It’s a good thing I’m rejecting perfectionism in this 10-minutes-per-day drawing habit thing I’m doing, because the quality of my drawings took a pretty deep plunge in the third week. Enough so that I’m embarrassed to even share them here. But the theme of the week was to be silly and have fun, and to definitely not take myself too seriously or feel like the drawings had to actually be good.
The challenges included drawing with your eyes closed, with your non-dominant hand, and upside down. They also included only drawing negative space, exploring shading by drawing an alien in sunlight, and drawing a subject three ways with your body: once using just your fingers (no wrist or elbow motion allowed), once with just your wrist, and once with just your shoulder, holding your arm out straight and moving only at the shoulder joint. I drew a blood orange.
And it was fun, and silly, and I didn’t take it seriously. In fact, it loosened me up enough to try using a paintbrush with my inks to add a little color. I hadn’t been brave enough to do that before. In the spirit of bravery and posting embarrassing stuff on the internet, here are my silly drawings from the third week of my 30 days of 10 minutes a day.
eyes closed and left-handeddrawing upside downthe space around my ivyfinger, wrist, and shoulder blood orangealien in the sun
I recently finished a book, Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish, that had a surprising twist at the end. It’s a self-development book I read for work, so was reading in the context of how I show up at my job, and particularly for the purpose of developing decision-making skills. I expected your typical business-y productivity book (which it is, though it’s wiser and more insightful than most I’ve read), so I was surprised at the end of the book to see a chapter called “The Happiness Experts.” What does happiness have to do with good decision-making?
Parrish distills good decision-making down to two things: knowing how to get what you want, and knowing what’s worth wanting — what really matters. The consideration of happiness helps us make decisions based on what really matters.
The happiness experts he seeks wisdom from at the end of the book are elders in their 70s, 80s, and 90s: people have lived a long life, who are facing death, and who have the perspective of many years of living to know what really matters. One of the items those elders list as important* is to savor daily pleasures instead of waiting for big events. We spend the vast majority of our lives in the mundane day-to-day. If we want to tip the balance towards more happiness, the every-day is the place to find it.
I am all in on this. I love the mundane. I love lounging around in my leisure time and laughing with my husband and kids. I love writing and drawing with my pretty inks. I love sitting by a crackling fire and reading novels. I love standing at the back window and watching the birds, squirrels, and bunnies. I love walking around my neighborhood and seeing the trees and mountains, smelling the air, and listening to wind in the leaves. I love finding beauty in the shape of an ink bottle, delight in my peanut butter and honey toast, awe in nature, curiosity in people-watching, comfort and coziness in my slippers, a surge of love when I smell our daughter’s vanilla perfume, hear her shoulder her swim bag, or taste the latest flavor of bubble tea she’s drinking.
The second week of the 30 days of drawing challenge I joined was all about delights. Needless to say, I had fun with this week. I had two long flights so I had lots of time to play with, and I spent more than 10 minutes on some of the drawings. I was absorbed in the activity of making marks on the page, and it brought me pleasure, and I had time, and I had no reason to stop. I feel good about that decision.
Day 7: something that delights meDay 8: delicious delightsDay 9: delight in natureDay 10: blind contourDay 11: clothes that delight (my slippers)Day 12: delight through our senseA week of drawing delights
*Other items on the list of things elders say matter in life are saying things now to people you care about, spending maximum time with your children, working in a job you love, and selecting your mate carefully.
Bloganuary writing prompt
What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
Of the two intentions I set for 2024, I am succeeding at one of them: I draw nearly every day. My friend and team lead, Kristina — the one who got me hooked on drawing to begin with — sent me an Instagram message to tell me about a January, 10-minutes a day, anti-perfectionist 30-day drawing habit… community? course? Substack? I don’t know what to call it, but it’s run by Wendy MacNaughton, the illustrator of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. After first saying, “but I’m not a subscriber!,” then landing a free 30 day trial*, I said hell yes! And I started drawing, fearlessly. Because the whole point is to have fun and stop editing yourself.
As with many online drawing lessons I’ve dipped my toes into, this one introduced us first to line. Or at least I thought it did. I can’t find a corresponding lesson, but I have this drawing of different kinds of lines that I’m sure came from WendyMac’s lessons:
Different kinds of lines
From there, I set a timer for 10 minutes for each assignment, turned off my brain, and drew based on the prompts she gave. It reminded me a lot of the talk I gave at WordCamp US, and then again at WordCamp Europe: Publish in 10 minutes per day. The keys are 1) to have a prompt to work from, and 2) to reject perfectionism. Set a timer, let it rip, don’t worry, and boom, you have a blog post (or a drawing).
One of the keys to having fun creatively is to not be precious or embarrassed by what you’ve made. So in that spirit, I’m posting the drawings from my first week with WendyMac. The theme of the week was doodling. Doodling is fun. It’s low pressure, there’s no comparison to reality, and it’s easy to flow with. I’ve found I really enjoy lines, and I like to doodle on airplanes. I turn on some music, or the fireplace video if available, and let my pen wander. Doodling passes the time while also putting me in a flow state. I found some entrancing doodlers on Instagram, and I am inspired.
The first assignment of the 30-day habit was to draw, in 10 minutes, what I want to do more of and less of in 2024. My More list is basically stuff I like to do for fun: listen to music, enjoy nature, travel, go for walks or hikes. And now, draw.
Below are my doodles. I have so much to learn 😂. For starters, I’ve learned about paper, and about not drawing on both sides of lightweight paper. I’ve also learned that 10 minutes is not very long. I think that’s the trick to it: 10 minutes is a short amount of time. It’s the starting that matters. Committing to 10 minutes helps you get started. There were a couple of days in week 2 where I said screw the 10 minutes, I’ve started, and I’m having fun, and I’m going to keep going. But the 10 minutes is also to give constraints and say, hello, this isn’t a masterpiece and don’t spend 2 weeks on it. Just 10 minutes. You don’t need to be perfect. Loosen up. Have fun.
Day 1: intentionsDay 2: doodle into drawingDay 3: doodle futureDay 4: circlesDay 5: get griddyDay 6: doodle finale
I’ve long wanted to visit Zion National Park in Utah. When I visited my friend last week, I didn’t realize how close she lived to Zion, and I was super excited when she said we’d go there one day during our stay. The sky was overcast when we arrived, and the colors of the land were all muted and dull. Still we gasped in awe at the majesty of the cliffs that rose high into the sky. Then the sun came out, and I thought I would die from the beauty.
Before the sun broke throughLook at that red rock!This took my breath awayDesert rockWe didn’t have waders to walk in the water into the Narrows slot canyon, so we just hiked down to its entranceBlue sky and red rocks
I’m on my annual weekend with my girlfriends, one of whom moved to Utah from the southeastern United States last May. The air, plants, and landscape are so different here from our humid, soft forests and mountains in Virginia. I love the wide open skies, arid plants, colorful rocks, and jagged peaks. These photos are from a little park a few miles away in St. George. Tomorrow we’re hoping to go to Zion, which I’m super excited about.
When I was pregnant with our son, in the summer of 2003, my husband and I traveled to Europe for the first time. We stayed with a friend in Marseille, and then traveled with him to his home city of Barcelona. I kept a dedicated journal on the trip, a paper journal with the Eiffel tower on its cover. I wrote nearly every day. I wrote about the croissants and baguettes our friend fetched from the bakeries each day in Marseille. I wrote about trying to buy train tickets to Aix en Provence without knowing any French, and trying to figure out how to use a payphone to call our friend to tell him we’d be late for dinner, and about trying to order food in a restaurant where we couldn’t read the menu and didn’t speak any French. I wrote about how nervous we we were about all of that, and how much energy it takes to move around in a place where you don’t know the language.
I wrote about the anticipation of waiting on the roadside for the Tour de France to race by, and the helicopters and caravan that preceded the cyclists, and the clicking and whirring and whoosh when the peloton finally sped by. I wrote about following our friend in the car from Marseille into the streets of Barcelona, and how we glued ourselves to his bumper because we had no idea where we were going and no way of contacting him if we got separated. I wrote about our friend’s father, and his apartment and terrace and the meals he made for us in Barcelona. I wrote about the busker painted as a devil who gave me a devilish kiss when I tossed a coin into his cup, and how exciting it was to go to Spain where we could understand the language and speak it a little bit after being in France where we could not. I wrote about photographs I overexposed and missed forever because I didn’t set my camera correctly or didn’t capture at all because I didn’t have a wide angle lens. I wrote about the siestas and the heat and the walking and the pastries, and how my feet ached and swelled because I was pregnant, and it was July, and it was very hot.
As I convert this journal from paper to digital and read all the entries in the process, I am grateful to my past self that I wrote so much down. These entries took a lot of time for me to write — I frequently stop an entry to say my hand hurts, or I had to break for a meal, or now I’m on the plane after the trip and am trying to capture it all in the air before I forget, but it’s taking hours to capture every day — and I’m glad I took the time to write them. They pull out details and impressions, fears and excitement, sounds, smells, and sensations that snaps on a cell phone, or even nice photos with my real camera, which is how I now document my travels, just don’t capture.
My husband and I have traveled a lot more since that first trip, and I am — I don’t know the word for what I’m feeling, maybe surprised? wistful? — reminded of what it was like to know so little, to have so little experience with travel, and to not have cell phones to communicate when we were going to be late or if we got separated from our friend, to not have a digital camera for quick photos, and to not have a translation tool for signs and menus, or digital maps for navigation. I don’t want to go back to those pre-tool times, but this journal makes me wish I kept better written diaries of my travels since that trip.
Butterfly Mind 