June was the last blog post that I wrote this year, which might seem like I fell off the face of my own planet, but it's understandable why that was a breakpoint in 2023 for me. June was so different than I could have imagined going into 2023. I spent ~3 weeks on the back side of June in Connecticut, house/cat-sitting for a friend. Things I experienced: the idea of living on the east coast the idea of living in a small town being able to go for a wide variety of hikes solitude homesickness new art experimentation cats The trip wasn't something I knew was on my horizon going into 2023. I had had this daydream during the pandemic that I could just pick up and go live anywhere for a while. My work was fully remote, so the world was legitimately my oyster. The part where I got stuck and never took the leap is the fact that I'd be paying rent at home, and also at whatever romantic location I chose to relocate to temporarily. So when I was asked by a friend if I wanted to stay in...
Dear Diary, OMG, it's been forever . Enough of that. It has been a few months, but life happens. What did I do in April and May? I'd say I spent my creative time in May "doing art." Mostly I was getting back into the habit of drawing in a sketchbook with some kind of regularity. This carried over into May, when I also completed this painting, which kind of started the whole, "I want to paint Looney Tunes backgrounds" thing in the first place: Also in May, I told myself that I was going to "write more." This did happen to an extent. And I think more importantly, I realized that if I want to achieve that goal, I work better if I have some kind of outline and some kind of guidelines. But as everyone knows from all of history, setting and keeping to new habits is very difficult. Especially when you're the only one to hold yourself accountable. However, where the writing was sparse, I'd say that my mind was alive with new ideas and forming so...