All work and no play make me kinda cray-cray.
I’ve been putting in extra paid work hours on top of the time spent preparing my book dummy, manuscript, pitch, and portfolio for this October conference. Fortunately, there are interim deadlines for drafts, critiques, and the like to keep me on track, but it is still a lot especially when I think that I need to learn to master Photoshop, Illustrator, and Procreate in the same month.
It’s customary for illustrators to bring postcards of their portfolio pieces to leave as business cards for potential agents and editors at these conferences. That’s another thing for my to-do list, I suppose. But in looking for a postcard vendor, I chased a rabbit of customized matchboxes and ended up exploring matchbox art. The photo is of some vintage matchboxes from China and Japan that I found and bought on Etsy for inspiration. Seems like the perfect project for my mini printing press, which I am itching to get back to.
All that said, yesterday I finally followed a great piece of advice from the folks at Drawabox, which can be paraphrased as: when learning to improve your art, make sure to make art just for the fun of it at least half the time, lest you forget why you make art in the first place. Taking that to heart, I pulled out the scissors and painted papers for some low-stress collage. Not all of my art needs to be in pixels, nor aimed at a lofty Big-Hairy-Audacious Goal. If designing matchboxed-sized art lights my fire right now, it might be worth doing to keep the flame going.
Yes, let there be fun -- and remember that art is at the center of HeART and also at the center of eARTh ! onward !