Creative Everyday

Last week I joined an online creative challenge: http://www.creativeeveryday.com/creativeeveryday/creative-every-day-challenge.html This is such a great idea, and a great way to stay motivated. Just today, I started a painting for a friend, and I’m just not feeling it. I was kind of playing with the idea of using polymer clay to make trees instead of the wire I’ve been using, and it worked fine, but I feel like that theme is kind of getting played out with me, so now I’m losing steam on this project. It’s small though, so I think I can pull it out.

I spent a lot of time today photographing and photoshopping images of my paintings. Now that I have my new camera they are so much better than the bad images I had before. I would like to try to enter this juried show at the Providence Art Club, so I need digital images of all my work. The show is highlighting “green” projects, and since all my paintings are done on salvaged wood, I think they qualify.

Friday I wrote about 5 pages of my story, tentatively titled “Angela Joins the Circus.” The reason I started writing this was so I would have a story to illustrate, because that’s a challenge I’ve wanted to try for a long time. I’ve also had this character in my head for years. So I finally started it last week. It took some good advise from a writer friend to get me going. He told me not to plan out the ending too carefully, to listen to the characters and allow them to tell you how the end should come. It was just what I needed to hear because I had this idea that I needed to plan out the story completely in advance, and I just didn’t know how I wanted it to end.

I also did some sketches for my first illustration for the story. I wasn’t too happy with them, and I could feel the old “oh forget it!” feeling coming over me. But I really don’t want to give up on this idea yet, so I’m going to push through it. I just need to sit down and get working on it, and let it unfold.

I think the lesson I really need to learn is to just do things my way and trust that they are the right way. To not worry about whether my “voice” is cool enough, or interesting or quirky or imaginative enough. To just going and do it and trust that it will be right in the end. That internal critic is a REALLY hard thing to ignore, but that’s got to be one of my New Year’s resolutions - to ignore the stupid critic and just make my art my way. It’s not life and death here. The worst than can happen is something might suck. Then I just try it a different way.