Summer Art Goal

I've been thinking a bit about the summer and how I'll have a bit more time than I have recently to do art for fun. I've been trying to think of some sort of art goals that I could make for the summer in order to keep me drawing and finishing pieces and posting them on the blog. I thought of having all kinds of specific goals, but getting too specific I think will make it seem too much like a project that I can get tired of.

So this is my goal.

Every week starting this week, on (or maybe sometimes before) Saturday, I will post a piece of art that I created that week that I can call finished. I might continue to work with and edit these pictures, but between work and classes I think I should have enough time to finish a small study, master copy,  experimental piece or whatever. Usually this should be a completely self-initiated project, though if there is a particularly busy week then I can count something from class or work that I especially liked.

I'm telling you this because I need to answer to somebody. Remind me on Fridays that I need to have something post-worthy in the next 24 hours. If you like what I post, comment, and along with mentioning things you like feel free to suggest ways to improve as well. I'm committing to this goal publicly here and to myself, but if anyone feels like helping me out by just checking up with me I would really appreciate your help and support.

So.

I'm going to sketch. My first piece of the summer will finish off my seasons series, and then... who knows what I'll do?

the dichotomy of ability and understanding

Over the years as I've been trying to improve in art and in other areas, I've noticed a pattern that I thought I'd share. This pattern has to do with the relationship between the ability to do something well and the understanding of how to do something well.

First off, I think our understanding of how to do something is always beyond our ability. As we study, observe, read, etc, our understanding (hopefully) increases.

Our ability doesn't always improve at the same rate as our understanding.

Lets pretend that we can graph ability and understanding, which we can't, but we're pretty good at pretending so we'll do it anyway.

Understainding: -----
Ability: ----

So we're feeling pretty good about ourselves, because we can do art (or whatever it is) about as well as we understand what it means to do well.

Then we study. We look at awesome pictures, take some classes, brainstorm some awesome ideas.

Then our graph looks something like this:

Understanding: -----------
Aility: ----

And we don't feel so good about ourselves. So we work and sweat and stay up all night and fill fifty sketchbooks and try new things.

And then we have a graph looking like this:

Understanding : -----------
Ability: ----------

And we're feeling pretty good about ourselves at that point.

I think this keeps on going indefinitely. Our understanding will pull ahead, and we work hard for awhile to bring our abilities up to that level again. When understanding and ability are close to the same level we might get kind of comfortable. But as we continue to, like, live and expose ourselves to good art and hopefully learn stuff, it happens again, and our understanding pulls ahead. When there is a large gap between understanding and ability, well, thats a pretty uncomfortable place. But it's important part of this pattern.

I feel like I'm currently at the high-understanding/insufficient-ability end of the cycle right now. Not a comfortable place to be. Understand, I'm not asking for sympathy or "your art is so awesome don't say bad things about it" type comments right now. I'm just saying, I feel like I have so many ideas and sources of inspiration and my current abilities just aren't measuring up to the visions in my head.

Not such a bad place to be. But you know what that means?

Time to get to work.

Clown Feet

I'm working on alot of projects right now, just none that are done enough that I can post them here. One is kind of a personal project that has been rolling around in the back of my head for awhile.

The idea started back in my Illustration 2 class. For one of the assignments, we could choose to respond to either of two prompts--either "vespa" or "clown". Not really having much of an idea of what "vespa" was supposed to mean, I went for the "clown" one. What is visually interesting about clowns? I thought. I want something I can play around with, something thats kind of fun. It occured to me that they have really big feet, which would be something fun to play around with. I did the assignment and didn't think much about it after that.

Lately, however, I've been trying to think of personal ideas and projects which, for whatever reason, I haven't been able to fully work on or play around with. I remembered the clowns with big feet, and thought it would be a fun to do a series of pictures playing around with that idea.

Then the other day in my Business Practices for Illustrators class there was a presentation about a website called Talespring, which is a website where book applications can be made and then self-published to the apple store. They also said the're holding a competition for all the students in our class and also a class at UVU--whoever can make the best kids book app before November can have it published for free.

Somehow, my brain put those things together--a digital childrens book applications, comptiton, and a series of pictures about clown's big feet. I've decided to make a story to enter in the competiton--wish me luck.