Pretend You’re A Cucumber
Be cool man. Be cool.
The 100 Day Project
I once ran a half marathon. It was The Great North Run, here in the UK. It’s one of the big ones. I had trained for it, but not any where near enough. I ran it on my own - I mean, me and the other 30,000 runners.
I was spooked by the crowds to begin with and ran too fast, then I was too hot and my cheeks (face cheeks, thank you) prickled. I knew quickly that I’d overstretched. My shins hurt. Before I reached the first thirty minutes I was uncomfortable, bored, lonely and tetchy about this stupid run. Then, a gherkin ran past me. The last tissuey remnants of my enthusiasm slithered to the curb. A google-eyed, be-capped dog, lolling his foam tongue at his friend the cheerful toothpaste tube also ran by. The remaining three hours running were a dull, thudding, square jawed lesson in unpreparedness.
This incident feels unrepresentative of me: More often, I have over prepared for experiences, interviews for example, or first classes with new groups at the beginning of a teaching year. I am mostly painfully thoughtful (is hesitant a better word here? Maybe.) and the opposite of this careless, impulsive one who plonked herself in a crowd to run 13 and a bit miles on that unexpectedly hot day in September 2005(ish).
When I was an undergraduate at Art School and found myself in need of inspiration, I would go to the Library and paw through the oversized art books. Images of artists work I admired reminded me of my own quiet but deadly serious, branded-on-my-soul mission to be an artist.
By week three of the 100 days challenge, I was somewhere between The Great North Run and my University Library. Do you remember back in May this year I told you about my neurotic start to this project? You can remind yourself of my initial pain via this link - or, if you can hang on until the bottom of the page I’ll link there for you too.
To recap: I had decided to write a picture book in 100 days. It was a semi snap decision to join in the 2024 round of The 100 DayProject. I have been window shopping the project for a few years - back and forth, back and forth past that same shop front. Unready, this year I plonked myself in and embarked on the project. I didn’t want to miss out on this round of 100 days for reasons of unpreparedness.
For context, at about this time I also secretly felt a creeping horror at a flatness I was seeing in my digital drawings. I had been drawing insatiably for about a year on the iPad and had suddenly hit satiation. I hadn’t drawn on paper for about ten weeks. I was noticing a lifeless quality in the illustrations staring back at me from my beloved little rectangular drawing screen but felt strangely nervous about drawing on paper again: would my sketchbooks forgive me for the abandonment they had suffered? Would I remember how to draw with regular analogue pens and pencils?
Before I knew what my 100 day project was going to be (and admittedly after a fight with myself for almost the entire first quarter of the project as I tried to INSIST to myself that I would be writing a children’s picture book) the task of the project was to simply get onto paper, get drawing, playing, remembering how to draw lines and colour shapes on paper and how to be quick and spontaneous and then let a line BE and not zoom in to adjust it or smooth or perfect or erase or go back a step (I’m looking at you back arrows and ctrl Z).
In contrast to making ‘finished’ drawings for turning into cards or designs for paper goods (which tends always to be in my mind when drawing on an iPad) I play on paper, in a way that for now I don’t do so much on my iPad. My sketchbooks are a place for wonky messy incorrectnesses, a conduit for something more unrefined and in-depth, more immediate and more revealing of the process and my thoughts as I draw. Sketchbooks hold my ‘workings out’ in a way that is absent in my iPad works. There is a degree of separation from the more raw and earnest qualities of the articulations that pour out into my paper sketchbooks, in my iPad drawings. Perhaps this comes down to a less developed language for the visual conversation happening when I draw on my iPad - I am still learning and much less well versed on a digital page than on a paper page.
All this is to say that I realised that the flatness seemed to spring from getting to the edges of my iPad vocabulary, over using edit tools and needing to lean back into the mechanics of drawing in a more fluent way - hello paper, crayons, pens and pencils. I don’t want the wobbly uneven qualities of my on paper efforts to be cleansed out, I really believe that’s where there is an important potency and personality in my drawing. There is a balance point I want to get to - a point where my iPad works have that same characterful spontaneity.
One of the things that looking at books in the University Library helped me remember was that there really are no rules about how to do make the art you want to make. I believe that this is at the centre of the centre of what it is to be an artist: When I remember it, this idea has always been such a thrill to me. Sketchbook practice helps me remember. Until that Library, I had a very limited access to Art that wasn’t impressive bronze sculptures or magnificent paintings in establishment galleries. My own art was anything but that. It was the scratchy home-made mad-cap-basement looking stuff in the books I found that felt most exciting to me (and still does). In that Library, rather than show me rules, the books made me an invitation, a promise: ‘Even you belong here, because Art can be all of THIS too…’
And so probably, it was week three of thrashing about feeling all weird and guilty for failing to engage ‘properly’ in The 100 Days Project by the time I remembered the old trick of looking at books, words and pictures and that there aren’t rules I need to follow. I looked at collected images of other Illustrator’s work and I got into Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’. I revisited ‘The Artist’s Way’ and stuck to my almost two years old habit of meeting myself on the page every morning to write. I read this episode of
s Earthling and found the idea of not being alone in hacking through the jungle back to the path a giant sized comfort. I re-rooted myself in my big reasons for drawing and continued to flood my eyes with visual truffles.
I also remembered that I LOVE Illustration and the endeavour of it, I love looking at and reading about other illustrator’s work, I love the off beat, the wonky and the scratchy mad-cap in this field too and I love developing my own mad-cap scratchy, homemade collections of illustrated and written projects. This stuff doesn’t have to be all knitted-brows serious, the process can (should be) be loved and fun.
I belong here too because Art can be all of THIS.
Very much inspired by Stephen King’s stories in ‘On Writing’ about he and his brother using an old drum printer (which they dragged into their mom’s basement) to produce a homegrown newspaper - the boys drew, wrote, typeset and printed this paper by themselves before distributing it around the neighbourhood as pre-digital, pre-televisual children. I mean that’s just pure rad-ness, isn’t it? - I really wanted to do something to develop the sketchbook drawings I had been making into a finished something and a zine with the feel of an amateur parish/villagey news bulletin felt like a fun direction. I pushed and pulled my drawings and writing into being a peculiar little thing called ‘The Small Times’ as a little joke to myself about silent dramas I have within, over these creative challenges. Above: The lively centrefold for the mag.
The zine feels far away from the clean, neat little children’s book proof I had planned to bring together, but there is something pretty magical about that being the way things unfolded. The 100 Day Project became a learning about the heart wanting what it wants and the creative vein within wanting to be its own undivertable boss. This was a lesson in being OK with testing and exploring, keeping working all the while not knowing where it was all going to end up. It was a test in the resilience of my faith in the mysteries of the creative organism within revealing its plan and coming good in the given time.
The finished piece, the zine is about the process of making the zine. The ways the creative process stalls and the internal conversations through the cycle of a creative project, the stumbling around into flight and fluidity. The process was a stretch cycle from downward-cowering dog to full sun-basking, wide armed warrior stance.
Epilogue: Completing big projects is often a peculiar disbelief. Like returning home after a significant trip and everything feels exactly as it did when you left but there’s a weird little sensation within you. Nothing feels quite real here, yet the travel and place you have come from feels unreal too. This weirdness window closes but it’s an alarming and isolating quiet for more than just a minute. A strange kind of cold distance of that type, after a project has come to term is usual in my experience. The enigmatic guest has left the building.
Later in the year, I will be able to look at the zine and I’ll feel something. For now, back to putting down thoughts and drawing towards the next thing…
Previous 100 day post here. Artist credits for folding moodboard in sketchbook and other inspirations on letter page inside zine and here:
(Thank you Lindsay Stripling, you helped more than you know!)
