breaking through art block

The beginning of December was met with a sad goodbye to our beloved dog, Elsa. Even when you know the end is near, it's never easy. The sadness was intense and at times overwhelming. But I got through it. You can always get through it.

It took me a while to get back into art creation. A little longer than I thought, TBH. Looking back, the art block only lasted about 3 weeks. Maybe because there was a lot going on between the beginning of the month and end of year events, but it felt like months.

Here are the things I learned from that block (and that I'm still working on).

• It's ok to do nothing. It's ok to just feel your feelings and not be productive.

• Working with your hands is the best meditation. I did a lot of knitting and crocheting and cleaning.

• When you're ready to start creating art again, do what's easy and doesn't need a lot of thinking - like drawing from observation or redraws of stuff you've already done before.

I was having a hard time thinking of new ideas to work on. Nothing that came to mind brought me joy. So I went back through my sketchbooks and Procreate gallery to gather motivation. But again nothing created any new sparks or ideas. But then I realized I have to pathway though the block already. I decided to redraw some of my old artwork from years ago. My style has changed and redrawing old ideas took away the pressure to create a new idea. And it's been really fun. I found myself going for my iPad more often than the last three months combined.

The thing for me to work on for 2024 is how to keep going when life events (good or bad) happen that throw off your mood. I've read so many motivation themed books over the years and the one thing that keeps coming up is consistency. Do your routine everyday so that when life does throw you a curve ball, you can easily get your focus back. Because motivation is fleeting. Habits are more sustainable.

Here are a few of the redraws I started last week that I'm still working on:

2018 >> 2023

This year I'll be building up a subscription blog - a lot like Patreon! But for now it's all free for whomever decides to read my sparse blog :)

I'm on threads now

I stopped visiting twitter a long time ago and stopped posting even long before that. It was time to shut it down. Look, it's either this or I start a broadcast channel on Instagram. And no one wants that.

So here are some life updates (in my head): I'm making a plan today to focus on filling up a whole sketchbook...and not buying any more notebooks/sketchbooks until what I have has been used up. OR jumping around to different sketchbooks. Because I literally have a stack of 4 notebooks + and iPad next to me because my brain thinks each brilliant idea has to be recorded on a specific type of paper or it will die. I've also been thinking about what would I tell my younger self if I could go back in time. I'd probably tell myself that filling the sketchbook everyday is the most important thing you can do for your talent, career, and sanity.

So...making lots of thumbnails in the hopes that something magical will motivate me to finish a series. HAHAHAHA.

And because I strongly dislike posts with no visuals, here is a process video of a knitting pattern I'm working on!

Bye guys.

Reading: It Start with Us / Colleen Hoover

Listening: The Retrievals / Serial podcast

This blog will be my livejournal and you can't stop me

A stream of consciousness that will appear more often, but less edited. I really want to get an IG channel so I can bother my followers more often.

Because like any good artist, I have a lot of sketchbooks. Always have, always will. And like any aspiring artist, the unfulfilled goal is to saturate each page with a collage of doodles and marks that are effortlessly merged together in a deliberate yet chaotic feast for the eye.

I imagine the journey is not unlike trying to reach enlightenment. Only instead of learning not have attachment in this life in order to reach true happiness, I will die buried in a hoard of fine liner pens.

But anyway, one good thing that has come out of moving is that I've finally curated my sketchbooks - mostly-full ones and blank ones are separated and easy to find. I have a few sketchbooks that are only a few pages in and have been left of the shelf dreaming of fulfilling their destiny. The thing that I've discovered is that most of my sketchbooks suffer from an "out of sight, out of mind" syndrome.

Truthfully, I do avoid looking at some really old sketchbooks because *cringe* it's not always pretty. But I've been able to revisit old projects and see where I can add or adjust to it to bring it into my current aesthetic. As I've refined my style this last year, I can now find fun in re-doing old work and be inspired by my old self...and not try to always avoid her.