Today I’ve made myself a little proud and practiced what I’ve preached. Keeping a creative life alive when you’ve got a hectic schedule is difficult, and I’m no different from any other parent who has the full range of grown-up responsibilities. The only difference is I’ve given myself an additional range of creative tasks to potentially get frustrated over!

If you can’t fit in a big project, do something small that’s a step towards it.

I’ve known this for a long time – some weeks there are just too many things in the way to dive in to a time-consuming project. This week was just like that.

I did have a great creative result as an art technician though, designing a minimal sheep’s skull mask template for a dance performance. I’d planned to recreate it and document it for the blog this week, with a pdf to share. I haven’t been able to do that, but I’ll make sure to get on to it as soon as I can.

The main thing I’d wanted to do was to carry on one of my ideas from last week when I worked on a backlit drawing of Ste. I wanted to set up some photographs going 360° around him, then translate these into drawings and maybe paintings.

Next, I wanted to try animating the drawings (William Kentridge is the first influence to come to mind, of course).

With everything we had to manage this week, there just wasn’t time, so I used my studio assistant (which is the entire reason why I bought him in the first place!). I took some quick snaps, but I just couldn’t fit in the drawing stage for the scope I had in mind, so I made a little video and then a gif from my stills.

Small steps can take you in the right direction

So this wasn’t what I wanted to have done by the end of the week, but having a deadline (this post!) and a strong desire to have something – anything – as a visual note meant that I have a step towards the end goal.

I particularly like seeing the answers to some of my questions, such as:

How would it appear – as if the subject is moving, or if the observer is moving?

What effect does the light source have on that – moving around the model instead of moving the model?

Anyway, now I have something that I can look at and show to others to demonstrate the concept I’m thinking of expanding on, and that takes me further along than if I’d done nothing at all.

Not getting distracted…

Of course I’m interested in animation, but I can’t commit to another rabbithole! This is definitely something I’m going to pursue, but I have the money project to get on with as well as a few writing jobs to complete.

If you get stuck with your own creative process, try to tackle a smaller step, and pat yourself on the back for what you have managed to accomplish. It definitely helps!

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This week has been full of nostalgia. Memory lane has been more like a highway, with lots of reminders about the things I used to do and the person I used to be. What do I mean?

Echoes of my old studio

On Sunday we went to an Ikea showroom – Ste’s first time ever, and my first time in a very long time. It was strange to see so many of the same things I’d bought for my ceramics studio, like the plastic Trofast storage bins that held my clay slips and glazes.

Of course I was tempted to plonk down the cash to kit out my new studio to get it just the way I want it, but I think I’ll just take the furniture that gets kicked out of the rest of the house and try to work some magic with it.

Mixing glazes

Funnily enough, my first tech job the following day was reconstituting dried glazes and mixing some stoneware glazes from powder. It’s been over a solid decade since I’ve mixed any glazes, and as I stirred and brushed the rough glaze mixture through the sieve, I thought about all of the years I’d spent totally immersed in the world of ceramics.

I don’t do ceramic work these days, but I still love it. I’ve kept all of my glaze recipes and kiln books… knowing me, one day I might well jump back in. Even when you don’t carry on in a particular medium, nothing is entirely wasted – the skills you pick up stay with you, and I’m glad I’m able to keep on using them even if it’s not for my own practice.

The craft work

So after a few weeks, I finally managed to finish (subject to a bit of tinkering I suppose) a mammoth post about my craft business, why I folded it, why it didn’t work out like I wanted it to and what I could have done differently.

Thing is, I’ve spent a lot of the intervening years thinking of that business as something that failed, when it really did a lot for me and helped get me to where I am now. After I went to recover some product images from an old hard drive, I realised just how busy I’d been and how well it had done for me.

When you decide to move on from one phase of your life to another, it can be too easy to write off the past time as a failure or a waste, without recognising what it’s done for you. The truth is, nothing is ever totally wasted.

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This week I tumbled unceremoniously back into the world of work – yay for me!

I brought back a sweet little felted mouse made for me by Jenny. How cute is he? I gave her some jumpers that I’d accidentally shrunk, and she made this mouse out of one of them. One of the cats stole him when I wasn’t looking but I managed to get him back unharmed!

My gentle return saw me cutting up cardboard and cleaning screens – which, of course, made me think about my return to the world of artwork. I’m definitely well enough to start printing again, but my studio is an absolute tip after a month of ignoring it.

Honestly I don’t feel mentally strong enough to tackle cleaning my room, but it’s got to happen sometime. The banknote project was really on a roll when I had to stop, so I feel as though I’ve lost momentum, and I’m almost wondering whether to start from scratch. (Almost.)

Figure drawing again

To stretch my legs, so to speak, I started some figure drawing. I like being able to switch from one theme to the next when it feels like I need a change, and it’s good to plan something different – and big – later in the year.

I love this pose and I like the challenge of the foreshortening. It’ll be interesting to develop it and work on it in paint.

Let’s end with something totally unrelated to art.

The award for the weirdest phrase I came across on the internet goes to:

“I consume pineapple thrice a week”

I mean, who talks like that? This question almost deserves an interrobang!

Almost.

This kind of thing tickles me somewhat because I spend a lot of time writing for the internet. This personal site is the tip of my blog iceberg; I also receive a lot of submissions from other writers looking to publish posts on my other, vastly more popular site. On top of this, I used to edit for a website where I’d publish interviews with other bloggers.

So I’ve seen a lot of writing cross my desk apart from everything I read for post research, and it’s easy to spot non-native English writers, as well as to tell which part of the world someone comes from… and nothing gives you away like cramming words like “consume” and “thrice” into a sentence. We know you’ve been busting out the thesaurus, it’s ok.

Anyway, it’s stuck with me because of a link scam email I got this week, from someone who was definitely not who they were claiming to be.

It made me think about the ways we represent ourselves online and how we use language to cover up who we truly are, like a mask, or to portray ourselves in the best possible light, like makeup. Artists have a pretty tough job when it comes to figuring out the right tone and content for promoting themselves and their work, so it’s all going into the pot of topics to research for future articles.

I meant to write about it this week but haven’t yet, mostly because of getting stuck in to writing a mammoth article about running a craft business, and a few more about digital marketing. All of these topics are bleeding into another post about why on earth an artist writes about digital marketing in the first place.

Well? That’s for another post – soon, I promise.

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Having shiny object syndrome has its pros and cons. On the plus side, I’m always fizzing with ideas. On the downside, when one of my ideas takes off and people start to want a piece of it, it starts to smell a bit like work!

My plans for getting down to some figure drawing were totally derailed by – no, not someone else – by my own writing.

What I did produce was, at long last, the outline of an article about running a craft business, and what I learned from the business that I gave up. It made me think about how much has changed for me in the last 10 years, and how little has changed about me fundamentally. I’m still trying to do all the things, mostly on my own; but now, instead of sewing all the things, I’m drawing and writing and publishing and promoting all the things.

Back to life, back to reality

Six weeks ago I had surgery. In the first week, nothing much seemed to change, but every day after that, I could see incremental improvements. The biggest changes happened about 4-5 weeks on, when I could stand up straight again.

When usually able-bodied people get ill, we can go from taking our daily lives for granted to taking nothing for granted, and then slowly ramp up to forgetting again. It’s easy to forget about it when you get better, but some people never do. I am getting better, and before long I expect I will fully recover, but this experience has made me think about those of us for whom diminished ability isn’t a couple-of-months-long blip.

I had this many years ago, where I was temporarily disabled whilst I was pregnant. I knew that in all likelihood it would go away, but at the time it was an all-consuming blot that not only overshadowed the way I felt about myself, but obviously changed the way that others viewed me. At the time I didn’t know how long it would last, and was actually quite afraid that I’d never be the same. A year later, I was fine.

That experience has never really left me, which is partly why I was dreading this fresh experience… but it hasn’t been as bad. Yes, I’m impatient with myself, but the fact is, there is an end in sight.

Even now, I’ve passed through the realm of invisibility that the disabled are pushed into by our reluctance or inability to engage with them.

A friend of mine, a fellow artist, suffered a stroke last October, and despite having been dealt a hand of truly outrageous fortune, he’s been a real inspiration to me and I expect, to everyone who knows him. It puts my passage through this state into sharp perspective.

The less able figure

Representational art can’t help but find itself sticking to the decorative, the beautiful, the perfect. We want it so badly because frankly, we need it. Static on a page or as a sculpture, we want to immortalise the image of the body so we can forget about the body’s propensity to go wrong.

It’s all just made me think about the purpose of my own figure drawing, pursuing an image of a body that is itself relentlessly in pursuit of perfection…

But we’re all being transformed, no matter how able or less able we are right now.

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Generally restless – it’s been a long time to be indoors. I can count on my fingers the trips I’ve made outside my house, and I’m starting to get a bit bored.

On the other hand, I’m recovering steadily and am now standing up straight and walking around, which means that it’ll be back to business soon! In the meantime…

Beware of commissioning beggars

I’ve been loving Reddit’s Choosing Beggars sub, where a surprising amount of entries have to do with artists getting lowballed – or just begged for free art – by tightwads.

When your client asks if you can do it cheaper. from r/ChoosingBeggars

The amount of abuse artists get just for asking for payment makes me glad I don’t chase commissions. I considered it, but decided I didn’t want that.

Our homemade book was well received…

I started off well, trying to follow the instructions in an old bookbinding book I was given years ago – but the instructions went something like, “sit at a gilded table no more than 3 feet from any corner of your room, with your book placed 12 inches in front of you at a .25° clockwise angle, and commence wrigglestitching whilst a cockerel crows.”

Needless to say, I just hand-stitched the signatures and back to the best of my ability.

Finally getting somewhere with photography

About this time last year, I bought a DSLR camera, mostly to use for my other blog and to take pictures of my artwork. Of course, starting (mostly) from scratch, I had next to no idea of what I was doing and next to no idea of how to learn, so I turned to the internet.

I came across The Beginner Photography Podcast, which broke things down into fairly manageable bites. It comes at photography from a commercial point of view, focusing on wedding or event photography, but that doesn’t matter when learning about the basic technical aspects.

Besides that, it goes on to discuss aspects of running a creative business that are useful for artists as well as photographers, so I recommend it.

A year ago I didn’t really have the time to put into photography, but now I do have a bit of time where I can play around with the camera, and learn a bit more through trial and error. Even though I haven’t been actively looking up information on technique, I can tell I’m improving somewhat. Is this going to make a photographer out of me at last?

Absolutely not! But maybe it’ll make me a better artist.

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