In other words, I'm starting something that I may be spectacularly ill-equipped to follow through on... sigh. We'll see how far this goes.
In his book, author Noah Scalin (of Skull-a-Day fame) says "The key to a successful daily project is deciding on a subject or medium that you will enjoy exploring for a year (pg. 7)."
I've been looking at birds here for a while and I'm still fascinated by them, so that seems like a good subject.
And I'm in a natural science illustration program this year, so why not combine the two to create a body of work?
Here's the project, as I see it right now:
Do 52 bird studies this year, taking a week to do each study.
I know what you're thinking -- that doesn't sound much like a 365-day project now, does it? Bear with me for a moment.
Last term in the NatSci program, we had a process and I'll be basing the "daily" part of the project on that process. If all goes according to plan, it will look something like this:
- Saturday: research
- Sunday: "getting to know you" sketches - loose, mostly gesture, for overall shape, or to study the interesting bits
- Monday: line drawing
- Tuesday: tonal drawing in graphite
- Wednesday: color, either colored pencil or watercolor
- Thursday: detail drawing - here's where you're likely to see lots of beaks, feet and eyes
- Friday: put it all together digitally
That's it, for the moment. Since it's my project, I reserve the right to change the rules whenever I want. If I can keep it going for any length of time it should be a good experience, and maybe I'll even make a few things I like!
My first bird: the Northern Cardinal. I saw my first live one in DC, so it will be a new bird (for me) to start a new project in the new year.
Happy New Year!
