Today a friend of mine asked me how I go about blogging, whether it is on a schedule, my frequency and goals. I didn’t have a very clear answer to any of it. I’ve always kind of done this thing at night, when I am through with my work day. When I am excited about work I blog; I want to share, see what people think, open up the gates that create the boundary between someone completely engaged in a project and the outside world. Learn.
When I got home from hanging out with my friend, I had dinner, cleaned up and started working on an illustration project that I had worked on all day. It is a pretty good project. For all intents and purposes I really like it. I have been given pretty well free reign and that is amazing, but I got tired after dinner. I managed to finish one sketch and during the middle of Billy Bragg and Wilco determined to take a nap. It was a far longer nap than usual. Usually I manage about a half hour. This was more like an hour and a half. When I woke up I felt very groggy and sick of illustration. I putzed through one more page for this book and started to think about how it was too early to go to bed. I picked up the commission that I had been working on and looked at it and thought, “I’ll push a little paint until I can’t do this anymore.”
Four hours later I looked at the clock, realizing that I needed to start getting ready for bed. I used up the rest of the paint on my palette on a scrap of wood in studio, looked at the painting I had been working on, and realized everything that I’ve been missing the entire time I was in graduate school, what the answer to Pilar’s question was, and what I need to do to keep myself motivated.
When I started blogging in 2006, I was so excited about my work that I would get home late at night and my girlfriend at the time would be asleep already. I would want to share my piece. I was so excited that I couldn’t think about sleeping yet. I still felt jazzed about the painting. Tonight I have that, and on a night that I thought I had no energy. That’s the answer though. I started blogging at the end of nights that I had put my all into a painting. The adrenaline always needs a moment to calm down, and writing a couple paragraphs helps me process what I did and settle a little into the relaxation that is my house, or in my present circumstances, my bedroom.
Here is what I was working on tonight. I am so pleased with it.
It’s a lot of old school, but I think there is a bit of the last two years in there too. I can’t quite explain it. I was thinking about different things while working this out. I was pondering what it meant to others. I don’t really know the answers to anything, but I’m thinking about it. I think that that influences what it looks like anyway. I’m excited. I need to get to sleep. Thank you for reading.
Peace
-Mike