14 Nov 2013

Buzz like a bee!

My freelance life has been quite chilled out lately: I have had a very reasonable amount of projects running simultaneously, and they all tend to have very reasonable deadlines, too. I have a timetable and usually dedicate one working day for one project at a time: on Mondays I do this, on Tuesdays I do that and so on. It helps me focus and get into a good work flow, when I don't have to think about everything at the same time. Sounds like a tip from some kind of a freelancer's guide..? It probably is.

However, this week I'm having an overflow of deadlines. I even scheduled some of them on following days, thanks to a not so smart brainwave that made me think my agenda was fairly empty. Turned out it wasn't, so here I am, working like a madman and multitasking my brains out, doing one thing in the morning, another one in the afternoon and something else in the evening. Like yesterday; I was in desperate need of some fresh air after sitting indoors from dawn to dusk, so I put on my sneakers and  rushed out for a jog. I ended up touring around the city for two hours, making mental notes for an article that I'm working on. Efficiency at its best - beats listening to your own breath and wondering how many meters you have left anytime!

I'm making it sound like I'm the busiest person on the planet Earth, so in all honesty I have to admit that some of the deadlines I'm talking about are self-originated. A friend of mine had a birthday, and I wanted to make a card - bing, a deadline! Me and my boyfriend celebrated two years of shared silliness, so I had to come up with something sweet for him - bing, a deadline! But I don't mind, because none of the deadlines - neither the personal nor the professional ones - involve doing something that I wouldn't enjoy. In fact, it is a great pleasure to be stressed out because of nice things!

With this positive mood and world embracing mindset, I shall leave you with this bee illustration I made for the cover of my agenda and proceed to the next thing on my to-do list: putting the mental notes from last night on paper (...or actually a word document...).

Farewell for now!

6 Nov 2013

The devil is in the details


As part of the Secret Mission I'm on at the moment, I've been drawing plenty of kitchen and food related things: chairs, cups, cutlery, tables, teapots and celery. Some of them have been so called pieces of cakes that I've drawn, coloured and finished at once, whilst others have been drawn a dozen times before I have reached the point of perfection where neither me nor my client have found anything else to change or experiment with. 

Last week, I spent hours and hours drawing teapots: Japanese teapots, dainty teapots, metal teapots, teapots with smooth surface, teapots with texture and teapots with stripes. I also drew a jug of milk, but in the end it got ditched and put back in the creative fridge where it came from. Before that, I went through the same process with grapes, which didn't make it to the final illustration either.

That's the life of an illustrator: drawing tons of things on a sketch book thicker than a bible, whilst the end result of all that work might be just one illustration. At times, when I've spent 15 hours working hard and the outcome is just one illustration, I begin to wonder how did I manage to spend all that time working on one single image. At those times, it's good to remember that although it is just the hand-picked selection of top-notch drawings that end up being presented on the table, behind the door of the creative fridge there are dozens of sketches and tryouts that are not served - these grapes included.