An unexpected side effect of ending the 2020 Vision series of posts at the end of 2020 — strange how that worked out — is that I’ve found myself missing the discipline of making new images every work day.
This feels particularly ironic, considering how much of a grind that felt at the time, especially as the year went on and the pandemic exhaustion grew. There were days, during the year, when the very idea of spending any time whatsoever on creating the graphic felt like too much, and it was only my stupidly compulsive need to not miss a post at all costs or else that kept me from giving the whole thing up. (Huzzah for completist tendencies brought on by years of being a comic book nerd, I guess.)
And yet, now that it’s over, I find myself at a loss in some indescribable way that the muscles that got trained — the ones that, on some level, I knew I was training, the ones that I haven’t really used since art school decades earlier to very quickly, almost unthinkingly, respond to a brief and decide this is the right way to illustrate this idea in my head simply — are atrophying again, or at least, not getting used on the same regular basis in the same way.
(There is, for now, the THR newsletter graphics, but even that isn’t the same thing; they’re for very different purposes and talk to different parts of my brain. It’s hard to express, hard to explain, how that works, but just accept it and go with me on here.)
I’m not entirely sure what to do about this particular absence in my life, I’ll be honest; I don’t want to decide to do daily images again, because the grind was too much, and it stopped being fun remarkably early on. But… I feel like I have to do something to fill this gap, whatever it ends up being. Maybe I’ll just draw and keep the results for myself.