Giving ourselves gifts in 2021
The 1-Hour Coloring Book
Like all of us, I need to get through the resistance some times. I over-think everything. I don't know my own voice. I'm adhering to someone else's standards. And I'm afraid of what everyone will think if I fail, and I know I will fail.
One way out of this is to produce work, lots of work, and to damn the torpedoes as far as the critical voice goes. (We can use our critical voice later, when we need a dialogue about who we are, what our style is, what we want to say...)
How to do this?
One way is deadlines. Work fast. One way is to work extremely fast.
Also, we have to remove the worry that what we do matters. Can we work with effort, and be care free and confident? I think so.
One game I create as an exercise, was to color a whole coloring book in 1 hour. Coloring books don't matter! You can't fail at coloring! (I know, you're all saying "I can!" but really, just roll with this one, ok?)
So, I did this exercise on New Years Eve, the last hour of 2020 (good riddance!)
Click above for the video compressing 1 hour in 28 seconds.
That damned critical mind.
We have to give the critical mind something to chew on. Give it a ***#! PROJECT! Give it 42 pages of art to look at, and to try to piece some patterns out of.
Part of the exercise was to reflect LATER, on what it was I did.
Try to figure out what is going on. True, the critical mind will hate some of it, fine. You don't have to go along with it, or you can, but let's be a little more objective and see what was going on. What did YOU do? What did you feel? What did you RESORT to? What came out? How can you refine it?
Another part of the exercise was to TRY. Try to make something nice. Be fast, but don't settle. There were times I took an extra few seconds to add sparkles or one last color, stuff like that.
I started at about 11:01 or 11:02 pm. My goal was to finish exactly at midnight (and I did!)
Here’s a glimpse of some of the pages. I wrote a lot about it here: https://members.sawcomics.org/posts/giving-ourselves-gifts-in-2021
(about half of the pages…)
At that link you’ll see my full 42 pages of coloring, and reflection on what I remember, what I felt, what I was going for, and what I wanted to do, had to do, or did!
In 2021, let's be GENTLE to ourselves, and look at our own work and answer a few questions:
What did we do?
What could we have done more of? (And what should we do next time?)
What ones worked?
What work would be good candidates for revision?
What else?
In 2021, let's give ourselves gifts. The gifts of knowing that art making makes ourselves, and opens ourselves. We deserve that this year. We've been closed off for too long.
Check out my whole post here: https://members.sawcomics.org/posts/giving-ourselves-gifts-in-2021
I CHOOSE YOU!