day 1: 30 day blogging challenge

Hello vast tubes of the internets! I'm going to try something new. I am going to post a new entry every day for the next 30 days. The posts will be art/illustration-related, but that's about as far as I'm going to worry about structure. I figure I'll post what I'm working on, what I'm thinking about, things I find interesting or inspiring. We'll see where it goes.

Why do this? Mostly I think it's to help me get into a routine of making time for inspiration and personal projects. I get so busy with the full-time job and freelance projects that I don't make time to just be creative.

How'd this come about, you wonder? It started over the weekend. A friend of mine is heading off to grad school in few weeks, so we decided to have a tiki party before she left. I was in charge of decorations. And if I was having a tiki party at my house, I of course needed a giant tiki head with glowing eyes and smoke that billowed from its nostrils.

 It was a busy week, so I didn't get started until Saturday morning. Lots of trial and error, but I love the process of troubleshooting and making it up as I go. Sadly the dry ice billowing smoke part did not work on first try, and I ran out of time to fiddle with it, but I think it turned out pretty fun nonetheless. Best happy accident: the spray paint disintegrated the top layer of foam and gave it a cool rough rocky texture. Sweet!
 

I spend the majority of my time sitting at a computer. All of my illustration is digital. Half the time I can't even find paper or pencils. While I enjoy Photoshop and Flash and After Effects, I do miss the act of making a mess and actually creating a physical object. Things like this tiki project get me re-energized and excited to create more stuff! So I've got all this energy, but was not sure how best to channel it.

I've been working on animating the song Pin Pón (a traditional Spanish kid's song.)  This morning I had to make a couple fixes and was re-rendering the intro. The render ended up taking about an hour, so while waiting I read Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. Great little book full of inspiring ideas. One of the suggestions is to keep a logbook, which I'm planning to do analog-style. But many of Kleon's ideas synthesized for me with another...

Last year, good pal illustrator Jim Madsen told me about this Ted Talk by Matt Cutts. It's a quick 3 minute talk about trying new things for 30 days. That concept has been floating around in the back of my head for a while, but until today I didn't have a strong conviction of anything I wanted to try. So for whatever reason this 30 day blog idea hit, so that's what I'm gonna do for the rest of the month.

Wish me luck!