A view along the sidewalk at the Iowa River Landing Wetland Park in Coralville, IA, with some added digital crunch using an app called 8bitphotolab. It seems like whoever made this app isn’t supporting it anymore, so I’ll get a little note when I open it saying it isn’t compatible with the current version of android. I need to figure out some alternatives.
I made a sort of “early New Year’s resolution” around Christmas of last year to do more journaling. Since then, I’ve been intermittently opening up a new document in Google Docs and typing whatever’s currently on my mind. It’s been a useful process. I think it’s been good for me to have a mechanism to get hold of my thoughts and feelings and identify them, rather than have them just sort of whoosh past me.
A turn of phrase that came up in one of these journaling sessions that stuck out to me is “Art isn’t all at once.” I identified that sometimes I “chase myself away” from just sitting down and doing some drawing because I falsely convince myself that some great progress must be made. Just messing around is an important part of the creative process.
I hope soon you’ll sit down with a sketchbook or a keyboard or a piano or stand at your kitchen counter - whatever your particular creative outlet is - and spend some time just messing around.