BLAG – 082

I’m in the process of writing a document I am calling

The Creative Fisheries Manifesto for Creative Living

(all the cool kids are writing manifestos so I thought I’d give it a try too!)

And as Julia Cameron promises, when you set out to do something, serendipity happens. I’m thinking about creativity and this guy is writing a whole series on it. As much as he rubs me the wrong way, I can’t seem to unsubscribe myself from his feed. And when I look past the seplling mistakes (just because there are no red lines in your document doesn’t mean that you’ve spelt words correctly!) (sjoe, glad to get that off my chest)

okay let my try again…

For all the faults, the posts are thought provoking. Like this one about creativity.

Go read it first…

welcome back!

So I did a quick calculation. If you were to work on your craft for 8 hours a day (let’s say it’s your nine-to-five job and your admin gets handled by someone else), 5 days a week, then according to the 10,000-hours-to-become-an-expert theory it would take you ~ five years.

A mere five years to become an expert!

There are so many beautiful examples of how consistent, deliberate, concentrated effort over a period of timegets the results. This is my favourite. It’s what project 365 aims to achieve.

It’s also an extreme exercise in patience.

At the time of this post, my personal Project 365 has got 28 drawings.Some were very quick, others I actually spent some time on.

I want to get better at drawing. I want to be able to draw a man with a moustache so that he looks like himself,not like Hitler.
Not Hitler

But I am impatient.

I want to fast-forward a year and say “wow, look at that, making a little drawing every day for a year hasactually for real improved my skillz! Look at how bad these first ones were in comparison…”
Bird Goddess
I want to be better at drawing NOW!

When I look at the grid I notice one thing:

I can cross-hatch.

Orb

Maybe I can’t make a moustached man NOT look like Hitler, but I can create a 3D orb.

So I’m thinking about what Derek Silvers once said (in a post that I’ve lost and can’t find on Google, otherwiseI would have linked it)

“maybe we should be focussing at bettering our strengths, not our weaknesses. Bettering your weaknesses onlyresults in a very average overall picture”.

I can see my strength lies in shading with pencil.

But what point is a 3D picture of something that is not in proportion?

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