Achieving Focus

My awesome son has started school here in our new hometown and is doing great.  This has allowed me to better organize my days.  While he's at school, I do my day job as a freelance writer.  I actually have a long term writing gig with a great company.  Technically, I'm still a freelancer, but it's a full time job in itself.  I also changed my Elance subscription so that, for awhile, I'll be applying only to art jobs there.  I think this will be a good way to get more experience as a working artist, and to add experience to my CV and résumé.

Anyway, so it's writing day job while my son's at school, some job hunting, both for freelance art jobs and a day job as a 3D modeler while he's home and playing around the house, a walk and/or trip to the park with my son, and dinner, and putting him to bed, then art practice after he goes to sleep, then going to bed myself.

Drawing really is a fundamental skill for many types of art.  Obviously, illustrators have to be able to draw.  Painters also need this skill for the basis of their work.  As a 3D modeler and digital sculptor, the better I can draw, the better I understand the forms of things.  Also, being able to draw clean strokes helps tremendously when sculpting in a program like Zbrush.  On top of all that, I've started seeing modeler jobs that require good illustration skills.

I posted a bunch of eyeballs that I sketched weeks ago.  I'll post drawings now and then as little snippets of my improvement.

Onto another topic, you know how people keep to do lists?  I do that often to keep track of all the things I need to get done.  But I also get ideas for art projects, or blog entries.  It seems silly to write these down in separate places.  I mean, how many notebooks does one guy need to carry?  Plus, I might want to sketch some doodles.  I do have a sketch book for when I want to sit down and really practice drawing, but I don't need to lug that around with me, either.  Writing, you know, can be like an extension of the mind, a way to make sure tasks and ideas aren't forgotten.  Is there a name for a notebook where one writes down all of those things?  I'm thinking, "Brain Dump Book."