2018 Year in Review Part 2: Art Last week I wrote about my travel experiences in 2018. Check it out. I love to do daily challenges. If I haven’t committed to something very specific, it’s too easy to realize that 5 days have gone by without doing any drawing. In 2017 I did a huge one my #365accordionproject – where I drew one continuous drawing in Moleskine accordion fold sketchbooks – resulting in one drawing that spans about 50 feet! In 2018 I did a couple of smaller challenges. Starting in April I participated in the worldwide #the100dayproject and learned to do repeat pattern designs and basically made one a day for 100 days. Some days I did more than one variation of a simple one and some very complex patterns took more than one day to complete – but I ended up with at least 100 patterns. Some successful, some not, but it reawakened a love for surface design that had been lying dormant since grad school. I learned how to do repeat patterns in the early 90s, but we did them on paper with scissors and tape. It’s much more fun to create them in Illustrator! I used some of these patterns in client design work and put a bunch of them on Spoonflower and products that are available on my website. Posting them on Instagram every day as I was designing them got me some good attention and resulted in this beautiful article in Paducah Life Magazine. In October I participated in the #inktober challenge of doing an ink drawing every day of the month. I...
2018 Year in Review Part 1: Travel I think I did more traveling and more drawing/designing in 2018 than ever before. I also had a few bizarre health issues. I had planned for this post to include sections for all of those, but since it’s gotten so long, I’ve decided to break it into several posts. First up, travel! Here are the the travel highlights broken down by month. I’m very fortunate to be able to travel more than my income should really allow, thanks to having friends and family who live in places I love to visit! January/February I turned 50 on December 10th of 2017 – and as a gift to myself, I planned a trip to Mexico for the first part of 2018. Thanks to some lovely friends, I had a beautiful house in Mazatlan all to myself for two months! I left for Mazatlan on December 30th with the intention of staying for 5 weeks. I planned to spend my time drawing, writing, reading, planning, swimming, eating, drinking and resting. I managed to a little bit of all of those things, but not nearly as much drawing, writing, reading and planning as I had hoped. But I did plenty of resting, swimming and eating! And a ton of walking. It was the longest vacation I’ve had since high school and it was amazing. I ended up deciding to extend my stay an extra three weeks, but spent the last few weeks easing myself back into work. While in Mazatlan, I got to see some old friends and made some great new ones (shown below). Some...
