A Year Ago Today

Last September I did at least one trading card sized image every day in Photoshop. Here’s the one for September 21st, 2005. By the end of that month I was starting to get fed up with the push to accomplish something each day. Not that it was taking the joy out of it for me, but that self-imposed pressure tended to take over and by the end of the month I’d had enough.
It was one of the best things I’ve ever done creatively though because it forced me to learn things in Photoshop I hadn’t before. I read a quote somewhere that said: “Repetition is the mother of all skill,” or something like that. All those trading cards I did in Photoshop weren’t necessarily repetition – more like practice really – but the work that came afterwards was a lot better than anything I’d done before. The one-a-day habit is definitely an apprenticeship, if you stick with it.