This summer I am going to finish one project per week. This is a way to gift myself dedicated time for wide-ranging, hands-on, fast exploration that leaves judgement at the door.

Judgement free creativity

When I was in the third grade, a friend in my art class taught me how to draw tornados. Being a 8yo kid this, of course, thrilled me. You slightly angle your pencil and begin to rapidly draw ellipses, whipping your hand around until you've created the tip of the funnel from which nothing can escape.

Unfortunately, our art teacher did not find these tornados as thrilling as we did. The class was supposed to be drawing self portraits, so her way to bring us back on task was to scoop up our pages of tornado filled landscapes and tear them in front of us.

In hindsight I know that this was just frustration at some (very) annoying kids, but for a while afterwards I really didn't feel confident in my ability to draw.

I'm incredibly fortunate to have been raised in a household that wouldn't let a scarring moment like that tarnish the joy to be found in creativity, but this event very well could have closed me off to one of the core pillars of my identity and the skillset I use to make a living.

I always have had judgement and self-doubt in my creatively. Even when I'm making something solely for fun, there is a small voice in the back of my head that tells me it doesn't look right, people shouldn't see this, maybe I should move on to something else. Oftentimes, that judgement that keeps me working on a project, trying to perfect it when BAM, my interests shift and the idea of wasting my leisure time on that project seems insane.

So here we go, this is a summer to silence that judgement.

Rules of play

Releasing 1 project per week

• No more than 7 hours can be spent on a project
• I'll post about the new project on Instagram & this blog
• There are no limitations to what the project can be, it just has to be something new
  • "new" can be working in the realm of an existing project as long as what is being built is sufficiently novel
• I may go back and edit these rules but the underlying goals here will remain the same: keep things raw, learn a bunch, and move on.

Let the summer commence!

Unbeknownst to me when I was developing the blog site where I am hosting this (and writing this first blog post), I had already started my first scrappy project. So here you go, we begin today*!

*technically tomorrow since it's now 11pm and going to bed sounds more appealing than doing a "release".

P.S.

I'll be using this blog to share updates about the projects/experiments from this scrappy summer exercise but I may also post my notes about the things that I'm interested in.