October 2022
Hello hello!
Another month another update (though this one comes so close to the end of this month, I really need to get better with this). October was a relatively slower month when it comes to work because Charu was on some time off so we didn’t do much on our game, and Kahran was traveling so some of the progress on Joyus also slowed down, especially considering he is also planning a wedding. Well, except for our usual releases of the podcast.
Conversations with Mello were super exciting as the team expands and new offerings and new tests take place.
But this month the most interesting thing that I did was starting to draw and practice more. For the last 10+ years, I have been drawing but rarely letting myself get deeper into the practice or about improving with volume. There have been periods when I have drawn a lot, but never really at the volume that I know is needed to get better at the craft. It’s not that I don’t appreciate when people really like their craft and hone it, I just have never seen myself as a honer.
And the last couple of months have been very interesting in terms of me questioning what I see myself as, and why I have been attached to certain views of what I am and less so with others. For example I never really see myself as a “true artist” and I’ve always identified myself as more of a “designer”. Not that there is a value judgment about who is better or worse but there is definitely some amount of discomfort around accepting the “artist” label. Instead of forcing myself to accept the label, in October, I asked myself what would it require for me to accept myself as an artist, and I came up with two distinct answers
I need to improve the quality of my ideas so that I can connect things that seem much more farther away and connect them in interesting ways
I need to improve my craft by practicing
Number 2 came in form of drawing more studies, and doing it regularly. Even if I fall off the wagon sometimes, just coming back to practice how the human form is, or how colors work has been really quite interesting. It also extended to watching tutorials on painting and sketching and composition for the first time in a couple of years.
Number 1 is trickier, because how does one assess the quality of ideas? One help here was an audible course on “creative thinking” by the Great courses. The best thing I learnt from it was that the creative process is divided into 4 distinct stages, Clarify, Ideate, Develop and Execute. And what I am right now focusing on is improving the volume for the first two stages. I think I have a natural inclination towards ideation and clarification, but after years of doing work, one tends to at times become a bit lazy and just work off of a couple of ideas rather than having a lot, so that is what I am focusing on these days. I will keep you all updated on how that goes over the next couple of months.
Thanks for reading along! I am not sure what shape these updates will take but I am excited about going forward on this and making more posts about what I am doing.