I didn't know it was happening to me till I got out of it. My impression of burnout was much different. The general notion of having a burnout is that the artist does not paint at all. He/she is repulsed by the thought of picking up the brush. That he lies in bed all day - unmotivated - in a solipsistic fugue state. 

My experience was not so. You see, I painted myself into a corner (pun 100% intended). It's not that I didn't want to paint. I did. I was hungry for it. I painted. But nothing came of it. It was a vicious cycle - painting something for 2 hours, hating it,  deleting it, and starting over. There is a term that runners use. They call it "The Wall".  I was running head first into it over and over again. It sucked. For a whole week it sucked.

Continuing the 'wall analogy', I saw 3 options. (a) Let time take its course. (b) Circumvent the wall. (c) A combination of the two. And so I went with option 'c'. Here's my magic solution. Literally walk around the wall. Yes, literally. Take a hike. I hate the outdoors so I paced inside my room like a feral cat and guess what? It worked!

I think I'm still remission but at least I'm happy with what I'm doing now.

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I've been practicing time and weather progressions in my designs. There's so much more to learn and it was a really good exercise. I'm trying to broaden myself as an environment concept artist and this feels like a step in the right direction.  

No long post, just what I've been working on since we last spoke.

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Star Wars Day (May the 4th) is coming up real soon. So, to celebrate I'm gonna share a couple of Star Wars paintings I did.

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SPQR is a book I'm working on. I haven't really made clear in the past as to what it is exactly and I'd like to shed some light on it. So for the last few months I've been working on and off on a project called SPQR. I've decided to compile it into a book. And this is how I've stumbled my way through the whole thing.

One of the spreads in the book. Printing and trimming the bleed edges was by far the easiest part. Then I had to bind it.

I bound the book with a perfect bind. It's because I had to print the pages on single sheets. Above is my jerry-rigged book press. 

Next is the board for the hard cover. I had to cut it down to size and wrap it in the cover.

And it's done! It's hard trying to condense the entire process into a few pictures. There was so much more trial and error involved and at times it was extremely frustrating. For anyone who's looking to do the same, I have a bit of advice:

Measure twice, cut once.

-Kenn