I’ve decided to do a hundred hours of drawing before my birthday — just an arbitrary goal, based on a conversation I had with my friend Lisa.
When I stayed with Lisa and her family in Toronto, she was in the middle of doing 100 hours of ukulele practice — an hour every day — even though she’s already a professional musician (her Dixie/Bluegrass band, Dirty Dishes, is a lot of fun). But she wants to get better. So, in true Suzuki Method tradition, she’s showing up, setting a timer, and putting in the time — and has witnessed her skill with the instrument take a leap forward.
So, yeah, I want that with my drawing. One challenge has been knowing what to draw when I’m looking at the page. I like doing diary comics, but I’m not going to progress if I just keep drawing me all the time, so — again, taking my lead from Lisa, who had a grid of exercises to choose from, I’ve made a list of different things I want to practice (gesture lines, charater anatomy, composition, animation…). Yesterday I got an app that spits out random story prompts for writers, and I’ve started using that to conjure up images to work on:
(I did another drawing that was a total hash — which I’m allowed to do in practice, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to share it!)
I’m also trying to give my days a bit more definition, ’cause they’d become kinda saggy, with some work done, then me getting lost in the afternoon.
I didn’t really intend to focus on books this year, because there’s really no multiplier there (the effort that goes in is disproportionate to what comes back, which is usually nothing). Still, I’ve got an Ikea cabinet full of paper — paper I don’t intend to take across the Atlantic — so I want to use my couch-time to stitch together all kinds of books just so I can get that paper out the door in some sort of hopefully desirable form.
I started last night with some old postcards and cereal boxes, making them into gift-boxes and notebooks. Here’s one I made for myself out of a granola-box:
This puppy is proving very helpful: a “saddle-stapler”:
I gave my long-reach stapler to the charity shop (they get a lot of good stuff from me!), ’cause I just couldn’t set a staple reliably with it. I’d line it up so carefully, drop my hand — bang! — and… crooked. With this thing, the spine of the booklet sits right on the metal arch, so it’s impossible to miss.
That this is so much easier makes me more inclined to produce stuff.
Speaking of producing, it’s time for some copywriting…