Much of my free time is oriented around reading — on my phone, on my kindle, in a paper book — and I’ve been feeling like it’s been too long since I made something. Blogging is a great outlet for thoughts, but writing is my default response, and there are so many other formats I’d like to play with — I just need to remember to do them. As part of my recovery process to bring down my elevated cortisol levels, my therapist has also encouraged me to do more tactile and immersive activities.
I’m working on multiple long-running projects that take a huge upfront time investment before they’re ready to share with others. It’s hard to measure my progress in much besides hours invested. It would be nice to finish some things. (That’s something I like about blogging; the format encourages me to finish and publish.)
I find it challenging to create visual art for the sake of creating. I suspect I am more a designer than an artist at heart. Blogging works well for me because there are endless prompts to think about. I have way more ideas for fiction than I’ll ever have time to write. But visual art? Inventing something pretty to draw feels kind of meaningless — purely aesthetic — but I’m not sure how to translate what I can do with writing into the visual arts.
In the past, identifying themed projects for myself has unlocked a ton of creative energy for design and other types of work that aren’t my first instinct to turn to. Time-based art challenges like MerMay and Inktober spurred me to draw more, but the daily pressure to create was too intense and the prompts felt hollow since I didn’t pick them. A more enjoyable — and meaningful — project was making daily comics during a vacation.
I’d like to give myself a creative focus, a new project to orient my art around this fall, so I’m starting by brainstorming the boundaries of what I want out of it. Constraints make a project. If I draw a bunch of random shit, it’s a sketchbook; if the drawings have a theme, it’s a collection 😎
Although waiting for an organic idea for a project sounds more natural, thinking back, I’ve always had a goal that served as a constraint at the core of each project idea: I made vacation comics because I’d always wanted to do hourly comic day but missed it again right before I was leaving on vacation; I created my Sense Memory project because I wanted to experiment with a newsletter format and revisit old photos; I created an online t-shirt shop for my political satire project because I wanted to critique capitalism through capitalism.
James (jamesg.blog)
