"By showing up every single day, or the vast majority of days, you build muscles, you live your life purposes, and you get a lot of work accomplished."
Eric Maisel, The Power of Daily Practice (47)
Practice Every Day
Starting a regular daily practice isn't too difficult. My struggle is to keep going when the novelty of the start has worn off. I use Instagram posts to record my daily practice because I like scrolling back through my posts and seeing the small incremental improvements with each post. What keeps me going is knowing that I made some progress today and eventually, I will see big improvements.
I can miss a day, but instead I need to get right back to the practice to the next day. I don't want to dwell on how I missed the day too much. The important thing is to get back to the practice.
For today, I worked with a vertical rectangle format, a more traditional portrait format. It was more difficult to create a sense of deep space. The figures are central and I struggled with finding ways to integrate them into the background smoothly.
As part of #20For20ArtChallenge2022, I am reading from The Power of Daily Practice: How Creative and Performing Artists (and Everyone Else) Can Finally Meet Their Goals by Eric Maisel, PhD. Part I of the book covers 20 Elements of Practice. In this blog post series 20For20, I write about one Element every day and reflect on how to incorporate the Element into my daily painting practice.