Being creative is largely about being able to connect unrelated things, so building a library of experiences is a great way to become more creative. If you have more thoughts, feelings, adventures, and activities in your library, even if they're just pamphlet-sized, you can draw on them later to solve problems in new and interesting ways.

That's one reason why I decided to say yes when a friend asked me to participate in the Richmond edition of the Cotopaxi Questival, an adventure race where teams compete in a scavenger hunt in their state to document experiences and have fun. I only knew one person on my team when we started, but now I've made new friends. I've also, so far, tried new Indian food, watched the sun set and rise, used a flint and steel to... try to start a fire (my attempt was unsuccessful, but one of my teammates made fire!), kept that fire alive with sticks we gathered around our campsite, sung goofy songs, and had a lot of fun.

And that was only yesterday!

Even though it was cloudy, I watched the sun lighten the earth this morning and it got me excited for all the new adventures we'll have today all around our beautiful state of Virginia. And I'm hoping that it will help build my library even more so I can leave this experience with new things to draw upon for my art. 

If you feel like you're not achieving what you want to do in life, go have an adventure! It might just be the boost you need to build a new connection and start an idea you couldn't have imagined before.

Go make a great day for yourself. I plan to. Onward!

I've been dancing around this for years, but I am finally at the point where I admit it: I like motivating people :)

​I think this is pretty clear in the kinds of responses I give people who ask me questions, but it's more than that. When I start writing almost anything, I begin thinking about how I can mold it to inspire someone else, to help them learn something that gives them a boost toward their own dreams.

The problem is that I was never able to figure out a way to incorporate that into my brand. I'm an entrepreneur of art, so my main goal is to make art, and make money off that art. Inspiring people isn't opposed to that, but I'm not an inspirational speaker. That's not what I'm selling. Yet, the urge to motivate and encourage is constantly there.

I plan to incorporate this more naturally into my art in the future, but for now, what can I do?

I was fiddling around with my own personal goals this morning and came up with an acronym for myself - HEMS. It stands for:

Coincidentally, a "hem" is also what you call the finishing border stitching on a piece of clothing. Until the hem is added, a garment might fit well and look pretty good, but it's incomplete. Similarly, I don't feel complete without my hem (or "HEMS"... the singular-plural thing isn't working out for me here, but oh well). 

Healthy encompasses both my diet and my fitness. This is something I've struggled with for several years now, as I suffered from some health issues that caused me to lose weight and feel very weak most of the time. Fortunately, I am doing much better now, and have recently been making more of an effort to exercise regularly and stick to a healthy diet. If I have a healthy body, doing everything else will come so much more easily.

Educated means continuing to learn things, and to think critically about the happenings around me. I do this one pretty easily, as I am a naturally curious person and love finding classes and lectures to listen to. I've also been taking basic Spanish lessons just for the fun of it! If I am educated, I will stay sharp and relevant, and able to make decisions and adjustments more easily.

Mindful means paying attention to both myself and others. Being mindful of myself means listening to my body, my emotions, my mind, my conscience, etc. and making sure I take actions that keep myself in a place of balance. It also means being mindful of other people and my community by trying to be loving and compassionate to everyone I meet, and taking part in community events and volunteering. If I am mindful, I will stay connected with myself and my surroundings and feel more whole and balanced.

Spiritual, to me personally, means living my life as a good Christian. I want to slow true love to others, friends and enemies alike, and be able to answer the questions of anyone who's curious about the gospel of Jesus and how he came to save all of us. It's not something that I put forward a lot on my website or other social media, but it's something integral to who I am, so I can't make a self-improvement acronym without including it! If I am spiritual, I will stay connected with the root of who I am and why I am here. 

​I'm going to be trying to incorporate HEMS into my life as often as possible, which means in my business and art pursuits as well.

I want my business to be Healthy by taking extra care to watch my finances and keeping the paperwork in order; I want it to be Educated by being informed about what's happening in the art world and finding ways to improve my customer service and products; it should be Mindful in going above and beyond what is expected and really thinking about innovative ways to grow and serve better; and it can even be Spiritual in that the work I do should touch people in some way and be meaningful.

HEMS hasn't been super tested yet (I mean, I just came up with it this morning!), but I'm feeling pretty confident about it as a way to condense my overall goals into one easy-to-remember acronym. I'm sharing it with you in the hopes that maybe it can help you in your life, too. Leave a comment about how you would interpret your HEMS goals, or if you have your own general guide that you follow in your life.

Make today a good day :)

As I'm contemplating putting up a blog again, I'm reading down through some of the very old posts and cringing at my own writing. I'm thinking of taking them down. But that would go against one of my own philosophies, namely that imperfection and failure aren't to be feared.

See, every artist hates their own artwork, especially if it's not recent. It has nothing to do with a lack of confidence, but because as an artist learns and grows, their taste improves, and their ability to see the mistakes in their own work and remember their own shortcomings becomes stronger. Those old pieces are still important stepping stones that helped the artist get to where they are now, even if they're... regrettable. 

Therefore, while I'd love to delete every previous blog posts, erase every terrible artwork I've ever put online, and make myself look like I popped into the earth fully-formed and perfect in every way, that's just not true, and there's no use in hiding that fact.

So hey. If you want to read my old, terrible blog posts, be my guest. I'll probably hate this one in a few months, too. And that's okay ;)

It's funny how looking back at old work can also give me a sense of pride in my young self. Despite the flaws, I can also see strong skills and solid abilities in an early state. It makes me with I could go back in time and pat myself on the back. But it also makes me feel a little uncomfortable. With the history laid out before me, it's easy to see periods where I improved quickly or really grasped and practiced a technique or principle that I may be rusty in today. Am I still improving fast enough and well enough? I don't have the advantage of hindsight for what I do today just yet. Am I where I "should be?" Have I fallen "behind?" Is my work good enough?

I think so. And I don't think so. Being an artist - nah, a human - is to be full of contradictions.

Looking back at old work and hating it, or looking at current work and doubting its value, makes me think about what I've learned about failure in the past few years. I used to be terrified of it. I was unused to failure and so badly prepared for it when it did happen that every small failure seemed unbearably painful. Then after graduating, I lost a job (no fault of my own, thankfully), failed to start and keep a business alive, became depressed and unable to succeed at the highly-scheduled life I had given myself, moved to a city that I hated living in, felt isolated from everything I had ever known and loved, and almost got to a point where I felt that life would forever and always be a huge failure and I should just get used to feeling sad and lonely forever. It was when I started to embrace that failure was a learning experience and had value that I began to take chances again, even knowing they might lead to more failure, and found myself in a better place.

In the course of a year, I moved to a great town, got a new job with wonderful people, found some new friends, had some new adventures, and now that I've settled in, I feel more confident in myself and my work than I probably ever have. I'm used to failure. I embrace failure. Every failure teaches me how to be better the next time.

In the upcoming couple of years I have a lot of plans, and I know for sure that some of them will fail, but I'm going to try anyway. I'm going to work hard for the golden nugget of success that will eventually come. I've already found a couple and am building my little dragon hoard of golden success nuggets even now. 

I have a lot more I could say about this topic, but this blog is long enough now, so I will let you go back to browsing the 'net or thinking of hiring me to do a portrait of your puppy. Go make it a good day :) 

It's after 9PM, and despite the fact that I told myself I would be in bed by that time tonight to catch up on some much-needed sleep, I find myself sitting in front of my website, wanting to poke and prod at things. There is certainly new work I could add to my gallery. There are many things I could write about in my blog. 

I've been doing a little more personal work lately, so I could show-and-tell all about that. I am the middle of implementing my side of an Art for Art Supplies experiment that I initiated amongst my personal acquaintances recently, which would be fun to talk about. I could summarize my year so far and all the art and non-art-related adventures I've had.

Or I can go to bed.

Or I can read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

But bed is probably a better idea.

Sometimes doing what's good for us is less desirable than doing what feels gratifying in the moment. But I know from the past several weekdays that staying up late to do this or that always ends up producing a very drowsy Hannah the next day. The whole day. A couple of hours of immediate gratification is not worth twelve hours of feeling like a slug.

Do I have to make this relevant by tying it in to something to do with design or illustration? Nah. You're smart. If there's a lesson to be learned in all of this, you'll see it.

​Goodnight.

Yesterday, I realized that my GIF-making skills from way back in high school had gotten a little rusty. By that I mean I completely forgot how to make them. As such, and because I was on my lunch break, I immediately hopped on Skillshare and searched for GIF-making lessons. When I got home last night I reviewed the lessons again and spent a couple of hours playing around with Photoshop to see what I could do. First was this beauty:

The lesson creators are in the campy camp (that was very gratifying to type), so psychedelic colors and tasty junk foods floating through space were the obvious first choice of project. I modified mine slightly from the project parameters  to have a little more fun with it.

There are actually two different timeline features in Photoshop, and I wanted to play with the other one (with frames, as opposed to the timeline method above), so I went off-project and used my rudimentary animation skills to throw together a little character.

These were done pretty quickly for the purpose of learning, but I can't wait to make a few polished ones, and try some different styles of GIF. I haven't even touched video-based ones yet. So many possibilities!

I also learned definitively that GIF is pronounced with a hard "G" sound, unlike the JIF peanut butter. I've heard it both ways for so long that I wasn't sure there was a correct way to say it, but considering GIF stands for "Graphics Interchange Format" and "graphics" has a hard "G" I'll stick with the hard "G." Don't ever say I didn't teach you anything.

I have been working at a design company in northern Virginia for the past year but, shame on me, I haven't touched my own site in all that time! I've finally updated the site with new branding, a new web address, and new work in my gallery. 

I also have renewed interest in keeping a blog about my adventures in the art world, among other miscellany, so this seems like a good opportunity to start! There are always new sketches and experiences to share, and I'm constantly learning new things that I'd love to pass on to others. Never stop learning, that's what I say!

As I stood in front of a row of paintings at an outdoor gallery, pointing out both defects and successes in each to a cousin that had joined me, I made the comment that, "No matter what degree art majors get, they all have an unofficial BS in art critiquing." It was a joke, of course, but I've always found it amusing that art critique seems to be less about the work the critic is talking about and more about how much the critic is able to justify choices that the artist made. I could tell you how a circle painted onto a canvas is actually a brilliant statement about the overstimulation of the modern world, and pretend to be entirely convinced of it. Artists are very good at doing this with their own art as well, defending flaws as stylistic choices, if they have to, and convincing others that their artwork is worth supporting. It's a good skill to have, since we are constantly having to give our opinions and defend our choices, and we can't all be as openly critical of things we don't like as the teacher I once had who would take a short look at something and say, "That's crap. Start over."

This skill of exaggerating and romanticizing process and product is something artists also use when writing their artist statement. For those who aren't familiar with this term, an artist's statement is a self-imposed personal rulebook, the raison detre of the artist, outlining their goals, dreams, processes, philosophy, and/or lots of fancy words. In college, I remember doing an assignment early on where my classmates and I had to write our own and critique other's artist statements. A lot of them sounded a little like the writers had gone through the dictionary and tried to write, "I just like painting trees," in a way that made them sound like a very grown-up and serious artist. I'm not trying to point fingers. Mine was no better.

So are artist statements useless things meant to pander to an artist's ego? Absolutely not! I think the naivety of many of these statements came from the fact that we were, in fact, naive about our art at that point in our lives. We didn't all know what it was that drove us to create, so how could we articulate it? Once we grew into our work, I think it became easier to understand and explain it to others. At that point, the statement became a tool to quickly convey our purpose for making art in a way that clarified our individual artistic choices. It turned from a clumsy add-on to a helpful friend in our gallery spaces.

It has been a while since I wrote a proper artist statement, so as I created this website I kept wondering what I would say, in short, if asked about my philosophies as a graphic designer. I wanted to be concise, but I also wanted to encompass as many of my artistic interests as possible, not just design, because my interests often overlap and meld. My ultimate solution is the following:

I could say much more, but I think this does a good job of succinctly explaining the basis of my work, at least at the present time; artist statements are as alive and changing as the artists who write them, after all. My goal is to show that I am more than just a designer, that I like to tell stories and communicate clearly in every type of art that I do, and that attention to the practical goals of a project is just as important to me as "making it pretty." I know enough about myself and my art not to fill this with fluff now. But if I hadn't learned how to write the fluff, I never would have appreciated the true value of a well-written statement. 

DISCUSSION:
What does my statement convey to you? Does it succeed in giving you the message I'm trying to convey? If you had to write your own personal statement (you don't have to be an artist to do this), what would it be?

EXTRA CREDIT
It's awfully flowery and long, but if you click "read more" below you can read the first statement that I wrote for the class I mentioned above.