Have A Mojo

I rendered the faces of more bald-men today. I've come to the conclusion that I have time-management issues— Still not waking up on time every day, and tasks take more/less time than planned. 3 PMs have been arriving without enough hours to put the work into. This must be an issue most people who work (or keep themselves busy) from home have to deal with at some point. So today I googled  "motivating yourself to stick to your schedule", and found Celestine Chua's post: 6 Proven Ways To Make New Habits Stick Sold at "Proven".  And to my surprise, Chua addresses the "wake up on time" dilemma in her very first step. I knew this issue was not to be underestimated! Chua's advice is to get to the root of the problem by questioning yourself as you would a 6 year old. I don't have any better ideas, so let's go. Why didn't you wake up on time? I feel like crap every morning.   What's making you feel that way ...

Sketches inspired by today's  random word — "Mist" I'm hitting a wall today. I mean, I'm still motivated and all, but I can't for the life of me think of something useful to look-up. This calls for a re-examination of my goal: I'm going to research and implement one strategy a day. Just one thing that will help me find my mojo, and I'm going to blog about it. So, "strategy".. entails what exactly? Nothing's holding me back from being creative and painting today. I mean, I already released my tablet from it's holding-cell and had fun drawing with it (the shitty-ness of my drawings is beside the point!). The use of the word "strategy" as the center of my goal is the problem. Finding strategies is not the only thing that will help me find that mojo of mine and chuck Sir Nothing out the window. My goal is need of refinement. Instead of finding, implementing, and blogging about strategies, I should have said ...

Sketch inspired by today's  random word — "Awful" Today's efforts were supposed to be dedicated to reading and implementing Step #2 of Adams' Staying Committed Strategy . A closer look however revealed that both steps 2 and 3 are no different from what Paul J. Silvia very beautifully explained in his priceless book " How to Write a Lot ". I already have a daily- as well as long-term plan with deadlines and all that ciabatta, so best move on to something new. The thing that's poking at my brain at the moment is how bored I got while reading steps 2 and 3. I continuously paused and stared at things around me, at myself, my dogs, and thought about the last time I ate (multiple times). I started procrastinating. The more I distracted myself with random things the more boring "work" seemed. And then came a yawn, "the" yawn. This called for a much needed search— "How to stop procrastinating". My favorite result wa...

Yes, I remember what I said yesterday --  That I'll focus on step #2 of Adams' Goal Commitment Process today.. But this is an emergency! I'm supposed to be producing at least one image a day, yes? Well, I did, but as a result, I'm experiencing these all-too-familiar anxieties and frustrations ( The Nothing  seemed to be making a move on me). See why this is a plan-altering kindof situation? As I finished sketching today's random topic (which was "Injured"), I became frustratingly unhappy with what I was looking at. I felt the hate of a low-level pvp player running for his life while the opposite faction's most eager "heroes" chased after him through 5 different maps. All I wanted to do was drown in tears and scream, but I also felt the fear of quitting again. So I decided to google (don't laugh)  "How to deal with the frustration of drawing badly".  I skimmed through a few posts of "don't compare yoursel...

Another day brings a new challenge. Today my attention fell on a blog post titled How To Stay Committed to Something published by the author of 40 books (yes, 40), R.L Adams. I googled this topic due to yesterday's accomplishments. I would like to focus on holding on to my new-found resolve and keep myself from falling into Nothing again.  In his post, Adams talks about the three required steps necessary for anyone (who is probably like me) to be able to commit to their most desired goals. I would like to experiment with all three steps, but since my daily goal was to follow one idea at a time, I'm going to focus on step #1 today, then 2, and 3 over the next two days. Step #1, S.M.A.R.T.E.R. Goals-- According to Adams, it's important to put your goals on paper, and to examine them using the following check-list: S- Specific M- Meaningful A- Achievable R- Relevant T- Timed E- Evaluated R- Re-Adjusted Today's Sense-of-Accomplishment To...

So I'm a little behind schedule, but as long as I'm still blogging (and putting heart into it), I won't consider myself offtrack just yet. To be fair, I had already googled "overcoming art block" yesterday, and found this post by Courtney Jordan How Do You Make Art When You Are Feeling Blocked? And I went with the point that didn't give me heart palpitations Pick up a magazine  you don't  mind  sacrificing to the muse. Rip out anything that catches your eye-- words, advertisements, patterns. Make a collage. Either use the paper in a mixed media art project or start painting what you pulled together, even if it is just abstract impressions of these source materials.  Now I don't own any magazines-- Yes, I'm a weird person who never browseses through magazines in supermarkets (the fact that I haven't been to a supermarket in 6 months has nothing to do with it). I do have Photoshop though, and I'm positive that I can find an onl...

I have no idea what to write about, or even how to express myself. I'm not a writer. Hi, I'm Dani, an illustrator (but currently a WoW addict supported by a relentless husband and family business), and I'm stuck in a loop I would like to call "The Nothing". I decided to start this blog to document my daily attempts to escape Nothing and find my mojo again. I haven't drawn anything worth mentioning in 18 months. I'm not really sure how I got myself stuck in Nothing, but here's how it is-- There isn't much in life that I don't find boring. I have lost interest in just about anything, including cooking. The only thing that I can tolerate doing is playing  WoW. I'm not sure why, but it offers a shut-in like me some kind of easy enjoyment without having to leave my home. I'm not really saying that being a shut-in is necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it works for some, but I can say that it's not making me happy. Before Nothing, I had...