I’m trying something new. Something I really should’ve started a long time ago, seeing as I’ve pretty much fallen off the wagon regarding my fine art efforts and haven’t really spent any time in the studio since last summer.

I’m adopting a very loose plan (because it’s hard to adhere to much of a schedule when you have a two-month-old baby in the house) to work on my art a little bit every day. Even if it’s just 30 minutes each evening. I got the idea from a post at Fine Art Views where Jeffery Sparks talks about setting aside time for your fine art while holding down a day job. Sparks talks about a friend of his who gradually improved his art while holding down a position as a director at a large company:

My friend had weekends off. Each week night he would do something to prepare for Saturday, his “painting day”. After each work day, he first spent time with his family, and afterwords planned for paintings with thumbnail sketches, value and color studies. On Saturday, he would follow up by allocating the entire day to painting. … the trick here is to analyze your own painting process and break it down into manageable chunks throughout the week, so that when the uninterrupted painting day begins, the plan is in place, and the work becomes more enjoyable.

This actually reminds me of my Granddaddy, who enjoyed watercolor painting. Every summer my mom, aunt, cousins, sister, grandparents, and I would go to Cumberland Mountain State Park on the Cumberland Plateau and spend a week in a cabin in the mountains. Granddaddy would bring along his watercolor supplies, including a bright lamp and a lightweight drafting table. He brought along lots of drawings he’d already prepared over the months. That way, he’d already done the compositional work, which was admittedly pretty loose — I don’t think he had the patience for things like perspective — so he could do the fun part: putting color on the paper. Two years after his death, I realize how he had made it a little more efficient for himself.

My friend Pete Sullivan (whose website I designed and programmed) committed a couple of years ago to work on his art 30 minutes a day. His wife tells me that’s when his artwork really improved (and started to sell.)

So that’s what I’m going to do: slowly, steadily work on my art. I can spend a little bit of time in the evenings working on structural pencil drawings, Photoshop sketches, toning/stretching/gessoing canvases, transferring tight drawings, experimenting with color combinations, etc. Then I can dive right into the work on Saturday mornings. I can even work on pencil drawings on my lunch break if the canvas or board is small enough to be portable. I think I may even take a stab at the small-works thing, and try doing Weekly (but not Daily) paintings. It’ll help me make more valuable use of my time.

I’m putting this out there in the hopes that you, dear reader, will perhaps out of the goodness of your heart encourage me and keep me accountable to a certain degree.

Oh, and it sure beats whining to my wife about how I don’t do enough art.