Artwork of an Evening
Been scribblin' in paintbrush. One of the things I've been reading is "Work as a Spiritual Practice: A Practical Buddhist Approach to Inner Growth and Satisfaction on the Job", by Lewis Richmond. I'm hoping to learn from this how to use Buddhist practice to make work suck less. One of the things he mentions about spiritual practice in general, contrasting it with the world of work, is that with spiritual practice what is important is not the goal, but just the doing of the practice. So I thought, why not take that approach to artwork? Just doing it to do it. Doesn't matter if it sucks, the important thing is the doing. I always really hated not being happy with some art work I'd done. I got to where I did not want to even attempt it if I did not have some inspiration of what I wanted to achieve. An idea. A goal. This time I just decided to start and see what happens -- which is also something Tropical_Hermit mentioned to me about creative writing (thanks!). I trashed the first one, but doing it gave me an idea for the first one you see here -- the idea was the black squiggles. They seem to add something natural and organic to it. They aren't straight lines, angles or perfect circles -- though those elements (and the bold colors) are what I like most about doing artwork with a computer.
That one came out not half bad. Next I ran with the black squiggles and came up with some sort of Christmas Tree farm. Which is kind of "eh..." but still "ok".
Last I just started making dots and went from there. The background is like something I did in another picture over a decade ago. The gray bars though -- that was inspired. I'm pretty happy with this one!
None of these took longer than 10 to 20 minutes. I'm not spending a lot of time on these. But it's fun to do, and putting the emphasis on the doing, I guess it doesn't matter if they come out crappy. Still, they came out pretty good I think!