Week 7 of being creative

A very vulnerable writing + first mural project ever 🎨

Day 1-3: Write “On feeling love again”

I just published another post: https://trangdoan.substack.com/p/on-feeling-love-again.

It took me 4 days in total to write this. The first day had a huge surge of inspiration.

But on day 2 when I returned, my inspiration dropped. I JUST COULDN’T FUCKING WRITE ABOUT IT.

After grunting at my computer for an hour, I finally gave in and journaled on why it was being difficult. Turns out being vulnerable in public is hard af 🙃. I’m a bit nauseous at the idea of turning feelings into art for the sake of making art. It was also difficult to put my emotional journey in a logical order that “makes sense,” because I’m barely accepting how I feel. Opening my heart to the public just seems too much of a risk - if there’s one comment that misunderstood me, I’ll shrink and die 🎭.

But I decided to write and publish it instead, as an exposure therapy to just accept my emotions no matter the condition.

Plus, I’m just being dramatic anyway. Nobody reads this blog except a few friends so… =)).

Day 4-7: Draw

This might be the biggest + longest creative project I’ve been working on till now:

The door to my room recently is no longer see-through glass. But it looks boring. I’m gonna paint a mural.

Q: What’s on the mural?

A: 2 dragons, 1 cat, 1 buffalo, 1 goat, and 1 tiger.

Q: What?! Why?

A: They are the lunar year animal of each person in my family. My sister and I are dragons, mom a cat, dad a buffalo, niece the goat, and the eldest sister an angry majestic tiger.

Mood board

Inspo: em Râu making art at @smolelectron, NYC subway, a random FB post without credit to the artist 🤢

I like the simple line drawing style, with a mix of only two colors - blue and red. I experimented and output this combination to see if I’d actually like it.

Yes! I like it.

So I proceeded to drawing the distribution of animals on the door:

After drafting, all the animals seem random/ bland/ unconnected. So I wanted to add the personality of each person to their animal. I implemented a thorough survey to character design the animals, aka just ask my family how would they describe themselves if they were their zodiac animal.

My eldest sister: A majestic, cool af tiger licking its hand

My mom: a chill cat lying in the sun, eyes half closed, enjoying life.

My dad: a suffering, tired, hard-working buffalo. My mom even suggested adding a whip lashing at the bull’s butt to show how much suffering my dad is in 🤣

My other sis: a pooping dragon. She has a lotus tattoo on her arm so I will add that in.

My niece: a cute goat, can bite people, loves K-drama.

It’s such an interesting question to get to know people because abstracting it into an animal gives me better answers to how people want to be perceived. What’s interesting is, my mom used to be the hustler of the household and my dad the chill buffalo. Now the role is reversed.

I don’t know how I’ll draw myself yet.

But here’s the cat and one dragon so far:

You can’t get chiller than a cat sleeping on a cloud

Le dragon with lotus tattoo pooping

Putting it to the door it looks like this

Shout out to Yufei for consulting me on methods to scale this to the door/ mural size. I really like collaborating with you.

Ongoing

• Research on the freedom writing series. I’ve just been talking to friends about various areas of freedom and how they perceive it.

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Takeaways

• Now that it’s been 7 weeks of consistently doing creative stuff, I’m having much more fun doing it and more pointers towards what I want to do. There are crafts that I get obsessive about perfecting (e.g.: dancing, filmmaking). I’d spend hours trying to improve the littlest details that only the profesh would care about. But there are crafts I only want to get “good enough,” aka able to produce something out of it, but need not be perfect (e.g.: sewing, drawing, coding). It’s true that actions lead to more insight. This makes me even more excited to keep doing creative work each day.

• Influential video of the week: My Simple Productivity System by Struthless. I’ve been binging Struthless. He offers lots of practical and balanced perspectives on creative work. For example, he framed productivity not as the end goal but as a by-product of these factors.

  

  I also like his wall where he puts in all the projects, breaks them into smaller steps, and uses an arrow to point to the progress. I’m definitely slipping into doing more than 3 projects at a time, which is what I promised myself. Having a physical reminder would be great.