Catfacehorse

I went for a walk through the bush at my parent’s place in Tasmania this afternoon, looking for things to draw. I picked up blue-gum nuts, brown gumnuts with a cross on top like little hot cross buns and a tiny white animal skull nestled in the leaf litter.

I sat down to draw the skull, spending lots of time trying to get the intricacies just right. I finished the shading with my pen and sat back to look at it. It sucked. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why it didn’t work, perhaps the relationships between the shapes weren’t quite right. It just looked wrong in a funny sort of way.

This often happens for me the first time I draw something, it seems to take me one go at drawing something new and complex before I can see it properly. I am going to have another try tomorrow, and see if it comes out any better. I don’t find I have this problem if the object is flattened out into 2D already. The picture below is a watercolour I did from a little business card-sized image of beetles, from the back of a Museum admission ticket.

Next here (I hope) will be a decent drawing of a skull. For now, I am enjoying the learning process.

Things are good right now. I am ramping up to Christmas, yet managing to ramp up the drawing as well. It helps that Christmas is usually a creative time for me anyway. For the last four years I have been too broke to buy presents (and Owen and I have an abundance of siblings and parents between the two of us), so instead I have made presents. I have stencilled T-Shirts, bottled chutneys, sewed book bags, and stamped badges.

This year I have been a little busier, and with little extra money from work I have decided to ease the pressure and buy some lovely handmade things.  I have managed to keep drawing by finding little snatches of time here and there - after dinner, in my lunch break, or sneakily during a long day of presentations. (I just think of it as doodling, but with a purpose.)

Here are some the products of those snatches of time.

P.S.  - Leave a comment, I love to chat

I have been reading Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders, and he has certainly lit a fire underneath me. He writes about ‘courageous sucking’,the headspace you need to have for any creative pursuit. He writes that when you start out, you are always going to be crap, so instead you have to get interested in the process of creating and not the end product. He is right, it does take a bravery to suck at something, and continue anyway. This attitude really struck a chord with me, it is exactly what I am trying to achieve with this blog.

I am not a master of anything right now - though I do hope to be the master of something one day. I am interested in animation, painting, drawing, writing, baking, photography, printmaking, the list goes on. At the moment none of these pursuits get anywhere near enough devoted time for me to even find out whether I could be good at them. I work full-time in a currently very un-creative job, but I would love someday to be both analytical and creative for a living.

This blog is the online equivalent of lighting the fire underneath the donkey - a way to get moving. I want to live more creatively and to put things out into the world, whatever they may be.

These things will probably suck. I am, after all, a beginner. But I will attempt to suck courageously over and over, until I suck no longer.

To start, here is a little picture.

It has slowly dawned on me that the more I get my hands stuck into making things, the more I feel like myself. I spent my childhood making tiny wombats out of clay, building miniature mud-brick houses by the dam and inventing elaborate games of ‘Bush Barbie’ with my sister.

Since then, there has been a long, empty gap. I worked for a few years before university in admin for a theatre company, and then spent several years totally immersed in my media and communications degree. The last year has felt like slowly coming out of some sort of coma. The only problem is that I have woken up to find myself in an unfulfilling job, twiddling my thumbs in the public service. The light is at the end of the tunnel, I have been paying my dues in order to get into an exciting job in a few months, but I have learned my lesson. I need more.

This blog is a way of bringing back that person who loved to get stuck in wholeheartedly, even (and especially) if it meant getting covered in mess from head to toe.

This isn’t a blog that has a settled identity - it is not an art blog, a cooking blog, a craft blog or a spill-your-guts blog (although I hope there will be a bit of each). It is just me and my partner Owen, sharing our attempts to live more creatively. To feel more like ourselves, and to have fun doing it.