Day 150 feels like a milestone, and I am thinking about how this daily practise has changed me.
I saw a thing the other day online, and I can’t remember where it was, but it was a commentary that said that if you commit to doing art/creativity as a daily practise for X amount of days, it will change your art. It’s true. It will also, perhaps more importantly, change your attitude towards your art.
I’m speaking for myself, of course, because there are going to be people this just won’t work for, and that’s OK too.
After 150 days I find I am much, much freer in my art making, and much, much freer in my art sharing. I worry much less about sharing art that isn’t filling me with joy. I’m embarrassed about much less of my art – even if I know it’s not good in and of itself, I accept it is just part of the process, and the process doesn’t have to be perfection every time, or every day. In fact it’s never going to be perfection.
I am also much freer in myself in terms of what my daily practise looks like. I am incredibly good at making lists, and goals, and lists of goals, and getting incredibly detailed about what a daily art practise should look like. The upshot of that is it will stick for maybe a day, maybe three, and then I will “fail”, and I will internalise that failure, and…
But since I have been doing this daily practise, defined by the bare minimum of one page of art practise, and one blog post, I am much more comfortable on the days I don’t create for hours, and much more relaxed the next day to just go again. This is different from previously where I would get blocked very easily, and just shut down.
I have not so much “found my rhythm” as “found my rhythms”, because the rhythms are not undulating across single days, they undulate over longer periods of time.
There are different daily rhythms, of course, because some days I really want to create, and I get going, and I have a productive and inspiring day. Some days I don’t feel motivated, and I may get into the zone if I persist, and some days I don’t persist, and eventually force myself into a sketchbook and make something. They are all good days, in the end, but perhaps the most frustrating of days is the kind of day where I really want to create, but I just cannot get going, and I cannot identify what the block is, and I have to force myself to a sketchbook page. In the end, even on those days where I feel I have marched myself to the page just for the sake of my streak, I succeed because I somehow got out of my own way.
The days I want more of are the days where I feel motivated, and I get motivated and I have hours of work under my belt at the end of the day, so I have been quietly paying attention to the different things that are going on that I feel demotivate me, and one of those things is the limitations of my space, which is hopefully going to be changed by the new table.
The table hasn’t arrived yet, but I am already seeing the way I want it to be part of what develops in my practise for the next phase of my artist life. There are a few artists who I follow online who inspire me very much, not so much in their art styles, but in the way they work. Of course I like their art, but it is not my style of work, and it is the WAY they work, their processes, that resonate with me.
They work in ways where they can cycle through multiple projects all in the same day, laying things aside to rest or dry, and moving onto something else, and this is a way that I really enjoy working. It’s my ideal art day. Now, they have proper, dedicated studios, and lots and lots of table spaces, and I do not. I have a Room that is not very glamorous, that functions as a storage space for almost every craft material known to woman, a computer space for Himself, and a painting/art space. I also have another art space in my tiny study. I do get my steps up bouncing between the two spaces, but I just really want the Room space to fit the way I work, and it is coming together.
Today I had one of those days where I felt motivated, go going, and worked on multiple different pages and sketchbooks. I was in my best flow state, and it was an excellent day. The bannister along the landing is littered with bits and pieces resting and drying, and I feel accomplished.
One of the things I did today was to revisit a figure pose I had been working with a while back, but it has been abandoned for a while. It’s often difficult to come back to something after the momentum has gone, so it felt a bit like starting again with it.
I covered my A2 drawing board in brown paper, and set it up on my easel, and worked some very fast sketches using my phone timer. After the first charcoal sketch was done, I laughed, and then gessoed over it a bit, and then went in with a piece of XL charcoal, and some big sweeping gestural motions using the side of the block. Again I laughed, and smeared on some gesso.
This is where I decided that if I had another board the same size, I could switch out one board while the gesso dries, and keep the momentum going. Note to self.
Since I didn’t have that option, I started working the gesso with the XL charcoal and reshaping and realigning parts of the drawing to correct things. It’s just brown paper, it’s just practise, it can end up as collage fodder, but my connection with this figure pose is back on.
I’m kind of attached to the middle version, even though it is gone now. It’s out of proportion in terms of the actual figure reference, but it does have a kind of troll character feel about it. The third version, which is where I stopped because the paper was gettin saturated, is just not quite there and is giving me thoughtful minotaur vibes, but maybe I can use that.
Tomorrow I go again.
Til the morn,
Suzanne
150/200
Thrummie Bizzum 
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