Summer Posting Time

     Nothing quite like a new blog to get me in gear to do stuff, only to eventually become an ugly reminder of my malaise and scatterbrains to be deleted out of shame. There is a ton that I need to learn in such a very short amount of time, and I'm not off to the most promising start. Settling down to practice consistently continues to be tough as the disgusting amount of learning I need to do can't decide whether it'll be what gets me out of bed before noon, or what keeps me hiding there until nightfall. Its been summer for me for nearly a month, and I've spent most of it flat on my stomach with a condition that has left me unable to move. Now that I can finally sit without growing myself a ripe vine of blood clots,  I'm pretty clean out of reasons not to just take the plunge. The more time I spend dreading what has to be done rather than simply pulling up my pants and doing it, the easier it is to forget that its not supposed to be work at all, and the more guilt there is that, despite having the privilege to consider work what many cannot afford to sustain as a mere hobby, my insides still quiver when I set out to do it.
     Part of this fear definitely comes from knowing that once I do start to work, I'll be forced to face just how much of mount improvement needs to be climbed, and just how little time I have to scale it without the boulders of debt, work, and even family hurling down towards me. That fear of simply starting is probably what began this whole weird heady mess of meta-anxiety in the first place, and is the same reason I'm filled with dread before going out for a run. As is true of the first few lines I scratch into my sketchbook on a given day, for the first few miles of a run, everything involved is painfully conscious and clumsy. Everything is so unsynchronized, as though every function involved is actually happening on someone else's body in some far off place in the world.  My legs, for instance, always set off flying around with the infinite grace of those waving blow-up arms of which car dealerships seem so fond.  With each entering breath of that first mile, my lungs feel more thinly stretched than the single napkin at the bottom of the fast food take out bag. Even my very mass weighs uncomfortably on my awareness, to the point where I feel like an alien adjusting to gravity on this planet for the first time. In case I've failed to make it clear, there's no part of me that doesn't join this overwhelming resistance against my well intentioned jog. But after some perseverance, there comes a point at which, like magic, all these parts throw down their pickets and resign to working as a single system, and whereas minutes or seconds ago the eight remaining laps were too great an obstacle to even wrap my head around, I'm now able to double the initial intended distance of my run. The control freak part of my brain attempting to consciously monitor the many different functions of running just goes numb, and the process becomes easy, automated, and truly enjoyable.

 I need to get to that automatic state in terms of drawing. I know I can do it, I've done it before, but just as in running, I'm afraid of those first few miles where my face is smurf-colored and my legs feel like they would do a better job an old dining room chair.

So far this is the only piece I've worked on this summer. Was experimenting with a way to color in my linework, didn't go so well: