Daily Drawing Challenge — Week 4 Roundup
Reflections on the final(?) week of the challenge
Welcome to the fourth weekly roundup of my daily drawing challenge!
Catch up with Week 1, Week 2, and Week 3 if you missed them.
You can also follow the challenge along on my Instagram, and there is also a dedicated Spotify playlist.
Hard to believe this is the final week of 30 Days of Drawing Colour — the benefits of working every day on this challenge have brought are almost too many to count. You will know by now that this was about so much more than having new ideas. I’ve been healing my relationship with perfectionism and procrastination, inviting play into my life, definitely having new ideas about work but also about life, and generally just getting out of my own way.
So many people have been reaching out to say how much they have been enjoying seeing these colourful illustrations brighten their feed and support my many explorations. After my burnout I grappled with dark thoughts of ‘my career is over’, but this process has reminded me that I’m only just beginning.
Life is about to get incredibly busy for the next few weeks, but I commit to showing up to draw everyday for another 30 days. Maybe I can do 100 — we’ll see! And let me know if you’d like me to continue writing these articles about my process. 😉
‘Succession’ and the subconscious
One of the favourite pieces I’ve worked on so far this challenge has been the portrait of Kendall Roy from HBO’s ‘Succession’ TV series, played by the fantastic Jeremy Strong.
I knew I wanted to portray him with symbolism, something I greatly enjoyed doing for the Khruangbin 2021 Official Tour Poster and wanted to do more of.
In my experiments I started with imagery of an explosion that I tried to generate with AI (sadly I lost those images), then researching imagery of things falling to pieces, which led to thinking of a tumbling house of cards, which led to the Tarot.
This was an exciting connection for me because I have been playing around with the Tarot over the past year and love its symbolism, its ability to shed light on the subconscious — another focus of study of mine over the past couple of years. Carl Jung was fascinated by the Tarot; the visual nature of the cards, representing familiar archetypes (connected to the collective unconscious), can raise curiosity and create a relatable and intriguing dynamic for the viewer.
Part of the show’s success is the extremely nuanced layers to the characters and all the unspoken, dysfunctional family dynamics. The children of Logan Roy are always acting from a place of their wounded inner children (which lives in the subconscious), so the Tarot is a wonderful way of examining these dynamics.
For Kendall’s portrait I chose to use symbolism from the the Tower, a Major Arcana card that evokes sudden change, upheaval, chaos, revelation, and awakening, connected to everything that he has tried to do within his father’s company and all that has happened to him in the show.
I’m super excited to continue watching this final season of the show and will be making a series of portraits of the other characters! Stay tuned.
The importance of community
As I prepare to pack down and move out of my studio for the past couple of years, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the importance of community and my ability to ask for support.
The realisation I have ADHD led to my understanding the importance of being with other creative folks in my working day-to-day. As I’ve grieved for the space that I built with love and many hopes, I’ve also been able to let go of fear of failure and embrace the hope of a new and exciting chapter, and also to call on my community for their help, thoughts and suggestions.
This little piece playing around with type and more abstract-ish figures was a fun way to channel these feelings and insights.
3D modeling as a portal to play
As a trained architect turned self-taught illustrator and artist, I’m often restless to get out of the 2D space of my laptop or tablet and realise visual projects in different ways. Over the years, alongside illustrations and animations, I’ve worked on festivals and stage sets, books, textiles and apparel, gift-wraps, paintings, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, furniture, films and installations.
Experimentation is a huge part of my nature, and yet it can take an immense effort to get different experiments going, in large part due to procrastination and perfectionism. I have often felt frustrated at the fact that I have given myself Herculean personal projects, only to set them aside after completion to explore different things instead of building a cohesive body of work.
Over the years I’ve come to accept that this is precisely the nature of my experiments — to play, to try things out, and move on to the next thing. I took for granted the lessons this taught me — that I was proving to myself I was capable of making and building what I was dreaming of.
All of this to say that I’m getting increasingly excited with the possibilities that 3D has been offering me and my experimenting nature. I think I will always have a hankering for closing the laptop screen and working with my hands and body, but being able to visualise and create imagery of the many things I dream of has been a fantastic tool to get out of my own way, and my perfectionism, and simply allow myself the joy of play and creativity.
Favourites and outtakes from Week 4
I was going through a sketchbook that I started in 2021 and found a bunch of thumbnail ideas that I never developed into full pieces. It’s so interesting because at the time I remember thinking they were crap, and now two years later I have been marvelling at all the unused, interesting ideas I had.
Don’t take old sketches for granted, even tiny thumbnail ideas. Keep revisiting them – our past selves have a lot of wisdom!
Just really wanted to express my appreciation for you, your work and the beautiful way you have to share your process as well as your vulnerabilities. I’ve been procrastinating a lot lately, amongst other things getting back to a regular newsletter on Substack, this is super inspiring and exciting. So thank you from the heart x
Beautiful vibrant work. And your description of the process of making art is fascinating.