drawing practice - Get On With It

Using a side-project to practice

In the lead up to starting work as a Happiness Engineer with Automattic (we’re hiring by the way), I started to create a couple of “side-project” sites as as a way to both practice with the toolset of WordPress as a publishing platform, as well as feed my own artisitic practice.

One of these sites is FiveFigures.blog, which I used to amass a collection of daily “reps” of drawing figures: people, hands, feet, faces and mostly a wooden mannequin that I had lying around my office. I’m ressurecting it again today to start work on another month of figure drawing, with some new props and ideas, but mostly to just stick to a 5-10 minute a day practice.

Yesterday I found myself in the car for an extended period of time, something very rare this year. After a few stops along the way, I decided to switch attention away from the new RTJ album (so good) and switched on a recent Tim Ferriss Show with Hugh Jackman. I’ve missed listening to podcasts now that my commute is gone (really the only thing I miss) and this one was, as usual, great.

I was thinking about the beginning where he talks about what he learned from Patrick Stewart:

And he said to me that when he was about 60, he realized that he was never going to read all the books that he wanted to read in his life. He did the calculation. He decided that no matter what time his call was—let’s say he’s picked up at five—whatever time he would have woken up, he wakes up 30 minutes earlier, gets a cup of tea, and goes back to bed, and he reads. He said, “I don’t read the paper because it makes me angry. I don’t read my emails because it usually makes me anxious, gets my mind going.”

I think all the time about how I’d like to read more but there doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day.

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