BLOG | 2015 DAILY SCHEDULE
by Kevin Preston | 20th December 2014
I am a man, and well, sometimes girl lol, of routine. If I don’t have a schedule and a list of things to do I find myself not being able to focus, I am at my best when I start the day clearly knowing what needs to be done with a list, so that I can just focus on getting each task completed in order. I also love crossing things off the list, as it feels like you’re actually getting stuff done :)
For the past 2 years I have broken each day down into hours and created blocks of time for studying, drawing, sketching etc I used to go to work, and come home at 6am, have something to eat and then from 7-9am study from books, 9-10 gesture drawing, 10-11 sketching and then go to bed, weekends were all drawing time, putting into practice what I had learnt during the week.
The past few months I decided to focus most of my attention on myself and creating the new website, and so Art had to take somewhat of a back seat. I’ve still been doing daily gesture drawings, daily meditations, still admiring other artists work, but I felt it was more important for me to focus on myself, my gender dysphoria and basically just step back and look at the bigger picture for a while, it’s also fair to say that I was struggling to focus on my art at various points this year due to my mind needing to deal with my gender issues.
It’s funny, but the universe presented me with the opportunity to quit my job and take some time out at just the perfect moment, it was just what I needed, it’s very risky as I have no idea what the future holds now, but in a way, none of us really do if we’re being honest :) I’ve always gone with my intuition on everything I’ve ever done, and it’s never let me down thus far, and quitting my job to focus on myself and my art for a while felt like the right thing to do.
Something I’ve learnt over the past few years, is that if you want something badly enough, you have to be prepared to sacrifice other things that are maybe more enjoyable in the short term, such as playing videogames, or watching TV, nothing wrong with either of those things, it’s just there are only so many hours in the day and so something has to give. It’s very nice to have started sorting myself out within, but I am aware that I need to stay focused on my Art.
It’s fair to say putting the new website together really took it out of me in November, sleepless nights, full days of just sitting in front of the computer like a zombie, forgetting to eat, it was a month that whizzed by and looking back now I almost don’t know how I did it. After that month I just needed some rest time, I was prepared to give myself a few weeks to just enjoy embracing my feminine side, seeing as it’s been 34 years of hiding it and living in shame, I think a month of embracing my femininity was something I deserved :)
Now, as the new year approaches, it’s time to focus, get plans in place and come up with schedules that will allow me to focus on my art while still having time dedicated to embracing my feminine side. My vision all along was to have one weekend dedicated to Sophie, and all other time primarily for Art.
My plan is to have the first weekend of each month dedicated to Sophie time, the first Saturday of each month I plan to produce new photos that I will hopefully one day turn into paintings/drawings, and then Sunday will be the day I crop all the photos and get them resized for the site etc. I’m hoping by embracing my femininity this will feedback into my art, ultimately improving my artwork, plus it will be a nice way for me to energise my batteries each month away from drawing.
When the weather is nice next year, I intend to go one step further and spend that first weekend of the month camping up on the moors, taking Sophie photos out in the open air and just sitting up on the hills sketching as the sunsets. It should be a nice little break to look forward to each month, I got the idea from Sean McCabe at SeanWes.com, who takes a weeks sabbatical every 7 weeks to recharge his batteries, I’ve decided to take the first weekend of each month off.
As for Goals, I aim to carry on studying Figure Drawing, but I see that this will be a very long love affair that maybe is never ending. It’s not just a case of picking up a book and being able to draw the figure as I first naively imagined, there is so much more to it then that. I will explain more about my 2015 goals with various website links in another post, but I intend to carry on studying figure drawing while simultaneously learning colour theory with coloured pencils.
I’m pretty excited to be trying something new, and it’s also nice to finally see light at the end of the tunnel after the past few months of madness, hopefully this new found clarity will lead to 2015 being filled with lots of new Art :)
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
Thomas Merton