That image above isn’t me in bed, that’s actually Betty lol So you at least got to meet Betty, but since falling ill last week, I haven’t done any drawings, studying or website stuff. It’s only yesterday that I finally began to feel in control again. I’ve never felt like this before. It took everything out of me, left me feeling massively depressed and questioning everything. I’ve had moments this past week where I’ve come close to giving it all up.

I see now I hit burnout. Did the illness bring on the burnout, or did the burnout bring on the illness? I don’t know. For a while I’ve been aware of the fact that I hardly ever produce finished works. I spend all my time studying and practicing, and I was beginning to not enjoy myself. In fact, I was getting more and more disheartened. I felt like I was putting all my effort into the wrong areas. In a way I felt trapped by my systems.

I had started to question the amount of time I was putting into the blog each week. I love writing. It helps me make sense of my life, but I’ve had a new blogpost every week for pretty much two years now. To think I kept blogging throughout October-December of last year, with all the chaos that was going on in my life. Looking back now, it’s kind of insane that I pulled that off. I believe they call this hustling, getting shit done no matter what. Well, I question if hustling is for me anymore. I question if hustling should be for anyone.

I asked myself, why am I doing this? Creating art should be fun. All this extra stuff I found myself doing was taking away from my ability to just enjoy creating. I was even starting to sacrifice sleep just to get stuff done. I realised two things. One, I wasn’t doing enough of the fun stuff. Two, I had cut so much out of my life that I had lost the balance. Before I got ill, I actually wrote on my whiteboard that I need Sophie back in my life. I had tried to focus on my art 100%, fearing that Sophie would be a distraction I tried to have her take a backseat. There is just no way I can keep going without Sophie. Sophie is such a highly complex situation for me, but Sophie and art together are key to my success.

This post could go on forever, but I’m going to keep it super brief. I have been, and I still am, looking at everything I do and everything I want, and sorting out what to include and what not.

My main goal now is to focus on creating finished pieces of work, in fact, not so much finished pieces, just pieces of work. I want to spend my days drawing and painting for fun. For goodness knows how long now, I’ve kept saying, I want to do paintings but I need to focus on learning how to draw first. Well, how long is that going to go on for. Years if I keep saying it lol At some point I have to say sod it, I’m painting now, whether I’m ready or not. That point is now.

I’ve always dreamed that one day I would reach a point where I could paint and bring Sophie to life. So why not start now. I intend to paint from Sophie’s photos, and create new photos, with the intention of creating artwork from them. I imagine my paintings will suck. I don’t care. I’ll just paint another one, and another one, and another one until they no longer suck so much :) Sophie and Art is what makes me whole, my biggest struggle will be staying focused and having the discipline to not get obsessed over taking Sophie photos at the expense of creating art.

I will carry on studying from Lee Hammonds ‘lifelike drawing in colored pencils’ book, I’m determined to get this bleeding book finished lol That will be my only studying as I’m going to back down from studying heads and circles for the moment. So my focus is now

IN

• daily sketching for fun
• Sophie inspired paintings
• studying from lee Hammonds book
• daily gesture drawings
• life drawing class on a Tuesday and every other Thursday,
• a dedicated day each week for taking new Sophie photos
• continue to produce realistic portraits

I need to be more laid back, if I start painting one day and enjoy it so much that it takes all day, so be it. If that means I don’t work on a realistic drawing that day, that’s ok too. As long as each day I am creating some form of art, I will end the day happy :) I’m not going to be super strict anymore. As long as I am happy and producing art, that is all that matters. So what is going?

OUT

• The schedule of the favourites section is going. At the moment every month a new artist/female was added on the first of each month. I will still add new favourites, but they will be as and when.
• The weekly blog is also going, for the moment I am taking a break, I imagine I will return to blogging but it will most likely not be weekly. You never know, but I need a rest from blogging for the moment.
• Studying of heads is going
• Daily segment drawing is going

I imagine I will return to posting Sophie photos to Instagram via Sophie.Lawson, alongside my artwork feed at KevinPrestonArt. However, I’m not going to force myself to post every day. If I don’t want to post for a few weeks, that’s fine. The focus has to be on creating art, most importantly, enjoying what I’m doing and not feeling like I have to do this, or have to do that.

I would like to add, that I will continue to draw one lucky winner each month from my newsletter subscribers list, who will win themselves a signed postcard. This will stay as the 1st of each month, so feel free to signup here, or use the form below, to be in with a chance! The monthly newsletter though, at the moment I don’t know what it will evolve into, but my main focus was always to have this list be for giving away postcards, so that is all that matters to me at the moment.

IT’S TIME TO EXPERIMENT. TO PLAY. TO TRY NEW THINGS. TO TRY THE THINGS I’VE BEEN PUTTING OFF FOR TOO LONG. TO TRY AND FIND BALANCE.

SO LET’S GO PLAY!