Art Goals for the Remainder of 2016

Angel's Landing in Zion National Park, March 2016. It took some planning and goal setting to make it out to Zion and up that trail, but we did it! ©2016 by Erin Blumer.

"You can't manage what you can't measure."

So the saying goes.  It's not always true, depending on who you ask, but in most cases, I find that concrete benchmarks are useful.  "Measurement" and "benchmarks" need not be numerical, of course, especially in art!  They just need to be defined well enough so that I know if I am making progress.

Getting this site launched was my biggest goal for this year, so I am super stoked that it is up and running, and mostly meets my needs and expectations.  What to do now, though?  With the major work of getting erinblumer.com up and running complete, I can focus on creating.  So without further ado, here are my goals for the rest of 2016, in no particular order:

Complete at least one original, non-commissioned artwork per month.

Given the amount of travel I have been doing for my job, as well as an upcoming trip to New Zealand, this might end up being a tall order.  But even small works count, so we'll see.

Take 2-3 art excursions to outdoor locales in the area.

My first outing will be this Sunday, September 25th at Shaw Nature Reserve!  Progress already.  My plan is to spend the day sketching, taking photos, painting, and writing.  If I'm organized enough, I'll blog about it after the fact and feature a few of my sketches and photos.

Experiment with new types of watercolor paper.

I've been pretty exclusively using Arches hot press watercolor blocks, and I've been thinking it's time to branch out a bit.  I have two new papers picked out online, so once those arrive, I'll be excited to try them out!

What are your creative goals for the last quarter of this year? Tell me in the comments!