Went for a walk round Burnham Beeches in the freezing cold to get some wintery/misty photos. Wanted to try and get something a bit dark and otherworldly. I’m moderately happy with some of the shots, they look spooky enough (in my head anyway), hopefully in a subtle manner. They all look much better full size.

Was a bit dissapointed, took loads of shots of the mist coming through the trees but when I checked them later the mist was hardly visible. Did follow a couple of Muntjac’s around for a while but then some shouty twats with a dog turned up and scared them off before I got a chance to take a photo.

All 10 shots up on flickr.

Here’s my favourites…

Think of this as my New Year Resolution if you like.

For years I’ve had this horrific mental block which I’ve allowed to kill off a large amount of my creative drive. A combination of procrastination and fear of failure have caused me to give up on most creative projects before they have a chance to launch. As I age this has started to fill me with dread, every year since I was about 25 (I’m now 32) I’ve promised myself I’ll finally record my first album and for the last 3 or 4 years I’ve been convincing myself that I’ll get enough visual material together for a book. Neither the album or the book would have to actually be released in any sense so much as just finished, in a creative sense if you will.

Every year that I’ve failed to do both of these things has put me more on edge that I’m never going to do them and I spent a lot of last year thinking about this and actively trying to sort out why I’m such a failure at personal creative projects. Paid for stuff isn’t such an issue, with deadlines and paycheques pressing I manage to get stuff done with no problems, BUT I do believe that if I could extend my personal creative output my overall output would increase in quality dramatically (although this would be a nice side effect rather than the overall intent).

There is no one simple reason for my ongoing failure to actually create. I spent a while studying books on enhancing creativity, of which there are a few and some are pretty good. My favourites are:

• A Technique for producing ideas – James Young
• How to Get Ideas – Jack Foster, Larry Corby
• It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To be – Paul Arden
• Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite – Paul Arden

I’d strongly recommend both the Paul Arden books regardless of any creative blocks as they are brilliantly witty and beautifully put together. I leaf through them both on occasion when a bit bored. The books did help a little, but not much. The first two go through the mental processes of creativity and teach excellent techniques, which for the most part I already use to great effect on work projects. But I learned some new stuff and it’s a step forward, I’m obviously not completely creatively retarded I’m just not capable of applying myself outside of a work environment. I should probably be a little clearer, by work I mean either stuff I’m being paid to do or stuff I’ve been talked into doing for someone else. I’m absolutely fine to create stuff as long as the end ‘client’ is not myself.

I spent a lot of time analysing my creative output and my general life patterns, habits and so on and I believe I’ve nailed it. I have three overall problems which kill off my personal creative drive:

Distraction and procrastination. I’m a sucker for other people’s projects. I’m better these days as people have to ask me to help out but in the past I’ve often offered myself up to every project out there without much thought to how much time I actually have. I find it very hard to relax and concentrate on something personal if I have anything outstanding for other people. An awful fear of letting people down drives me to put other’s projects above my own. As a good friend recently said ‘Just tell them to go fuck themselves’, which is harsh but effectively accurate, or to be more fair I just need to learn to manage my time. Other people’s projects are not a bad thing, but too often I end up doing the administration part which is no fun and not at all creative.

I also have this fear of not being involved in something brilliant, and often the stuff I’m involved in is brilliant – The History of Guns album is probably one of the most amazing things I’ve been involved in. The reality though is that not every project I get asked to join will be that good and the more I sign on to the less time and energy can be given to each project so I need to be a lot less reckless when saying ‘Yes’ to things.

Fear of mediocrity. This is, if I say so myself, fucking idiotic. The very fact it’s taken me this many years to see this shows I deserve a kick in the head. The fear that my creative output may be mediocre causes me to not bother creating it in the first place and so no practice, no evolution of skills and ideas and no creative process is had. EVERYONE makes something mediocre at times. If I don’t create something shitty I cannot learn where  I went wrong. Fucking idiot.

Blank canvas. Not in the direct sense, but in a more general form. I have interest in too many areas: illustration, photography, music, video, animation, programming and other things. When I do allow myself some creative time I often can’t even get over the hurdle of what sort of creative thing to be doing, I can switch back and forth all day trying to decide whether to photograph things, write music, draw stuff or something else so in the end nothing gets done. This is the one problem I still don’t have a strict solution for but I’m working on it. One solution is pre-planning, I will plan a day to go and take photographs or a day to spend editing music and from there stick to the plan as well as I can. I’m getting better.

One very effective mechanism I’ve found is keeping a regular sketchbook. In those times when I’d usually surf for something horrific on the internet or watch TV I’ve been drawing random crap in sketchbooks, nothing specific, just whatever comes to mind. It started with the intent of improving my drawing skills, which it has a little, but the side effect is that over time I’ve found it easier to come up with new ideas for things to draw, plus I now have several books full of assorted sketches and concepts that can be used elsewhere.

Enough drivel. My intent now is to always be working on at least one personal creative endeavor, regardless of whether they come to fruition I’m going to force myself to find time for them and ensure they are given a decent priority over other things. I’m currently working on two very different projects, one is a simple illustration project I can work on anytime I have space for a sketchbook and pen, the other is a ridiculously overblown multimedia project which involves modeling, casting, photography, locations, appropriate weather conditions, editing, music and possibly video.

Why I am telling the internet this? Catharsis and hopefully it will convince me  to carry out my threats.

Two more things. Happpy New Year, and how cool is this?

Myself and Scott went on our annual Winter trip to Imber Village today. We were hoping the church would be open as neither of us have ever been inside, it wasn’t we were out by about 4 days, it’s open for a couple of days in January (can’t remember exact dates). Took a few photos but not many as hands were very cold and we’ve both photographed it to death now. Some of these are more ‘near Imber’ than actually ‘in Imber’.

Whole set on Flickr.

Still alive! Knocked up an incredibly twee Xmas card* while waiting for Virus Checks and Backups to run – for some reason I’m utterly incapable of doing anything directly constructive while such things are happening, this is something I must get over.

Anyway, in case I don’t get another chance/burst of motivation to post before Thursday, have a wonderful Christmas, I for one am aiming for taking photos of winter and getting some peace and quiet.

xx

Happy Xmas

* it’s rough unplanned sketch, please don’t bother critiquing, you will make the baby jesus cry.

I may live to regret this. Damo created me a twitter account an age ago which I used for approx 2 minutes before smashing his monitor in an defenestrating him (ok it was the ground floor and the window was open so no hard done). I hated it with a massive intensity on first use, it appeared to consist entirely of back patting vacuous twats. Anyway, I never logged back in, but over the last year I have received multiple updates informing me I have plently of followers (which is odd for an account that’s never been used, I suspect spammers/nutters). I forget what my original account was, so I created a new one:

http://twitter.com/anxious_silence

I may decide I hate it again very quickly, but am willing to give it more of a chance, some people of substance appear to be using it. This doesn’t mean they are posting anything of substance but I need to communicate with the outside world more. I may be forced to change my ‘microblogs are for twats’ stance.

No new design right now. Up to my pits in PHP5 Objects and Frameworks. I long for pixels and vectors.

Took today off, mainly to take Karen to an exam, but also because I damn deserve it damn you. Had three hours to kill while examinations took place so went into Reading and experimented with the concept of NOT BUYING STUFF because I have a fucking mortgage now. Lovingly stroked some nice design books an CDs then spent a couple of hours taking photos. I like the idea of restricted creativity, usually I’d visit somewhere I actively want to go where I expect to find some decent shots. I forced myself to try and find something interesting to shoot in Reading town centre (been there? dull as fuck). Quite happy with the result.

Full set is here.

Sick of coding tonight. I’ve been on a massive coding binge the last couple of weeks, amongst other things researching and writing a Best Practice Manual for Shinytastic, drastically improving my OO skills and coding patterns and other such stuff. Part of me wishes I could just drop coding and stick to design work but right now the coding pays the bills.

Working on a possible logo for a possible project I may possibly be involved in as a bit of light relief, here’s two of tonights sketches.

Work in progress.

Got some more History of Guns artwork to sink my teeth into soon, started it a month or so back but need to find the time to get working on it again, this whole house-moving/new business nonsense doesn’t half eat your life.

See you in the trees.

A quick holding page that appeared to transform into something a little more flamboyant than expected. For Moonshine PR

Moonshine PR Holding Page

Hopefully Emily doesn’t beat me to death when she sees what I’ve done to her website. I very nearly animated it in flash but fortunately (for you and her) time is short tonight.

I have just launched the Shinytastic website v1.0 – http://www.shinytastic.com

Again I am not 100% happy with it, but I suspect it’s a case of being too close to be able to look at it properly. I’m going to be spending more time on it later in the week (hopefully). This month sees me hit ten years of doing this stuff for cash and this the first time I’ve had a website advertising my services. This is possibly the hardest site I’ve done in years. I think the homepage needs a good rehack and the template is possibly over-simple. I’m willing to take the risk on it. I’m not lacking work right now and (outside of this blog) I’m not going to be overly promoting it for a while so I’ve got a chance to hack it about and improve on it in the interim. To be honest I look around at a lot of my peers and they all seem to be as damn useless at their own websites as I am, regardless of the quality of the work they do for their clients. Am I just making excuses now? Possibly, but it’s two in the morning. Goodnight.

Shinytastic Screenshot

I have finally found the time to do a template for my own WP blog, and in the process have an even greater love of Wordpress, I was quite fond already.

Been fighting to find time to learn to do WP templates for months, since before I started this site. I have done one template before (Cuban Sow), but in the interim had completely forgotten everything through cramming plenty of other crap in my head (Actionscript 3, Joomla, and all the other crap I spend my life forcing into by brain via the medium of my eyes). Anyway, such is the goddamn simplicity of WP that I pretty much managed to re-learn + learn more and knock the whole thing together in an evening. Which is nice.

I know it’s far from perfect, let’s call it a ‘Work In Progress’ but I’d rather stick it up in it’s current state and fiddle with it over time than hold off until I think it’s 100% perfect and hence never launch the damn thing.

I say it took an evening to do, I had to install LAMP on my graphics PC so I could play with the design offline, the LAMP install took about 30 minutes, then getting mysql and php to talk to each other took another half a day, which was entirely my fault for trying to be lazy and use the installers. Eventually just uninstalled everything and redid php and apache manually (always the better method).

The graphics have been kicking around for ages to the extent that I’m a bit sick of it all already, but will live with it for now. The face was inspired by Tara McPherson (who is awesome). I suspect the boundary between inspired/infringing may be a little close, but I did draw it myself. The horribly over-the-top horizontal rule flourishes came from a pack (I’ll dig the link out later), everything else was drawn by my own hand. The colour scheme was an accident, I like it, I care not if others do not. The mass of grunge textures were either from my photos or Machine Wash and inspired by Tim keep banging on at me about using more grunge textures in my design.

Anxious Silence Wordpress Theme

Next up is getting a grip on Joomla extensions, how exciting.