Commitment, Focus, and Follow Through

2020 was a tough year and for much of it, I lacked commitment, focus, and follow through related to creativity, in general, and with drawing and painting, specifically.  Knitting was the bright spot in my life, creatively, and I am so thankful for that.  Knitting was a comfort and I enjoyed playing with color and either re-learning or learning some new techniques.  I'm almost done with my 10th pandemic hat, which I think I'm going to keep.  Here's the most recent one, which I gave to a friend. 

Most of the new knitting techniques came from attending a monthly Zoom classes put on by Sena Klets, a folk costume museum in Riga Latvia.  I attended one today on "Many Color Knitting".  Those Latvian knitters are really something.

I started getting my act together when I took the last session of Roz's class on creating background textures.  I really started getting my act together when I joined her Patreon site and several months later finally got into her Facebook group related to her Patron site.  There were some technical difficulties with Facebook.  I asked Roz to try a few different things and the last one finally worked.  The timing was great because it was right when she rolled out the idea of "Do It Anyway December".  A lot of things clicked for me about how I can and should use projects to focus on and develop skills. 

One of my stumbling blocks has been that I don't know what I don't know.  When I got stuck with a drawing or painting problem, I wasn't sure how to get unstuck. I think if I can adopt Roz's manner of doing projects, along with goal setting and assessments I can be a better captain of my own ship in deciding what I want to learn and how I can get the info, tools, techniques, and so on that I think I need.  

My project for December has been to paint an apple every day in acrylic paint while exploring color options.  It may not seem like much, but I keep bumping up against these color-related rules (and other art-making rules) in my head that aren't real and that I need to confront and make them go away, so I am doing things like painting blue apples. It may not seem like much, but it is helping me confront my internal critic and it's getting me back to creating on a daily basis and I can see small, incremental changes.  

I've also been focusing in a much more effective way on values.  The value finder tool has become my friend.  I purchased some black paint and a premixed gray and have been also working monochromatically.  The biggest surprise is that I started doing thumbnail sketches, which I previously have been afraid of and didn't understand how to do them.  Slowly, I'm learning.  Here's ones from the last two days and, the pen mark on the one on the left shows where I made something a darker value than what it actually was. 

I've been writing about all of this a lot, but what I've been writing has fit better into a journal app that I use, called Penzu.  I have multiple journals in this app and the exploration, processing, and journey fits better in the creativity journal I created.  I haven't figured out how the blog fits into all of this.  My guess is that I will post occasionally, because this blog captures the arc of my journey in a different way.

One last thing is that I have spent some time thinking about why do I want to learn to draw and paint?  It is clear to me that having creative outlets is an important aspect of my life, but I've never really answered the question why dry and paint.  While I don't think this is my final answer, here's my best answer as of today. I want to use art to capture everyday objects, moments, and experiences in an uninhibited way as part of staying grounded and present in my life.