I did this a little while back and it’s always strange and oddly embarrassing at times to watch a recording of the progression of a piece. This was my first try at recording a drawing and I really didn’t have much in mind when I started it other than to get something down and hope that it doesn’t crash while doing it. What’s pretty interesting while watching it is that I can recall what was going through my head at certain points and then see myself act it all out. It also lays bare the numerous mistakes I made that I wouldn’t have remembered just by looking at the final result. One thing that I’m trying to do is to produce at a faster rate and try to reduce my perfectionist instincts that slows everything down. From Bobby Chiu’s The Perfect Bait:

Kris Pearn: Mentally, you’re always trying to make good judgements… You’re always trying to design good shapes. You’re always trying to create good art.

Lets’s suppose when you do this, you’re drawing at 100% capacity. At 100% of your ability, it takes you maybe 10 minutes to do a good drawing.

Now, let’s just say you do 50% of your ability—by knocking back a drawing at 50% of your ability, you’ll speed up by 50%. Initially, you’ll draw worse for a little while. But the more you draw, the quicker your design sense will adapt and begin to catch up to that demand, the demand of drawing faster.

With practice, your ability will catch up so that you’re back at 100% again but now you’re drawing twice as fast as before. And then repeat—squeeze your 5-minute ability by 50% to double your speed. Next thing you know, you’re doing a drawing in two minutes, then one minute.

You draw out your quantity, and then you work, work, work, and eventually your quality catches back up to the demand that you’re making, and the time.

I’ve never quite thought of becoming more efficient in this way before. I generally thought about the accumulation of skill as the result of putting in hours upon hours of work, and I never fully considered to put myself on a time constraint as a way of spurring growth. The only times which I put myself under this instant pressure to produce were during figure drawing sessions. One minute poses. Five minute ones. Tens. Each variation came with its own limitations and approaches.

Usually I’m a details guy. I’m a stickler for line work, getting the angles just right. And I’ll admit that it can feel freeing not to think about all that when I only have a short amount of time to fill in the page and getting things all perfect just isn’t going to happen. Sure, I put myself on deadlines when I’m working on my own, but those are usually measured in hours and days rather than a handful of minutes. So with this in mind I’ve started recording more of my timed process so that I can see those moments where I got stuck on something, where I can see myself trying to piece things together and make it work. It’s all the little details about the process that you don’t see by looking at the final result. Just being aware of my tendencies will hopefully subtly change my habits and design sense. So this is just another challenge, and if in the end I am able to work faster while keeping up the quality it’ll be worth all the effort.

PicStroom’s Main Screen

One of my most frequently used applications is PicStroom. What it does is pull images from RSS feeds and displays them as rows of pictures. Adding a few of your own websites is a breeze, and the paid version of the app allows for an unlimited amount. You can curate your own list of galleries to suit it to your personal tastes be they art and design sites, photography and fashion, or home decor and world news. If the site has a valid feed, you can add it here. One of great ways of using it is by adding Tumblr feeds here instead of viewing them on the actual website, but you can also add Flickr, Ffffound and Dribbble galleries as well. Swiping through the rows is speedy and smooth, and a tap enlarges the an image to full screen view. Beyond just being able to view multiple sites at once very quickly, the simple and efficient design of it also removes the text and clutter which allows one to focus on the images alone.

Other great handy features are PicStroom’s sharing capabilities. Emailing an image, saving to your device’s photo album or starring to keep a favourites list is included. On top of those there are also options that allow you to save to a Dropbox folder (or multiple ones if you want to organize your images), Tweet a pic, save to Instapaper, or post to Tumblr. It’s a great tool for collecting and growing your inspiration library.

It is currently only available for the iPad although the developers intend to expand to other platforms. If you have a preferred way for browsing image sites, let me know in the comments.

If you would like to submit a work, the deadline is March 9th with a $30 fee for single entries. Categories include animation, books, editorial, fashion, and unpublished work and open to all illustrators, art directors, and graphic designers.

Good luck!

Digitally coloured subway sketch

These sessions are definitely social events, the meeting of other artists, the chatting and comparing works during the ride. It’s open to everyone to join in of course and an enjoyable way to flex your creative muscles. If you find yourself in the area with an open Sunday afternoon, this is a great option all for the price of a subway token.

I get excited by technology though. If there is something out there to that will help me be a little more efficient (you know, to even out all my inefficiencies), I feel like I have to try it out. What I’ve been up to for the last few months was finding a way to incorporate all those wonderful apps and gadgets out there to aid me along in being a freelancer and artist. Tired of Moleskine notebooks? You can carry around a library of your ideas with the digital alternatives. Sketchbook getting a little too clumsy to carry around? There’s some interesting options out there.

I bought and iPad last year and it absolutely changed the way I work. Carrying around a laptop and charging brick was never as invisible as I wanted it to be — I always aware of the awkward size and weight of it. Deciding to pack it before leaving the house became a hassle and a burden. The switch to a tablet and keyboard case solved all that. It also had the bonus offering access to so many useful applications, and who doesn’t love apps.

Having tried once before to blog and knowing how that turned out, I wanted to make sure to remove any friction and make the process fit into normal flow of my day. That meant being able to whip up this very post on the go. And by ‘go’ I mean ‘sitting in a coffee shop with the other folk that don’t seem to have day jobs like regular people’. I needed something that would let me churn out a post when I had a moment to, and work on the tablet that I almost always have on hand.

So I found Blogsy. Easy to setup, it can post to WordPress, Blogger, and other popular platforms. Handling images is a breeze, just dragging, dropping, pinching. Taking this screenshot and inserting it (Screenception?) only took a moment. It includes an HTML editor for all the gritty coding stuff and quick links to media sites for linking. If I keep this blogging thing up, I can see myself using this app quite often and would definitely recommend it to anyone else out there looking for a simple alternative to posting from a browser. Getting Stuff Done, Real Artists Ship, these are things I keep in mind as I progress with my career. This is just one of the tools that is helping me get there.

Blogging. Writing and posting. Not the hardest thing in the world to do these days. For me though, it’s taken about two years to get this far. That’s how long ago a came up with a name for the one I had in mind (My Shambolic Post-Its) (I know…). That’s how long ago a spent a week designing the oh so perfect header. Next was styling the template. That went well, I was excited, and then…then nothing came. After all that preparation I never did end up putting up a single post.

So I’m glad I’m starting now, late as it may be.