This week the theme card for my 52 Cards Project is Wonder. With nights growing increasingly colder, we (and our cats) are retreating inside more. And yet, the wild outdoors calls. The other night I noticed Leo, our young tabby, standing up from the floor to the bedroom windowsill to look outside and I realized that I’ve spent a fair share of time lately looking up from my sketchbook, my book, my ipad—to stare out the window too.

Winter is coming. The night sky is very dark (with just a crescent of a moon). There’s plenty of things to worry about in the world these days…and yet, I do believe the universe works in mysterious ways…the wonder of what’s out there calls. The birds. The critters. The wind. the deep mystery of all that is alive. That is what Leo is looking for, I’m sure, and I guess when I think about it, so am I.

And neither of us wants to miss one minute of it!

***

A note about long term projects. This week for my personal 52 Cards Project, I am really late creating and posting my theme card. I know my weekly Monday deadline is entirely self-imposed, but I still feel guilty because I didn’t really have other schedule challenges that brings me now to Thursday posting. Just procrastination.

And what this procrastination is actually about is project-fatigue. This is my forty-second card this year! And yes, I’m very proud of myself for making and posting 42 cards in 42 weeks—but I’m getting tired.

If you have worked on a long term project, you understand. When I start a creative project I’m filled with excitement—and lots of ideas! That carries me for a while…and then the inevitable dip start happening—I become less enthusiastic, ideas come more slowly. And sometimes when I start to lose enthusiasm, I quit.

But other times—like Inktober 2020 (which I only posted on Instagram and now regret not putting here on the blog as well) and most recently, ICAD 2022—I not only started a project, but finished it. And you know what? After the dip, the rest of a project has highs and lows. Some pieces come easier and some slower. Some aren’t so great—but then some surprise me! And by the end of a project, I’m always so happy with the work and I’ve always grown as an artist.

And, also true, I always feel like this drawing I made for the last day of the Inktober 2020 challenge:

I’m just saying: project fatigue. It’s part of every project too.

(I didn’t participate in the Inktober challenge last year, or this year (which if you don’t know is an annual drawing challenge where people from around the world draw or paint something every day in October and post their work on Instagram)—but only because I had other projects going, like this one.)

So this is all to say the #42 theme card finds me slowing down—I may be late each week, and when I’m traveling in November/early December I may even be more late—but I am determined to complete my 52 Cards Project this year. It’s been an amazing project, really. I have surprised myself time and again, drawing and conceptualizing in ways I didn’t know I could, and writing about them has been freeing! So I guess you could say the project itself fills me with Wonder, too!

And only nine more cards to go.