What’s better than new year’s resolution? A daily project for the new year and on! But before explaining the concept, a brief retrospective.
Many years ago, my sister was studying in Patra, a city ~3h by car from Athens where we lived, famous for its carnival and fun student life. One time while I was visiting I noticed a pack of new post-it notes along with a few of my all-time favorite pilot g-tec c4 pens, so it was very tempting to start drawing. The sketches were done quickly but carefully and I drew inspiration from -completely- random ideas or things from everyday life.
An abstract idea of an angry Mammoth or a floating sailboat, or the hassle of trying to repair a broken TV controller for hours. Even some of my sisters’ colleagues from the university could serve as inspiration.
Whenever I visit a made a few post-it sketches and my sister had placed them on a cork board.
I have around 30 of them still today and they’re the main inspiration for this new project.
The other part of the -not so original idea- are a few artists that practiced the habit of uploading a sketch, render or art piece every day on the internet.
The first one I noticed almost 20 years ago was the website of Jimmy Maidens named Boring 3d. Among other things, he was creating a 3d render image every day. These images were very good looking, and even if they’re not very high tech and appear low poly for today’s standards they were amazing at the time, not only for their artistic value (I believe they still look great today) but as a technical achievement for a solo artist working at that pace. Unfortunately, the update frequency deteriorated from daily to more sporadic and the last images were published on 2018 (2 images published in 2018, the previous 2 at 2016 and so on). I hope Jimmy is well today, his work inspired many people, me included.
The second one is the by now extremely famous and borderline notorious beeple (Mike Winkelmann). There’s not much to say here, he is an amazing artist that exploded the last couple of years because of his work with NFTs. I’m following him for many years (more than 10 if I remember correctly) and apart from his actual work, equally or maybe more interesting is his approach. I highly recommend these two videos (this interview and this follow up) hosted by Chris Do’s thefutur where he explains how important speed and commitment is to his work and his development as an artist and person. I believe there’s great value there and this is probably the main reason I’m starting this project.
Before I present the actual premise, I should also mention Baugasm by Vasjen Katro, who does something similar in principal, by creating a poster -almost! – every day in his particular style.
After this elaborate intro, here comes the premise of this project. Starting at the 1st January of 2022 I’m going to publish a new drawing every day. This is open ended, ideally this will be an ongoing project for many years and it will follow these simple rules:
I explored many names but they all look very elaborate for this so the simplest one, just my social media nickname (and actual name) along with daily was the chosen one. The logo (cover image) is also not something elaborate, I’m using the \[‘-‘]/ emoji, which I use In general here and there (I made it, but I’m not sure I’m the first to do so).
I also made a couple of rough sketches like the following that were published as Instagram stories just to test the idea, and I found it to be extremely fun.
My goal for this is to practice consistency and speed in a specific frame of work, explore many ideas on concept art and even use this as a calendar of sorts. The rules mentioned above are quite simple and easy to follow, so there’s no excuse not to do so. I’m very curious of the result and I can’t wait to see a year from now what these first 365 images will be.
If you read this quite personal and elaborate description you are probably intrigued, so you can follow it on Instagram, twitter, and facebook. All images will also be published at my new personal homepage in the ‘daily’ section here: erripis.daily.
I hope you like it! Have a great new year!