I have artblock and it fucking sucks.

Health problems flaring up in the past week with severe nightmares have really fucked up my sleep schedule and upcoming work and personal engagements (wedding season is here! It's not queer enough! I'm sad because I dislike the heat!) have made it hard to be creative and so I keep on. I'm trying my best to get around it, with rest and stuff and some things have made it hard because I rely on creative time to keep my mental health up. I also anchor my work routines around my health so it's like... all connected....

So how are the cubes going?

I'd like to think I'm getting better? But I'm not sure. I push myself to do 5-10 everyday but I think...? they're getting better? I'm not sure. my lines certainly aren't straight because I'm trying to capture the angles and such. But they are starting to feel structurally correct. somewhat. So far I think I'm about 20% through the 250 challenge. We'll see where it goes.

Anything can be a creative practice if you're annoying enough about it! - a planner girl

Okay, total confession, I'm a recovering productivity bro. Except I learned something super early into my productivity journey! If I make it cute, I'll be sure to follow through. So far, that's been the only tool that's stuck so far. Well, that and notion.

Here's my notion - yes I haven't updated the decorations since Christmas, it was a tough year okay. ;w;

I'm too invested in notion now to move away but that doesn't mean that I won't keep trying. last year I had an unfortunate incident trying out obsidian, but overall I think now - I've made my peace that notion is probably the overall best solution for me. Yeah I know "data soverignty" and "but Belle don't you kno-" shhhhh, shhhh, I was out of my house from 7am-12pm half of this year. Do you know how much I would've cried if everything was some entirely local only open-source whoopsydoesit linux thing and it FAILED ON ME? nah, chill. Me and notion are in this until the end of time. (I said that 10 years ago about Evernote, and yet....)

Although, I have made a significant change this year. I've gone back to paper planning somewhat! A little bit differently though than a daily planner. I am using the Artist of Life, it's more of a monthly and annual planner and workbook built around working towards your best life and all of that. I actually find monthly planning really works for me and is very sustainable - more than daily planners have been in the past, and looking at things (combining them with health tracker data and such) I'm able to see I lose basically one fucking week a month to chronic health issues FAWK all about my month ahead!

I find that these monthly planning sessions are basically like very important anchors in slowing down and reflecting. It does probably help that I did the artist's way this year from late Jan to early May too, and while I struggled with the morning pages (I actually usually did them at night, but before I started any creative work BUT I DID DO THEM) - I found that also helped as an anchoring ritual. Just yknow, checking in with yourself. Eventually I started deciding that I wanted to go back and print my own stickers. DID YOU KNOW sticker paper is like 5 dollars on amazon. It's not illegal to get, you can get it. I still buy shiny stickers like I did this weekend but generally I tend to print my own sticker sheets.

Daily clearly doesn't work too much for me, but I found keeping up with daily tracker in my artist's of life not too bad, but I clearly was struggling getting goals done on a more granular basis without planning and google calendar wasn't enough!

So I decided that I needed a good planner but those hobonichis are far too expensive of a mistake to make if I end up hating them! (though I respect the hobonichi girls) and, we'll see how this goes. I ended up settling on the Muji weekly/monthly. I like some of the annual views too, I think they're pretty cool. It wasn't too bad, and I think it helps that I only have to do keep in once a week. Unsure if I'll go hard on weekly spreads and decoration, but we'll see. It's only week one.

Animation!!! (I think)

Okay, so drawing is cool, but technically, animation is just like drawing x2. So technically??? :0 Drawing should be like, art 2..... soon we may have... drawing art 3..... and who knows what that'll be.

In all seriousness, like a year ago rosstoasty.bsky.social introduced me to Toonsquid on the ipad which I found leagues and bounds easier than doing 2D animation on procreate or clip studio and I get the urge to animate something every 2-3 months.

if only Bluesky didn't hate videos and gifs.....

I've been slowly learning how to stratify my layers across both the axis of time and place....

over time I've been like doing more expiriments and I like to think I'm slowly getting better.

I even took a bit of a detour in an app called Amberdraw, which is less like strict timeline animation and more just like... squiggly lines which is certainly interesting!

But I continue to be fascinated, which has picked up again lately.

I think I'm getting better at it all but tbh I know nowthing about animation!!! I'm literally just winging it, which made me want to actually... yknow... learn the fundamentals. And thus I found a course by a korean animator and decided last night another insomnia addled night that TONIGHT WAS THE NIGHT and thus started with a simple walking animation to break my artblock. I didn't want to do a full figure like the guy did, so instead I choose the humble Chococat.

wow, look, it's a whole walk cycle. in 4 frames per second, who knows what's next. :0 Dancing?

I struggled to thing of a reference I could use to draw the little dance so instead I just had him... vibe out. I will have to keep doing the animation course at this point to figure out what next. However, ngl, it is absolutely nuts how much these shitty little animations do well on social media like Instagram reels and Tiktok.

I think that learning some animation is helpful for creative direction on my shoots for work, which are often directed towards comic artists and animators. Comics can often shift between scenes and poses but animation is of course far more granular, so understanding that granularity is key to making... yknow better stock photos.