The empty thing becomes.

Things have started picking up.

The pages of the children's book I'm working on are starting to come together, giving me that feeling of excitement that tells me I like what I'm doing. I love that feeling of challenge. It's like wandering around in the dark, fear and uncertainty seeping into my pores. You can't tell where you are, and there's the sinking suspicion that the next step might send you plummeting into the abyss. Suddenly, you hit a familiar landmark with the tips of your blind mans fingers. Just that fast, you get a mental picture of where you are. And you know the next step you need to take, and the step after that, until you can turn a corner and see light again. That's what it feels like whenever I start a new and daunting project. Only (as I read back over that) not anywhere near that bad, as I acknowledge that starting challenging projects is one of my favorite things to do. I live for that $3!#.

I've had this feeling before in my writing, and in sculpting, and in painting. Challenge. Can I do this? Will this be what I imagine it to be, or some pale lacking imitation? I've had my share of trips into the abyss. But what makes it worth it is the high of looking at something while you're in the middle of doing, and realizing you're enjoying yourself, and the thing is becoming what part of you imagined it might be. That's the core of the creative process. The blank, empty thing becoming something.

To be honest, most of my projects are made up of procrastination. Usually it's hours of staring at a blank something (or, more often, minutes with the blank something, before making a peanut butter sandwich or turning on LOST). There's yard work, and two kids that aren't getting any younger and need more than an "uncle Dad". There's my 9 to 5, which really is my 8 to 7, if I'm lucky. And there's freelance that pays the bills, and a website that ain't gonna update itself, thank you very much. There's charity art that I donate, and other commitments. And after that, there's the pile of stuff that I want to do, want so desperately to do, when I have five minutes to rub together...and LOST is in reruns.

To make up for not doing, I've developed my creative process into an early stage of just wanting. A lot of the early work then is about imagining doing it, being mad about not doing it, planning how long it will take to do it and what chunks of time I can dedicate to doing it. All before I actually do anything. Like painful foreplay. But when I finally knuckle down to the computer, or the drawing board, or the table, it feels damn good. The problem is getting the knuckle down to do it.

That's one of the reasons like working in a design studio for a living. I get the thrill of making something, and being creative on demand, and a schedule that I have to do it in. The best days are those where I want to work on something so much that the hours fly by, and I can't wait to get in the next day after a late evening. When I worked at Marvel, that kid of creativity was a daily event, on any one of eight-to-ten monthly and bi-monthly titles. I remember being on vacation and champing at the bit to get back to it. That kid of creative freedom is rare, but one of the main reasons I love Art Direction and Designing. But, knowing that it's bad form to blog about your job where your employers might read it, this isn't something I'm going to go into detail about here.

What I will say is that I'm getting in the groove after hours, and the children's book pages are starting to feel real to me. The process I'm going through is to work out a quick sketch and then refine that in PhotoShop. I go back and forth through drawing and erasing, scanning and coloring, printing and painting, rescanning and reprinting and repainting...sounds like chaos, but it's actually pretty exciting. And it's becoming something. And that feels pretty good!