The First 7 Days

Summary

An artist embarks on a month-long drawing challenge, creating a new drawing each day and composing songs/poems to accompany the weekly collections, as a means to explore creativity through self-imposed constraints of time and activity.

Abstract

The website content details an artist's journey through a self-imposed creative challenge, spanning the entire month of July. The artist commits to producing a drawing every day, with the additional goal of writing a song or poem for each week's set of drawings. This challenge is inspired by Buddy Gott's "A Month of Creativity," and the artist uses it as a vehicle to break free from familiar patterns and explore new artistic directions. The creative process is guided by constraints, including a ten-minute daily time limit and the defined activity of drawing. The artist shares the progress on Twitter, engaging with the audience and documenting the transformation as the challenge unfolds.

Opinions

The author believes that creative challenges are beneficial for breaking down familiar patterns and fostering new directions in artistry.
Constraints are seen as helpful tools for focusing creative energy within a clear scope.
The artist values the process of combining visual art with music or poetry, suggesting that multidisciplinary approaches can enhance creative expression.
Sharing the daily drawings on social media indicates a belief in the value of community engagement and public accountability in the creative process.
The artist implies that the challenge has led to personal growth, with the bird character in the poems symbolizing a guide or muse that facilitates artistic transformation.

A Month Long Drawing Challenge for July

The First 7 Days

Experiments in Creativity

Creative challenges can break down familiar patterns and send you off in a new direction.

It isn’t always fruitful, yet it can create new pathways that lead to unexpected destinations.

Constraints are also helpful because they create a clear scope for where the energy needs to be focused.

The idea for this series comes from Buddy Gott’s A Month of Creativity.

A Month of Creativity

A self-imposed challenge to try to be at least a little artistic each day this month. Care to join me?

thepositivitypub.com

A month feels like a long time, so to get through it, I need a few more constraints.

First, a time limit. Ten minutes a day.

Second, a defined activity. In this case, making a drawing.

Since the start of the month, I’ve been posting a new drawing on Twitter every day. They’re mostly digital sketches with one being pen on paper.

As I’ve started cooking it up I’ve thought, why not throw another ingredient into the pot?

So here it is. I’m going to take each week of drawings and write a song/poem to go with it.

My new fellow traveler sings a strange tune,

In a dark wilderness, on the dark moon,

Her beak pecks my head when I don’t sing along,

She says “I’ll teach you my very new song”

“The tree where the spirit grew up in a bubble,

Is trouble for me, but for you it is double,

I sing cheep cheep, cheep cheep, cheep cheep chuble

And you sing deep, deep. Deep, deep double trouble.”

This balancing act is proving more than enough,

On the one hand is hate, on the other is love,

The bird says now, you are starting to see,

At first you are you, but soon you’ll be me.

I turned around quickly, but the bird was now gone,

And all of a sudden I’m floating along,

And my part of the song is being sung from below,

And the spirit is wondering where I might go.

Then the bird returned, in human form,

This all seemed to be out of the norm,

And the cosmos was calling, “Sing something new”,

What the bird had said, was now coming true.

Inside my mirror, an alien I see

As the bird now, turns into me

And canary yellow has been set free

It’s just not the colour she wanted to be.

Is this a coal mine? I don’t need to ask

Just don’t breath too deeply and put on your mask

So this is the world my king built for me?

He’s got me confused with my enemy.

Thanks for reading. You can follow along on Twitter here.