The end of week 4 to 5 was when I was starting to feel really unmotivated. I’ve never consistently worked on art for this long, so the combination of working on only art and the current situation of the world started to mix into a zombie-like state for me. I’ve felt similar things like this before on days like All-Day Art and Minimester (I painted for 16-ish hours in two days). On those days I had to take many walks, stretch and take breaks to keep my progress going.

Throughout the regular school year in studio art class, James always has us do a warm-up project at the beginning of each trimester so we don’t jump straight into our main pieces. The first couple of weeks working on a small warm-up project definitely sets up more successful work for the rest of the trimester, so I thought I should do something similar to help the momentum of my senior project in these last few weeks.

I met with James to talk about how to keep my project moving in the right direction. He told me to spend a couple days not working on the comics and just do something new, and creative. For one drawing, I used the maquettes but for some reason, I used a medium (color pencils) that I hated. It felt strange to use them again but it was good to just not have to think about perfecting my work because I wasn’t drawing a scene for a comic. I also did some embroidery, a completely new skill which was a lot of fun to learn. And a paint-by-numbers so I can still be creative without having to think.