Tien Chiu

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You are here: Home / All blog posts / December goals
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December 1, 2015 by Tien Chiu

December goals

Now that chocolate season is finally over, I’m working on my goals for the month of December. My original objective was to kick back and relax for a month. That, unsurprisingly, lasted exactly one day – I guess I’m just not that kind of gal! 🙂

Broadly speaking, I have five major goals for my time off:

  1. Improve my drawing and composition skills to the point where I can draw a fantasy animal and accompanying scene to my satisfaction. I do not need to be able to draw a detailed digital painting with all the subtleties of brush stroke, shading, etc. I just need to develop something that will look good when translated to jacquard design.
  2. Learn how to design for, and use, my jacquard loom. I also want to understand more about what can or cannot be done in jacquard weaving.
  3. Get back into exercise of some sort, in a sustainable fashion. Probably walking/yoga, but I intend to explore several options.
  4. Figure out what to do with my life, career-wise.
  5. Revamp my website.

Since those are pretty meaty goals, I plan to address only the first three during the month of December. Towards that, I’ve set some daily/weekly objectives:

Daily goals:

  • Draw one exercise from Andrew Loomis’s books on illustration, starting with Fun with a Pencil: How Everybody Can Easily Learn to Draw. (Alternately, find and work with a drawing tutor to help me accelerate the learning process.)
  • Go walking, do yoga, or do some other form of exercise. Experiment to see what’s fun.

Weekly goals:

  • Design and weave one jacquard design (2x/week), preferably one of the drawing exercises
  • Expand one drawing exercise into a full digital painting
  • Watch one class on illustration or composition on the Society of Visual Storytelling.
  • Read two books from the giant stack on my worktable

That sounds like quite a bit, but since I’m not working, I think it should be manageable. And if it turns out it isn’t, why, I can simply adjust my goals. I believe in having objectives, but not in beating my head against them. 70% is fine by me.

I do have one-time goals as well, but mostly too trivial to mention here. I’ll post about the creative ones when I finish them.

And, as a reward for having read through all this without a single photo, here is a hilarious video of Fritz going into ecstasy over my friend Alfred’s shoes. Someday I really must speak to Fritz about his shoe fetish…after I stop laughing, that is.

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