June Art Goals

Welp, it's been a while since I set some monthly art goals, wanna know why? Well my last set of goals made me into a complete mess!! I set goals that I just could not keep up with, which made me feel really crappy about myself & my work, and ultimately burnt me out. So why am I back making more goals? Am I daft?! Maybe.. but I really do believe that goal setting is vital for self-improvement, so I have three new goals for this month. I've also purposefully made the goals quite easy to accomplish just so I can ease myself back into this process.. and not go through what happened last time!! So here are the three things I'm going to be focusing on this month!

1 )  DRAW AT LEAST ONE ILLUSTRATION A WEEK! The most foolproof way get better at something, is just to keep doing it! If I wanna get better at illustrating then I need to make more illustrations! Since I'm doing my #100days project at the moment I have been barely drawing anything else as it's been keeping me quite busy, I think I can manage to get one separate illustration completed each week though!

2 )  PRACTICE DRAWING MORE PLANTS & INSECTS! I adore looking at plants & insects, and I really enjoy drawing them too! My illustrations have featured a number of beetles and moths in the past but I would love to expand my repertoire and get even more creepy-crawlies involved. Plants too, I love drawing different types of leaves but I really struggle with flowers, so getting some practice in will be super helpful!

3 )  EXPERIMENT MORE WITH INK! Pretty much all of my artwork is done in black indian ink right now and I really love the medium, but I'm not really playing around with it and seeing what it can do. I know that ink is incredibly versatile, I just haven't been versatile with it yet. This is the month where I will change that and hopefully develop some new techniques for my work!

As I said they're easy goals, but it's also very easy to fail at any goal so I think these are a good restart point for me. If I don't manage all of them then I'm going to try to not beat myself up about it, I can't afford to hit another art block like the last one!

​Let me know what you think of the goals I've set and if you have any goals for this month!

100 Days of Inked Astronomy - Week Four

We're four weeks into the project now, am I allowed to call it a month yet?! I'm excited because, as I keep saying, I've never kept up with a challenge so well and for so long! One half of me is just waiting for me to slip up and stop participating, while the other half just laughs and says "nah, we're here for the whole thing!" Even though I am super pleased with how well this project is going, there is one thing that I feel I really need to work on.. my participation & interaction with others & their work within the challenge. On a typical day, I'll sort out my illustration then post it to Instagram, then I won't think about it again throughout the rest of the day. That sucks, and I've begun to realise that a lot of the joy from this challenge comes from interacting with the other artists and following their journey too! I'm going to make it a daily goal now, to go through #THE100DAYPROJECT tag at least once, then I can catch up with everyone and feel more part of the growing community.

Do you have any favourite projects in the challenge? Link me and share the love!

100 Days of Inked Astronomy - Week Three

Golly golly gosh, week three already people!! Is time going by super quickly for you all or is it just me? Three weeks is a decent length for an everyday project but it really has flown by for me.

This has been my most challenging week so far due to a combination of not staying on top of the illustrations, and having to illustrate some HUGE constellations! I don't know why for sure, but my normal practice of doing the day's illustration the night before went right out the window for me this week. I often found myself quickly finishing them off right before I head off to work so I'm certain that I can photograph them well enough and get them posted for the day. Thankfully I haven't missed a day yet, but I certainly came very close to that a couple of times in the last week! I found this to be much more stressful and frustrating for me so I am making sure to go back to readying the illustrations the night before again! We also had some quite tricky constellations to illustrate this week. Carina, Centaurus and Cetus are all huge sprawling constellations in the sky, so trying to get the proportions and shape right in a teeny A6 illustration was quite challenging. I'm very happy with how Carina and Cetus turned out, but I planned Centaurus so badly that I had to cut off some of the constellation as I set it up far too big! I'm trying to be really careful with the larger constellations now so that doesn't happen again, so at least I have learnt my lesson!

So it's been a challenging week, but also the week where I have learnt the most in so I'm happy with that!