Ode to joy

As with beauty , joy is arguably in the eye of the beholder, or so I tell myself daily when tied in knots by my chosen project title of ‘dailydrawingofjoyfulthings’ in this years 100 day creative challenge.

Maybe as with gratitude journals the daily drawing effort will give me a bonus uplift of appreciating things a bit more and seeing joy in the mundane – including today’s ( day 36) drawing of an onion !

At day 36 I am more than a third way through and some days I have more inspiration than others. When inspiration is in short supply, I do a quick sketch to call out the drawing gods and then sometimes it turns out that the hastily drawn sketch is actually better than some other efforts – which is a lesson in itself I suppose.

Having completed this twice before, I should really have tried harder to do something more simple 😉 either limiting the subject matter or medium or whatever, but my motivation for taking part was mostly to get me back into a regular drawing habit and it has achieved that aim.

It has been a useful way to try new techniques and experiment for example -painting with watercolours. I am feeling more confident with watercolour painting, and thanks to the patient guidance from my husband am making some progress on drawing containers that don’t defy logic with their wonky perspective.

My joyful theme has expanded beyond flowers to drawing vegetables and other food, and this should be a good warm up for a Botanical illustration course I have signed up for in the autumn, where I hope to learn how to draw properly.

Overall it is an enjoyable exercise to draw daily even if a bit all consuming at times, constantly thinking about what to draw next.

I used to do a December running challenge – where I ran 5k every day in December. That could prove a logistical nightmare, but I think on balance it was easier than drawing every day for 100 days.