If you're following these posts on the regular - or if you know me in life - you'll know I've been feeling some kind of blue here lately. It can be hard to deal with not making the inroads in your endeavors that you work really hard for. It can be easy to let failures and frustrations weigh you down to the point of slowing any momentum to a creep that eventually, if allowed, will result in a dead stop. After some recent opportunities didn't present themselves the way I had really hyped myself into hoping for, I got caught up in a doubt-spiral. I think I've managed to mostly pull myself out of the whirling vortex of suck at this point, although I can still feel it's pull. I shook off as much of the disappointment as I could and have attempted to move forward by making myself work. That's really the only way to do it. And with October on the way, there will be an opportunity to throw myself into the art challenges that have become really popular across all of the sharing platforms. Among some of the biggest are Inktober, started by jake Parker in 2009, which presents daily themes that get shared all over the place, especially on Instagram, and Month of Fear, which has been going since 2013 and features artists working on themed subjects all month. There is also Drawlloween, which I just discovered this year, and seems less cohesive than the other two - I've seen multiple versions of the theme calendar for that one. I probably will pick and choose themes from that list if I participate (using the version posted by pop-surrealist artist Mab Graves on Instagram, if you are on there and want to check it out.) Of course, October is a very busy month for me, with social plans, a wedding, a niece's birthday, and a week-long mini-vacation packed in there on top of *everything else* (day job and everyday life!), so I probably won't be as productive as I think I'll be. But I'll definitely give it my best effort. Next up: how to choose supplies and what happens when you make a spectacular mistake.
