SUMMARY: A day where I was initially stressed, but then broke through the barrier and actually ran out of things to do. I felt a strong need to take a break, but pushed on the desktop wallpaper project and went to sleep very late.

This morning, I tried to figure out why I didn’t want to get out of bed right away. Possibly it’s because I was still tired, and possibly because I was dehydrated, and possibly I was in a low blood sugar state. The way I got out of bed was to stop thinking and let my mind go blank. When I do that, I find that the body tends to move by itself just for the sake of it. That is, if it doesn’t just fall asleep. In today’s trial, I made it to the bathroom and the day started.

I woke up a little later today, at 700AM. Was out of the house by 800AM. I’m just settling in now with my coffee now, at 825AM. Mental state: still feeling tired. Tension in my shoulders and lower back. Mentally I am able to maintain a stream of consciousness, but I am feeling resistance in the sides of my head and my eyeballs feel kind of dry. This could be dehydration…will try to load up on water today.

I may also just be nervous about taking on this morning’s creative task: translating my sketches from yesterday afternoon into finished vector pieces. I’m worried it will not go smoothly, and I’m feeling pinned down. As I wrote that down, the feeling in the side of my head intensified. This is an interesting development. It’s stress-resistance + tiredness? Or the tiredness is the result of the stress response. It reminds me a bit of depression leading to weariness.

So…taking a deep breath. Reassuring myself that the process takes many iterations, and even though there are other things that I’d like to do to, getting this one out of the way will contribute to an understanding of my creative process, which will lead to improvements in the very near future. The thing to do is just make something. Open that Illustrator program! Put it out of your mind that you hate its interface in small, petty ways. MAKE MARKS.

0830 to 0845: First 15-minute burst…open the program. Implement Spark Concept.
0845 to 0945: Extended time (got into groove)
0945 to 1015: Lay in text quotes, post to client.

1015 to 1100: Whew! I can relax a bit. There are three other concepts I can execute if this one doesn’t fly. Now it is time to check email.

1100 to 1130: At T-Mobile.
1130 to 1200: At home, tweaking colors on spark concept. 1200 to 1345: Catch up with friend who has been climbing the corporate ladder.
1345 to 1415: Tweaking the poster a little more, finalize for now.
1415 to 1445: Process some images for the blog, speculative.

I’m at Starbucks co-working with my friend, and I feel compelled to stay until 5PM. The power of shared work!

We had an interesting discussion about what we’re each up to. We actually seem to be doing similar things, as far as communication goes. I’m communicating everything I’m doing, trying to share my day and processes with whoever might be interested. He’s doing something on the corporate communications level that is geared toward improving the company overall. He gets paid a lot more :)

I got to share my spiel too, describing in broad terms what my current “career strategy” is. It broke down as “sounding board” and “products for sale”, and as I talked about this is became readily apparent to me that my desire is to really make products with my name and design stamped on them. I can’t think of anything that would be cooler. It doesn’t even matter what the things ARE, so long as they are useful, of good quality, and are appreciated people who care about such things.

It’s 245PM now. I think I’ll do some programming work, adding metaboxes to a WordPress theme.

1445 to 1545: Added Metaboxen.

Read email, went to the bathroom. STILL can’t go home, so I’m going to do a bit of graphic design cleanup for another client.

1545 to 1600: Send reminder emails to clients
1600 to 1630: Create outline version of logo concept, tweaked shape. 1630 to 1645: Catch up on this blog status.

It’s 4:30PM, and I’m pretty much out of things to do today. It’s been a fairly productive day:

• Finished a Desktop Wallpaper to the point where I like it. Now I’m in that place wondering if there’s some way to “push” it further. (pro bono)
• Did some coding (billable)
• Did some logo design tweaks (billable)
• Caught up with high-powered executive friend and got some insight into what his day-to-day is like.

I think I’m going to call it a day.

• Looked up 3d printed silver on Shapeways for a friend. The process uses lost wax casting with a 3d-printed wax master.

From 5PM onward, I ate a dinner of leftovers, finished the transition from “Commander” to “Captain” rank in Star Trek Online, then watched some RPers do their thing. It was like watching an emo version of a bad sci-fi movie.

I stayed up later than intended, too, tweaking the wallpaper.

2230 to 2430: Tweaked wallpaper. Broke apart source illustrator file into a foreground and background file, imported them as smart objects into Photoshop, and applied smart filtering for blur, noise, and overlay. This allowed me to add resolution-independent noise to hide the mach banding effects from the gradients. This ends up being a pretty efficient way to work, as it turns out.

Didn’t take melatonin. Just crashed. Decided I would wake up later, at 800AM. I am feeling it a pretty good place this week, progress-wise.