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.