day #365 - the end of an era

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I thought I was on top of it; I had finished early and was looking for a movie to watch already 3 hours ago. And I don't know how time went by. A phonecall, some networking studying, some online shopping and here we are, already past the time for an early movie. Regardless, today is a special day. The blog is over! I finished 365 days of daily painting and recording it, whatever that means. A big part of the process I will have to keep doing mainly for myself. Perhaps taking daily photos of my work and saving it on some folder. This has provem useful many times when I trying to date a piece I've been working on. Also making a small diary of today's achievements. It's still useful. But this will be done for my eyes only. I also don't know if I will be continuing my obsessively daily painting. How would life be if I had days off? Now for example that I'm moving out and I have to daily chores that until now were completely taken care of, perhaps I'll allow my
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day #8 - Vehicles, Friends and Four Fears

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For today a sheet of doodley vehicles that I decided to do as today's practice. The results are very satisfying per se. I've been struggling with downwards angled spaceship wings, but today I've been successful. I particularly like the curved ones, at the transport vehicle on the right. These were created by visualizing two circles - one vertical at the back and one angled at the front. Come to think about it, I could use the same technique with straight wings as well.The cars have funny perspective errors but I'm ok with it; I was more concerned with the cuteness. I like the planes too, particularly the bubbly one with the angled wings. Not sure how it could fly, but it has some Hayao Miyasaki vibe. I spent more time layering green to create a shading than actually drawing them. But I like that I'm playing with watercolors! And thank goodness, today I escaped from the R-Y-B palette from the last few days.

These days, I'm seeing my painting/drawing practice reduced to doodly pieces made for a blog submission. I am not very happy about it, but then again these days I've been particularly busy and something tells me that if I wasn't obsessing over posting daily on the blog I wouldn't be drawing most of the days.

Again, I see the irony that I never officially committed to making one post every day, but here I am doing it. And worse, I never set an end-date, some goal -some milestone for it. I implicitly (and this has been a lifelong habit) put an open-ended challenge for myself, that I know I cannot keep up for life, only to beat myself over the (inevitable) failure when it eventually comes. It hurts seeing it, but even like that I can't give myself a humanely possible size for the challenge. I'm sabotaging myself and I can't do anything about it. But why? Why can't I (now) say to myself "come on, this is going to be a 30 days challenge, and then it ends. Or you can restart it for another 30 days". My mind screams back: "only 30 days? What will I achieve in 30 days?". Good point! But what will I achieve in 60, or 90, or 365 days? What will I achieve in 10 years of writing the blog? Now here's a point; 10 years; 10 years can be a record of my progress! But this hasn't been the goal of this blog; sharing insight into the struggles has been it. And if I record my work for 10 years, I'd rather be doing it in microblogging form, or a gallery of images. Then what? What I am aiming at? No answer. I've setup a failure trap for myself and I can't do anything about it.

These days I've been torn between picking up some programming projects to bring some money my way, and diving deeper (spending more time) getting in touch with my creativity. I'm leaning towards the money and it stings. I feel guilty for not trusting creativity/art/flow enough to ease in and forget about money and I feel that now I'm further blocking it by choosing money.

On a slightly positive side, I'm realizing that it's very rare for me to doing complete pieces. I practice people, landscapes, machines again and again, but hardly ever make a complete composition, I'm too scared.

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