Thursday, December 22, 2016

My 2017 Resolution

Over the last two years I have been adjusting to a life where making art does not comprise the majority of my time. It certainly has been a weird adjustment and I am still figuring out how to budget my time so that I can regularly create my own artwork. 

In the hopes that I will let this inspire me to create more artwork, I have decided to create a New Year's Resolution specifically for my artwork. This is going to be loosely based on a set of goals that I created back in March.

New Year's Resolution (Art Edition)
As my art is still an important part of my life, I resolve to devote a portion of 2017 to the creation of my own artwork. I resolve to create, blog, and exhibit throughout the year in the hopes that I might inspire both myself and others with the work that I produce. These are my goals:
  • During normal work weeks, I will schedule time each week to work on some artwork (sketching, painting, etc.). This does not necessarily mean that I must complete a drawing or painting every week, but I resolve to work on some sort of artwork on a weekly basis. 
  • During vacations, I will devote a portion of my time to catching up and starting new projects. These projects are to be worked on in the hopes of exhibiting my work locally. 
  • Throughout the year, I will develop a plan for improving my figure drawing skills, including regular sketching, with the possibility of devoting a sketchbook to figure studies.
  • I will establish a connection with other artists in the area, including establishing a connection with the Multicultural Arts Center.
These goals may be simple, but it is their simplicity that I hope will inspire me to actually complete them. Writing these goals in such a public forum is somewhat terrifying , but I wanted to post them here in the hopes that it will help hold me accountable for my work. My work may not always turn out the way I want it to, and that's okay. The way to create better artwork is to continuously produce artwork. I will remember that even 15 minutes a day is enough to get started. 
December 21st, 2016

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Artwork with a purpose



As soon as I posted my conclusion to 2016 post, I realized that I wanted to post one more project that I completed this year. This was perhaps the largest project that I have completed and one that I am immensely proud of.


The whole process was amazing. I went to discuss Creekside's website design but ended up leaving with a new job. Over the course of one week, every hour I could spare was spent painting our mission/vision statement on our sanctuary wall. It was somewhat scary for a number of reasons...
I'm not great with heights and this job required me to be up on a lift and very tall ladder.
The act of committing to painting on a wall that was not my own also made me nervous...

In spite of my nervousness, it was exciting to complete this. Here are the rest of my progress photos:







The completed project is about 9 ft by 5 ft (I think...) and I am immensely proud to have used my artistic gifts to complete this project for my church family!


A Conclusion to 2016

With Christmas Break comes an opportunity to catch up on all of those projects I haven't had an opportunity to work on over the last semester. One of those projects is this blog; in November when I was at the Adobe Max conference, I got inspired to redesign the blog and I am extremely pleased with the result. Now the goal is to actually make art to put on this and perhaps even continually update my official portfolio website: laurenpetiti.myportfolio.com (shameless plug...)

For the past month and a half, I have been meaning to update my blog with posts from Inktober...even though it has been a long time since the actual Inktober took place. Busyness should not stop me from keeping an Internet presence for my art (small as it is...).

Here are the highlights from an Inktober that I am extremely proud to have completed. Did I finish all 31 days? Absolutely not! But I set a goal and managed to accomplish it; next year I want to set an even higher goal.