A Visual a Day: July Reflections
A confession, and visual dump for July
Truth time: I’ve been really stuck on last month's update. We're nearly halfway through August, and I was still struggling to write July's update to the degree I wanted. It's been great news—lots of progress is being made in my visual thinking journey—but whenever I sat down to write about it, the words just didn't come.
I try to maintain authenticity in everything I share, online or offline, which made my lack of words even more frustrating. Then I came across a brilliant blog post by James Clear (author of Atomic Habits). The take-home message for me was that I needed to reduce the scope of my post so I could just get it out there.
“For example, my expectation is to write a useful article every Monday and Thursday. But it’s more important that I stick to the schedule and maintain my habit for the long-term than it is for every post to be incredible.” —James Clear
So that’s what I’m doing. I’m focusing on keeping my commitment to share my progress and my work over my expectations of quality.
“When you can’t do it all, do something small.” —James Clear
With that in mind, here’s my “something small” for July.
Visual Stats
Visual spotlight
Here are a few of the visuals I particularly had fun with this month.
Used my had as a model for this one and felt a bit like Van Gogh! I really like the contrast between the brown of the hand and the purple background.
I went back and forth over the complexity of the image, having 3 rows makes it look busy, but two just didn’t pass the same message across. I decided in the end that I liked making a complex-looking image using just two drawings.
This was where I started really leaning into Infinite Painter (Procreate-like app for Android) and leveraging some of it's features. e.g. layers and duplication.
This was a great one as I had to learn how to draw all the elements in this visual from reference images. I also started experimenting a little bit with shading.
Learning to draw the icons for this one was a lot of fun and I think they turned out cute! Did some experimenting with shadows and highlights here as well.
Other Stuff
A behind the scenes look at how I sketch out visuals in Infinite Painter with a tablet and stylus. It was fun playing with different shapes to represent various body types for this visual. Brilliant quote too!
Daily Log
I’ve continued exercising my sketchnoting muscles by keeping a log of random things that I did during my day. It’s been great learning how to draw everyday objects and ideas.
Interesting Quotes
“Demons hate fresh air.” —Austin Kleon
“Failure is not fatal.” —unknown
Interesting Reads
Interesting Resources
The Noun Project. Just as the name implies, a fantastic resource for helping me reference and draw any noun I’ve been able to think of. It hasn’t let me down yet!
Until next time.
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😯 all these sketches & writeups in ur head for July?! Na wa o!! 🙈I see why we get the morning migraine, but e worth am!🕺🏾💃🏾 Welldone Pook!! #Augustwemueve😜💪🏾
I’ve had that feeling too! Sometimes it takes me hours to write a couple sentences! Glad that we’re not alone and I’m so glad you kept going😊