In a moment, one is lifted and inspired, invigorated to do better...and then the purgatory of life sets in again, tiredness and frustration and some deep need for change...in this way one accrues a motherload of ways to improve and sits on the lot like a bird on her eggs. Practice as you preach. It's time to address the accrual.

As mentioned months ago, it is better to spend, say, an hour trying to draw a masterpiece–putting everything you have into a piece–then it is to spend ten hours a day drawing aimlessly. Recently this advice has finally struck home, struck on that level where you grasp ideas with emotion and feeling. Drawing takes as much effort as you put into it: one can get away with sloppy scrawls and no thought at all, coasting by, or one can pour their every bit of being into the pencil, struggling immensely. This is, one imagines, the nature of all endeavors but particularly of the arts. The timed figure drawing is dangerous, therefore, because it allows for less effort in the act of drawing. Instead of endeavoring towards anything on the paper, the timed medium creates the concept of 'finishing' in the temporal dimension, without regard for the physical product. Thirty seconds, one minute, five minute and ten minute...it's wide open for the lazy to take advantage of!

Also mentioned months ago, the idea of doing what's important to you early in the morning. One has more energy at the beginning of the day then the end–by virtue of just having slept I argue, no matter how sleepy you may feel–and this quality alone makes the early part of the day better for trying to draw a masterpiece. Too often, I must admit, the day ends and mind straddles the border of wake and sleep, and then the drawing is done as mere labor of endurance. The feeling that things should be done better, not that they should be gotten done with, that is what ought to endure.

More recently, that a study of the face is required! Often I shy from planning out future days–better to focus on the present one then straddle my future self with debts–but today I devote tomorrow (and expect it to continue long after tomorrow) to the study of the face. The thirty minute daily drawing minimum is to be fulfilled regardless, and this is surely a dire area after all. Formal study instead of erratic wanderings should also be welcome.

'Tomorrow's study of the face will be done in the morning,' and now the sleepy quality whisks one away, thoughts half-complete and half-contained...in times like so, one must remember to preach as they practice or it all will fade away...

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It should be noted that each day a manifold of thoughts rises and falls now, where months ago I struggled to fill a page. There are two thousand words that could be written here but for lack of time. Practice as preach, preach as practice and preaching is practicing.

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The idea that we think in language must be untrue, because one finds that thoughts trespass more quickly than one can spell them with words, and relaying in language thus becomes like sweeping up after a storm has passed through. All depiction is therefore done in the aftermath of the fundamental conception, whether that depiction be thinking in language or drawing or writing. And each act of depiction removed from conception slows the depiction process down even further. For example, thinking in language happens very quickly. Speaking is a bit slower. Writing, most likely, a little slower. Drawing is much slower. Animating? Forget about it. But as the process grows longer, does the information density to become greater or is the like of animating simply a waste of time? Surely some arts become outdated with time and left to ruin.

On the other hand, as mentioned months ago, language (English, math, musical notation) gives us abilities we would otherwise never have (consider that people in cultures without numbers struggle to accurately assess quantities of items, with a numerical sense matched by the pidgeon). Perhaps deep thought is not 'relayed' into language but must at least in part originate from it, because our languageless faculties cannot generate thoughts in the way English grammar, for example, can. What does animation generate? This vague, strange sense of meaning I grasp from moving drawings, it could be either dead end or the bud of a new language.

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An excellent example of lazy drawing follows below: