Draw365 – a new playground
The idea behind photo365 – taking a photograph, any photograph, every day, for a year – has been around for a few years now. Flickr is full of photo365 feeds. More recently, artists have been tapping into the idea with draw365, something I have been doing for just over a month.
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.
Limited time and limited life
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!
Just over a month
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.
