Getting back on the wagon | SHW #24

Hey there! It’s been a couple of weeks but I’m back.

To be honest, I’ve been feeling pretty chaotic lately. Not because anything has gone wrong, just because my mind has been wandering a lot and I’ve been struggling to rein it in.

I have the tendency to overthink absolutely everything. Now that I’ve been out of work for a couple of months, my brain wants to default to this feeling of chaotic terror. The best way for me to get myself out of that spiral is through intentional action.

So, I did some reflection and journaling around what I really want and how I want to spend my time. The thing that keeps coming up over and over again is that I just want to work towards mastery in drawing. That’s it. I love the feeling of slow and steady improvement from conscious, daily work.

I decided to set a goal for myself and my art to keep me focused on taking action. Normally I keep all these things to myself so that I can conveniently forget about it one day and no has to know. However, I thought it would be helpful for me to share the goal publicly as well as my regular progress towards it.

My goal is to draw for 1000 hours in 2023. By this I mean actual drawing time. I won’t be including time that I spend consuming other content for the purpose of learning. I often get stuck in procrasti-learning, so I want to be very intentional about actually putting pencil to paper, or pen to tablet, or whatever.

If you want to follow along, I created an Open Goals page, where I’ll be sharing and updating my progress towards this goal (credit to Steph Smith for this idea). These will include all of my goals for the year, not just the art related ones. You can also continue to expect weekly reflections from my experience. I hope that watching me work towards these goals publicly serves as some motivation for you to take action towards your own!

Thanks for sticking around with me. Have a great week!

~Rachel

P.S., I still have some books and prints available in my shop if you’d like to grab a little token for yourself.