In praise of days off
It’s been just over a year since I quit my full-time job and became self-employed. One of the big adjustments always mentioned in freelance/entrepreneurship circles is that you work crazy hours and the work day never ends. Now I’ve been keeping a pretty good life-work balance, making time for the gym and hikes and stuff, but one thing I’ve found is that the distinction between a work day and a the weekend is mostly gone. And it’s been such a busy spring, that it’s been a long time since I had a full day off. Add that to ‘long-time-since-I-had-a-real-holiday’, and you have one grumpy girl. I was starting to have violent fantasies. And since I care about pretty much everyone I see on a regular basis, this is not a good thing.
Enter the day off.
Yesterday I declared I would do whatever the hell I felt like doing, and it was GREAT. I went for a hike with the dogs (who don’t talk much, so I could actually hear myself think). I read some old sketchbook/journal entries, read a bit of The Artist’s Way, I sketched, I napped, listened to music, puttered in the garden… I didn’t turn on the computer ALL DAY.
I should do this more often.
I was sketching some faces from the book Facial Expressions: A Visual Reference for Artists. Here are the sketches, in order. You can see in the first one I was really tense and out of practise.
(On another note, this post has me a bit disappointed with the integrated gallery feature in WP2.5. I downloaded a cleaner gallery plugin which is a start, but still. There doesn’t seem to be a way to do the things I wanted to do even creating this little gallery, like updating one of the shots or re-ordering them. Bummer…)
Posted: May 4th, 2008 under Art, Life.
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