Published on March 9th, 2010
Time is everything lately. With the day-job workload, re-working my first novel, and the imminent moving house, it’s tough to find quality time to sit and draw. But keeping up the practice is essential. draw365 was the answer.
Started by Regina Agu, draw365 encourages the creation of at least one drawing, ever single day. That’s a tough call for those of us hardly finding the time to do anything other than work these days. But that is partly the beauty of the idea.
Any drawing is good. Whether it be a multi-hour piece or a simple scribble, putting marks on paper to represent something is a worthy exercise and, simply, you cannot improve without actually doing it.
One of the strongest periods of my illustrative development came when I worked as an editorial artist for a daily newspaper. During the original Gulf War, I had the daily task of meeting the 12 noon deadline by supplying the appropriate diagrams, maps, illustrations for that day’s news. It taught m to work and think fast and to meet a very tight deadline at all cost.
draw365, to me, reminds me of that exciting time. I spend between 15 and 45 minutes on average on a draw365 drawing. Much less than I would like, I’ll admit, but that is about the limit of what I can slot into my day around the essentials.
Yet that time is enough. I have some specific aims of look and style I want to achieve when working in materials such as charcoal and compressed charcoal. The brief time commitment of the daily draw365 enables me to experiment and explore in a way I had not considered before. It loosens the inhibitions to try a new technique, a new style, because the time investment makes potential failure that much less painful: if I waste 45 minutes of my day, it really does not matter!
Each day I feel as if I am homing-in on my target. As I look back on the past month of drawings I see progress – progress based on my own, personal measure of whether a piece is successful or not (generally a set of parameters of what I want to achieve with each individual drawing). Sure there are some clangers in there, but the dead ends are as valuable as the triumphs.
draw365 is exciting and motivating. And using it for exploration and experimentation brings an extra level of value to me, making the time and effort that much more worthwhile.
My most recent draw365 creations can be seen in the sidebar of this blog’s home page, on my draw365 posterous blog, and on my flickr. Plenty more draw365 artists on twitter and flickr.
March 3rd, 2010
MacHeist is here again with a bundled selection of OSX applications for a daft price. Rarely do I find a bundle that is not worth the price. But this time I have been put off by one item in particular.
March 2nd, 2010
I’m unaccustomed to dealing with medical problems, so the prospect of undergoing a routine surgery came not without some trepidation.
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February 24th, 2010
Moving home is the perfect excuse to clear out all those things I no longer have use of. But the options are narrowing in where sell stuff.
For many of us, eBay remains the default location for second hand goods on the net. Paper-based classifieds having long gone to the dogs and most online classified still [...]
February 15th, 2010
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February 9th, 2010
Sleep and I do not have the most stable of relationships. In an attempt to understand more about how I sleep, and how evening routines affect my me, I have been looking at ways to record and monitor my sleep patterns.
Insomnia frequently lurks nearby and rarely do I find a night’s sleep properly restful. Elements [...]
January 27th, 2010
It’s well overdue time to remind you about some valid GoDaddy codes and coupons to get you a range of discounts on GoDaddy.com products and services. The following codes are valid to use right now will remain valid for some time.
January 20th, 2010
Apparently I’m not the only one suffereing this annoying problem.
January 19th, 2010
Last year, the new creative activity boost saw me revisiting old techniques and subjects. But it’s a different world in 2010.
Pet portraits are not overly challenging and very rewarding creations. When I did them years ago there were few artists working specifically on pets. So trying to inject more creativity into day to day life [...]
January 18th, 2010
2010’s big push to a more creatively aligned lifestyle means getting our feet wet with selling our art online. I now understand why so many artists fail to create an effective online sales platform: it’s bloody hard!
I helped in the background to get absinthe-shop.com online last year (where you can, of course buy absinthe!) which [...]
