After a week that included three sunrise photo shoots, two hikes, a fashion event, several meetings, and a casual but sweet birthday celebration for my husband, it was nice to take this rainy Monday off to work on cleaning our apartment and catching up on emails. My current top stressor is the death of one of my external hard drives – while I’m fairly certain it was the least critical hard drive to fail, as it contained mostly backups, any data loss is a real punch in the gut for me, and I’m hoping at least some of it can be salvaged. It’s not good that it takes a mini-crisis to make me reflect on my data storage process. I keep all my final images in online storage, but not the RAWs. Hopefully there’s a Drobo in my future soon!
Besides that, one of the main things on my mind has been art. Yes, photography is an art, and I consider some of what I do to be fine art photography. However, my background was in drawing and painting, and I spent my college years studying those arts in equal, if not greater, amounts to photography.
Once upon a time, I wanted to be an illustrator.
This was my art supply collection during the Spring 2007 semester at UH Manoa. Oil painting was my passion, and many of my brushes and paints had been brought home from Italy. I also had developed the habit of buying new art supplies whenever I was feeling down, which, admittedly, had been a lot back then. Art supplies had always represented possibility for me, even if my ideas for using them never came to fruition. I loved to experiment with new mediums, and I always found myself browsing the internet for inspiration from a variety of artists. Growing up during Japanese anime’s popularity boom in the United States from 1999 on, I had initially gotten into the visual arts after spending a summer drawing Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z fan art. This led me to getting my first little graphics tablet during high school, where I would teach myself digital drawing and painting at home while learning traditional methods in school. I would draw comics, design characters, and paint portraits.
Compare the 2007 art supply collection to my 2007 photography supply collection – one DSLR, two 35mm SLRs, two lenses, and loads of film photography supplies. Yes, drawing and painting was still my first love then, but that faded over the years until it found equal footing with photography, and then, after graduation, faded away as I pursued my career as a professional photographer.
Since graduating with my BA in Studio Art (didn’t feel I needed a BFA to get where I wanted to go) in December 2008, I have only finished a grand total of about eighteen drawings or paintings, mostly digital. (I know this from counting uploads in one of my Facebook albums) Compared to how I used to fill up binders and sketchbooks constantly, this lack of drawing and painting has been bothering me this entire year so far. I want so much to start drawing and painting again, whether digitally or traditionally, but trying to find the time and creative energy between the endless photo shoots and editing marathons has proven very difficult. I finally had enough of the nagging feeling in the back of my brain a couple of weeks ago, and bought myself a couple of brand new sketchbooks. One of my biggest hangups with sketching is that I would always be worried about drawing something that wouldn’t look good in the sketchbook later, which of course led to me not drawing anything at all. No excuses this time – I intend to fill both sketchbooks in the next couple of months.
Hopefully I can write again about the subject with a positive update!
Till then, if any of you are curious, here is a link to what would be my online drawing & painting portfolio, if I had one, which includes work spanning from 2006-2010.
Now, I’m going to go sketch for the rest of the night!
