Contemplative

I'm kinda burnt out this weekend. All week I've been working on a photograph of a friends' wedding plus doing a bit of paying work. I got it all done but it took a while. The photo was especially tough for some reason. Between the two things I ended up working ten to twelve hour days all week. It's not like I haven't done that before but somehow it's tougher with fewer projects to work on.

I've worked that many hours countless times before but usually I'm switching between three or maybe more projects. I can burn out on one and move to the next. That is unless it's paying work that has to be done. Somehow it's less taxing working a few projects rather than on one or two things that have to be done no matter what. My brain gets in more of a rut. I don't like brain ruts.

I think I've got that big photo done. I'll have to look at it again next week because I'm too burnt out on it right now to see it clearly. That happens when I work on something intensely for a long time. I cease to see it as it is. Especially at the end of working on something. I'll put a piece away for a week and then look at it again to see if it needs any finishing touches. Sometimes it does and sometimes not.

What to work on next is always the question I have. Shopping for a new car sure has cut into my personal art time and that task has yet to be finished but I still want to get things done. I've been working on my web comic strip and will continue to the best that I can but I also have to work on getting the site it's going to appear on up. That's no where near as interesting as working on the strip itself. But it has to be done.

I have more photos I want to work on. I recently made a masked street photo and want to do some more of them plus I have another large photo collage, like the one I just made of my friends' wedding, to finish up but I'm a little burnt out on photography right now.

I recently started a cover recreation but didn't finish it. For some reason I wanted to recreate an old golden age cover by Alex Schomburg. I was doing a pretty good job of it. I remade all of the logos and trade dress on the computer and traced/re-penciled the cover art. I printed the rebuilt cover out in blue line to ink it but got bored with the whole shebang about halfway through inking it. It's still sitting there undone. Maybe I'll finish it and maybe I won't. I don't know yet.

I also have handful of "Covers to comics that have never existed" that I have yet to finish. Those are the pieces I do that look like old comic book covers. They are all originals and not recreations of anything but I haven't mustered up the interest to actually finish one of them all summer. Weird.

Another thing I want to start is a t-shirt store. One of those online ones where I would post designs and the web site would make the shirts if anyone actually orders one. I started one of these stores years ago but barely did anything with it. The money to be made on such a site is miniscule and wasn't worth the time spent but for some reason I want to give it a go again. I'll have to crunch the numbers and prove to myself all over again that it's a waste of time. We'll see. It could be fun to make t-shirt designs.

I have to do some drawings for a group of paintings I've been meaning to start. I stretched many canvases early in the year and never quite started what I wanted to paint on them. I painted and finished other things but somehow never these particular ones. I'll have to see if I can get them going.

I could also start some more of my new dark charcoal drawings. They only take a few hours to do and maybe would fit better into my shopping for a car time frame but I still don't have a real handle on them yet. They are a work in progress as far as a genre of work for me.

So that's it. Once again I am wrestling with the eternal question of what to do next. Isn't everyone?