First Came Stress, Then Came Corona
What a March we have had, y’all. The last diary entry I shared with y’all spoke on how stressed I had become with all of the responsibilities I had taken on for other folks in my life. I talked about cutting back on some of those responsibilities and intentionally making time for my own creative outlets. Mid-march brought about an impromptu pause on all of my outside of the house duties.
While it’s scary to be immunocompromised-therefore on high risk alert during this pandemic… I am fully loving and taking advantage of this time at home. In the past two weeks, I’ve gotten more of my own art tasks done than I did in January and February combined. I’ve drawn every day. I actually am taking part in about three different drawing challenges at the moment – with each of them flexing a different art muscle. One is pushing me to draw every day, the next is making me face my fear of drawing people, and the last – which I will start next week – will build my skills with watercolor and character development.
Spending such a dedicated amount of time practicing drawing has been a blessing. I’m finally seeing growth and a newfound comfortability when I sit down to draw. As long as I keep practicing, I only see myself getting to a place where I feel confident when I sit down to draw something. I’m in the stage of my life when I’m really looking to have a balance between life responsibilities and my artistic goals. Actually, I’ve been in this stage for a while now. I’m just wondering how long it’ll take for me to get to that balance. With all the ideas I have it feels like the hardest part is over and I try to remember that when things take longer than I anticipated. Look at me - starting this post confident and then riding the roller coaster of self-deprecation… I hate roller coasters.
Let’s hop back on the dizzying teacups of triumph. Apart from drawing every day I have also gotten back into the grind of making sketchbooks, researching artist calls to apply for and I’ve been listening to audiobooks again! I grew up loooving listening to audiobooks. I used to run around with my little cassette player back and forth to the library to check out different books on tape. I would wear those tapes OUT. And my cassette player was an old one, so I was constantly having to manually wind back in the audio tape because sometimes my player would be finicky and have it all piling up together. Then as technology moved forward and I got upgraded to a CD boom box. I was hot stuff. No more winding back in the tape. I just had to be super careful not to scuff the disks. And for the past decade I can just go onto my library’s online system and check out an audiobook to download and play right from my phone.
Wow. What a trip down memory lane. But I said all that to say I’ve dived back into them again, after spending a good three years listening to almost exclusively podcasts. I looove podcasts too. It’s just been awesome listening to stories again. I’m about 14 books into this year. My goal for the year had been 24, but I think I’ll be surpassing that. I’ll bump up the number goal by the time I reach 20 books. Most of what I’ve read so far have been graphic novels and I’m really digging seeing the style of other artists. This month I may start back at posting fun panels from the graphic novels I’m reading on Instagram, and begin writing in depth synopsis on the full text books I read to share on my Patreon. In the last entry I also discussed taking a step back from my hyper focus on social media; and I wanted to update y’all on my process. It may not look like it, seeing as I’ve been posting on my feed every day for the past few weeks. Prioritizing drawing and creating everyday has brought about content to share without me having to make sharing content my top priority.
Overall, this quarantine (not the virus) has been and unexpected blessing for me. Diving into my own art has made it easier to not live in fear of my new lungs having to fight for their lives. Speaking of, this month on the 15th will be my 1st birthday with new lungs. It’s a bummer I can’t celebrate with some friends like I wanted to but… I’m just happy to say I’ve made it this far. How has quarantine been treating y’all?
You can find even some of my illustrations on my Instagram: @KadaziaSparkles
And you can find even more of my drawing practice, challenges I'm taking part in, and more by pledging as little as $1/month on my Patreon: www.patreon.com/KadaziaSparkles
Thanks for reading Lovelies,
Kadazia Allen-Perry