Digital Doodle, Sunday June 25th

If you've ever read Gary Chapman's book, The Five Love Languages, you've probably figured out in what way you express and receive love. This was a book my husband, Scott, and I read through and took to heart in the months before we were married, and since then, it's been interesting to evaluate how this theory of emotional expression plays out in my everyday life.

As an artist and author, I spend way too much time in self-analysis, but hopefully my observations
will be useful to some of you as well. My primary love language is time. It doesn't matter if we do anything productive or exciting. I just want to know that you value spending time in my presence. Ironically, because of my socially anxious nature, it takes a long time before I feel safe enough with any person to connect with them face-to-face. So that "quantity time" that deepens my relationships is hard to come by. Clearly, it's complicated.

As an artist, I have discovered that if I don't have time in my productivity cycle to develop my skills, I begin to resent the stuff that is crowding that time out. Time to experiment and get better at what I do is like the "quality time" of being an artist. If you are coming between me and my skills and not allowing us time to improve together, you will quickly become a serious problem for me.

In a proactive effort to preserve my sanity, I have decided I need to carve out between 30 minutes to an hour each day working on something that hones a skill I want to build. My current artistic goal is to work to develop a digital style that plays more to my strength with pencil. Before I really dig into my Divine Summons graphic novel, I want to make sure I have landed on a digital style that I truly love to work in, and the hard ink line work I've been doing so far is not it.

So tonight, I've sketched a first effort at exploring the tools in Clip Studio Pro (my comic software) to see what I might be able to use in the pursuit of a more pencil-y style. I'm also using the drawing to hopefully motivate me to tackle the coming week with fire, not weeping and gnashing of teeth.

I'm feeling good about this revelation that love languages don't only apply to interpersonal passions, but to pursuits as well. I pray that I will be successful in pursuing my goal of more "quantity time" with my personal art style.

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