Getting There

It’s incredible how things can fit the “muscle” metaphor. Getting stronger over time if you use it regularly. The atrophy if you don’t. The writing muscle I built throughout last year feels like a dream. Pretty sure it happened, but I can’t quite remember doing it. Luckily, with creative hobbies you often can get something out of your work¹. In this case, I got a solid record of how after I stopped regularly writing my personal journal, my own blog posts stopped soon after. I atrophied² one muscle, but I’ve been building up other things. Since I have the attention span of a fish, I’ve been focusing on smaller things. No game projects. No writing tasks. No big programming projects (though I have many ideas cooking in that area). My recent creative output has been mostly drawing. Typically, I am doing sketches or drawings that don’t take too long to get into a “good enough” state.

I think the most recent art I’ve shared on here was back in November of last year. That was a small gouache painting, and I haven’t done much gouache since to be honest. Most of my drawings have been digital. I’ve been taking a course by Ahmed Aldoori. Slowly getting through it, but have felt like I’ve improved even in the first third of the course.

I am not quite where I want to be with my drawings. There’s a lot to practice to get to that point. But I have at least had a sense of progress recently. I think a pro/con of the internet is that it’s easy to see other artists. Learn from them. Compare your drawings to theirs. It makes it easy to see the gap in skill of what you want to achieve, but don’t have the skill to do. That gap can kill a lot of the fun for me. Which… is a tough place to be at. It reminds me of that Ira Glass quote and the recent weeks I’ve felt like I’m actually making progress on closing the gap. That recent progress has been a bump in my enjoyment of drawing.

As for life things, I am still working from home and get included into way more meetings now. Lots to learn in the coming months. With how restrictions are right now, I am not sure if I’ll be able to easily visit home at the end of this year like I had hoped. But I am keeping my eye out for options. There’s a lot of extra hoops to jump through right now. Adding fire to the hoops, my residence card will be expiring at the same time I want to visit. I would need to figure out if I can leave and come back without issue in that case.

S³ and I regularly talk about the various types of restaurants or places we want to visit once The Numbers go down. Okonomiyaki is our long running champion of this list (followed closely by onsen). During our walk this morning we saw a snazzy restaurant/cafe. We stared at the building for a moment thinking about how nice it’d be to go in. It is likely okay with outdoor seating, but we still are uncomfortable with being out and about. Other than walks through the park or grocery store runs, we haven’t gone out much yet. For now, we’re just excited for the cooler weather. Today, it got hot, but it was absolutely lovely in the morning. We were able to enjoy a long early walk through the nearby park. Hoping to do more walks later this week if the weather permits. If the weather allows that will mean more photos from my walks to share. If not, then there’s more time to draw.