Topic: exercise!

This is something I do all the time now when I doodle. I first started it in late highschool and explored it more in the past four years, and it has really helped me both expand my capabilities and explore my style as an artist and designer.

Everyone has certain biases and preferred ways of doing things that become habit, but it’s always good to expand your visual vocabulary and practice seeing things in different ways!

The idea is to just pick a subject and see how many DIFFERENT ways you can draw it. It doesn’t have to look like what you would normally draw – in fact, try to draw as differently as possible from how you would normally draw it! And it doesn’t have to be good either. Who cares! It’s just for fun! There is absolutely no right or wrong, just variation!

Consider:

• Line thickness
• Line smoothness
• How do the lines connect? At what angle? Do they even connect? Are there even lines?
• Simple or complicated shapes
• Varying levels of realism
• Exaggeration
• How would it look if it were drawn by Disney? If it were in an anime? If it were on Cartoon Network? If it were from the 60s?

Just get as many ideas out as you can. Don’t worry about being too careful and don’t bother erasing if you make a mistake. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t like what you drew. Just draw another one!

Example Time!

How many ways can you draw a heart?

The pink one in the middle is the first one I drew. That’s my “default” heart, what I automatically think to draw when I go to draw a heart. Then around it, I slowly filled up variations trying many different methods and styles and exaggerations. This also made me realise that I don’t know how to draw a real anatomical heart. :P

Anyone can easily get started with drawing a simple shape like that. Next:

How many ways can you draw a face?

Again, the middle is my “default” face, that I immediately think of first. I’ve drawn that exact face hundreds of times. But as you can see, that’s not all I’m capable of! :) Of course some of these are more interesting or more appealing than others, but I wasn’t trying for awesomeness, just variety.

It’s really fun to do this with a friend too because odds are they’ll come up with completely different stuff than you do!! In fact, if you do this I’ll love to see your results!

Other ideas for prompts: Eyes, mouths, hands, monsters, birds, cars, trees, dragons, buildings… just about anything!

Q: But how do you know what to draw?!

A: If you’re really stuck, go to a corner of the internet that you rarely visit and see how different artists do things. Try mimicking them (just for practice!) to see how it is they achieve the style that they have. Do they draw the eyes really high on the head? Maybe their work has no sharp points or angles? Maybe they sneak some shading into their linework? Perhaps they always draw the nose connected to the eyebrows? That should get you rolling, then just try different combinations of things. Don’t be afraid to make your drawing look ugly or weird. You can always scrap what you don’t like later. Loosen up!

Then the next time someone accuses you of being a one-trick pony, you can pull this out and their jaw will drop. ;)

Posted on February 16th, 2012
Filed under: Creating, Exploring, Featuring, Learning, Living (All Posts)
Topics: design, drawing, exercise, faces, practice

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(Thanks artoz for the base photo! And Jessica for the inspiration to try combining images like this. :) )

For the past two years I have set New Year’s goals for myself – longer term goals that I wanted to take a whole year to work on. I do it in conjunction with New Year’s not because I think that the time is particularly special, but why not tap into the collective energy of everyone else who is setting goals at the same time?

In 2009 my major goal was to run 5 days a week, slowly increasing duration. I also had a secondary goal of trying 20 vegan recipes over the course of the year. In terms of running, I went from being about to jog for about 5 minutes to a whole 40 minutes!

And deciding to do the recipes was instrumental in my going vegan, since otherwise I would not have any clue what to make for myself! (Also it proved to me that vegan desserts are awesome.) It turned out that I liked 16 of the 20 recipes enough to make them again, and it gave me exposure to the different ingredients and techniques frequently used in vegan cooking and baking.

ProTip: If you’re thinking about a diet change, but aren’t sure if you want to go at it full tilt, commit to at least trying a certain number of recipes that fit that diet! You might be surprised! It makes it so much easier to switch later if you decide you want to.

In 2010 my goal had to do with freelance income. I pushed myself to increase my freelance income by 5.5% every month. I used a spreadsheet to calculate my target income for every month.

Even though I didn’t actually make “a lot” in terms of what a full time freelancer would make (I already had school and a day job), this was a big deal for me because it forced me to actually seek out these jobs and make sales every month, and it actually gave me a target to hit. Before I set this goal for myself, I might not have even done any freelance work in a given month. I was forced to get creative and ask, “okay now… I have 8 days left, and I have to sell $X worth of services/stuff. What can I do to create that?”

The result was that I made about 50% more than the goal I set for myself at the beginning of the year. I’m sure that I made at least double what I would have if I had never set this goal. On top of that, I got experience trying different kinds of offerings and promotions. The best part was that I gained confidence in my ability to support myself with my freelance design and illustration work once I leave school. Based on these results, I would encourage anyone thinking about freelancing or running your own business to try a goal like this.

On the morning of December 31, 2010, I was sitting in my hotel room in Hong Kong, looking out the 11^th story window to the bustling street below and thinking about what I might do for my 2011 New Year’s goal, or if I even wanted to have one. I had gone through some major realizations during the past six months about the purpose of life and the way I want to live it. (Here’s the answer, the short version, straight from the back of the book: The purpose of life is to feel awesome, enjoy yourself and have fun!) A few of the influences which helped me reach this conclusion, in various ways, were Jessica Mullen, Kelly Cree, Steve Pavlina, Abraham-Hicks, Dan Millman’s Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Halcyon and David Cain’s Raptitude. There are probably several more, but it’s kind of a blur.

I wanted to transition to living more in the moment, in the flow, enjoying everything I already have that’s awesome rather than worrying about the future. Sure, I think that planning can be helpful, but you can’t ever be certain where you will end up. The only thing you can truly commit to is enjoying the journey. This is a big step because I usually plan EVERYTHING down to the detail.

I had also recently encountered the concepts of minimalism and simplicity (mainly via Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits & mnmlist, and Everett Bogue’s Far Beyond the Stars), and had been trying in small ways to incorporate the concept of “less is more” into my life. For the first time in several years (maybe since 10^th grade in high school?), I had stopped trying to maintain a task list for my personal life. I would make short lists day to day if I thought it would help, but no tasks carrying over or systems like GTD. And I still maintained a task list at my job, because forgetting to do assignments for your coworkers is not good.

I found that it freed up a lot of mental RAM. I didn’t have the constant weight of 45 undone tasks looming on my mind – at most I would remember the top 3 that I actually HAD to accomplish over the next few days, and I did this just fine without needing a task list to remind me. Many of the things I would have put on my task list, it turned out I didn’t have to actually act on.

One of my friends used to say, “All problems resolve themselves if I just ignore them long enough.” We had laughed about it, but now I was actually beginning to see truth in it, at least on some level. As someone used to having a tight grip on things, this concept felt scary.

Leo Babauta’s article “The Best Goal is No Goal” really threw me. Go read it, it’s not long.

Could I accomplish the same thing I did when I threw out my task list, by tossing out my goal list? I saw the reasoning behind it. But how could I deny how much my previous experiments had helped me? I wasn’t sure that I was ready to give up the idea of goals completely. Still, I was too curious to let this idea go. Maybe I would try something in between?

So what did I actually decide to do for 2011? STAY TUNED!!

Posted on February 26th, 2011
Filed under: Being Healthy, Featuring, Feeling Awesome, Learning, Living (All Posts), Making Money
Topics: books, exercise, freelancing, goals, minimalism, new years, simplicity, veganism

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