here is the finished poster. I hope lots of people come and buy nothing

Week 2 Days 1 & 2

 I have to make a poster for church so I'm using that as an excuse. Here's the words I designed yesterday:

Not very exciting and probably wrong. Here's some clipart I made today that I will add to this tomorrow:

Feel free to use these if you want!

Week 1 Day 4

 I finally got on the windows side of my machine and used photoshop. Not sure if it was worth the trouble honestly. I just need to get a pressure sensitive program I can use in linux if I'm just going to doodle like this.

Week 1 Day 3

 Had a breakthrough vis a vis the whole burnout/I never draw (or create generally?) anymore. I was doodling around in the linux equivalent of ms paint (didn't even know it was there until tonight) and I had a thought as I was drawing "eugh, this looks like something I would draw" and it did occur to me that that feeling is probably one of the the things that is stymieing me. 

I definitely have this self consciousness that my art isn't very good, or that it's ok but could be a lot better but I'm in this big rut. I'm the kid whose not paying attention in class because I'm drawing an eye. Because I love to draw eyes. Because eyes are easy for me to draw. Why do I just draw a bunch of blank faces looking vaguely at the camera? Aren't there fine artists who just do that as, like, their day jobs? So what's wrong with that?

That last thing does actually gall me a little sometimes. Like a remix on the detestable sentiment "Why's that in a museum? I could've done that" (which like 1, no you couldn't have, and 2, ok then do it). But it's a little weirder for me because, well, some of these things I could actually do. We stayed in an airbnb recently-ish and there were some figure drawings up on the wall and with one of them I thought to myself, "I hope the guy didn't pay money for this... I did better figure drawings than this before I even got into my program at school"

I'm referring to the one on the right, but can we talk about this sexy couple that someone thought would, idk, set the mood for the room??

But it seems to me that feelings of "I could do better than that" rarely prompt me to actually do anything about that feeling. Maybe rue that I haven't tried selling my old newprint figure classwork as another revenue source? I feel like I'm sort of going off track at this point.

I guess the point, if there is one, is why do I feel like I have to achieve at a certain level in order to feel like making art is worth doing? Why can't it be enough that I like doing it? Do I like doing it? I don't like doing it and thinking "ew looks like something I would make" but how do I get past that? How do I return to the kid who isn't paying attention in class because drawing eyes is awesome in itself? Maybe I should do some master studies. idk.

Anyway, here's my revelatory doodle:

I look at this and think "this is basically what I was doing back in 2012 when I did this project for the first time :/ When am I ever going to grow as an artist?"

On a less philosophical note I've also considered a few technical things (e.g. it's a pain to log into blogger now that I'm not constantly logged into google) that may hold me back this year. I guess we'll see. Maybe I'll come up with workflows that are better for that.

week 1 day 2

Here's Odo, still using that sketchbook from like 2018 (at least it's almost full)

2024 or: Week 1, Day 1

 Ok will I be able to do this this year? Uhhh we'll see. For the last few years I have been really burned out creatively. While I have worked on some really fun stuff at work, my personal art life is pretty dead. So I'm hoping I can use this project to explore that a bit, see if I can figure out why this is happening, see if there's anything I can do to make it better, and so on and so forth. This is something I've been thinking a lot about for a while and maybe this project can help clarify some things for me. 

I'm also going to draw on the idea of "themes" as explained by CGP Grey over here and see if I can do a season of creating as my theme for this winter and go from there.

Here's my customary attempt at a self portrait for the first day, this time no mirrors because I am jetlagged and want to go to bed. Fun to give photopea a try, but I wish my pen pressure came through. I'll have to check if my photoshop install on the windows side of my computer still works.

Is this the hardest I will work on any of these? It's more likely than you think.