∴Chris and Kelly on Daily Projects∴

My wife Kelly is an industrious person. She’s always at work on something, a drawing, a video, a zine or maybe a stationary set. I’ll lose track of exactly what she’s up to, until she turns up one day at the studio with not only a finished product but a video about it and preorders. So maybe I can be forgiven for not really realizing until pretty late in the year that we’re both doing daily projects, me with photos and her with sketches.

We thought it would be fun to talk about how we approach our daily projects. We’ve written a few questions for each other, which you can see just below, and along with them are some photos and sketches we happened to make on the same days. Here we go!

April 8th

How has keeping a daily photo/drawing practice affected your relationship to photography/drawing this year?

Kelly: It’s helped me stay more consistent with my personal work, which can often get sidelined by commercial projects. Having a low-pressure project where the goal is simply to create something daily has kept me focused on personal work when I might have otherwise neglected it.

Chris: My daily photo project has encouraged me to look for visually striking moments in regular life. Previously I tended to go out with the intention of shooting street or documentary photos, and all my images felt like they fit into a particular visual language or style. But with a daily project I’ve had to be on the look out for images in places I wouldn’t ordinarily make them, like at home or behind the scenes on a shoot. This has been great for broadening my sense of what is worth photographing, and it’s really diversified the kind of images I’m making.

August 2nd

What has been the most frustrating part of the daily challenge (or) a particularly frustrating anecdote?

K: The toughest part is feeling uninspired, like there’s nothing interesting to draw. I’ve had to get more creative by drawing familiar things from new angles or focusing on small details. This challenge has pushed me to think beyond the obvious and experiment with what I already have.

C: Well, it’s a daily project, and some days the image just doesn’t come as easy. I have a bad habit of putting off shooting the photo until it’s getting on in the night, and suddenly I’m taking the long way home desperately shooting photos of bushes. One night I was in bed watching a movie and at 23:30ish I realized I hadn’t shot a single photo all day. So I had to pause my movie and walk circles around the bedroom looking for something to shoot. I ended up shooting the corner of the ceiling I think. Not my best work.

July 20th

Does any planning go into your drawings/photography or is it completely spontaneous? If planning does go into it, elaborate.

K: For the most part, it’s completely spontaneous, which I find important because it reduces pressure. The only planning I do is collecting references when I’m out and about.

C: I don’t plan a lot, but if I know I’m going somewhere that day that will be interesting, I go with a sort of prepared mindset. I just try to be more sensitive to photo opportunities there, because if I don’t shoot anything I’ll be walking circles in the bedroom again just before midnight.

March 27th

How do you choose what not to draw/photograph? When you can focus on anything, how do you make the practice more selective?

K: I tend to avoid complex scenes. If something is intricate, I break it down or simplify it. The small scale of my sketchbook, and even smaller post-its, naturally forces me to be selective. Ultimately, my goal is to filter the world through my perspective and style, while building a larger collection of ideas to draw from later.

C: I’m trying to be fairly open minded with what I photograph, but I’m finding flat surfaces just aren’t really fitting with the overall feel that I like when you see all the images together. I shot a few in the beginning, but I could tell inside that for whatever reason they just weren’t quite right. I try to heed that feeling when I get it, whether it’s at work or on a project like this. So what I’m saying is that I try to be sensitive to what I isn’t working, and let that guide me toward what feels right.

August 21st

Is the daily challenge a project in and of itself, or will the images you produce in it filter into other projects you're working on?

K: It’s a bit of both. I want to complete the year, but I don’t see it as something to celebrate or publish. The images I create may end up in other projects in different forms, but the sketchbook itself is just a way to gather ideas and understand my visual interpretations better.

C: I started taking daily photos because I knew I’d be spending a lot of my time working on other projects this year. I knew that while I worked on those projects I wouldn’t have much time to go on long photo walks like I normally do. So initially this was just a way to keep me photographing a little during this busy time.

Now that we’re 3/4s of the way through the year, I can look back on the images and see some potential for a small project to come from what I’ve shot. Because I delay I often end up shooting at night, and I’ve liked the feel of these darker images. I think if I’m selective I can pick out a project from the year’s photos.

April 25th

Do you like to share the photos/drawings on the day that you make them, or do you keep them private? Can you explain why?

K: I mostly keep them private, but I do share them monthly on Patreon. The point isn’t to make them public, but to focus on my personal work without the pressure of making them “good enough” to share. Keeping them relatively private helps me stay true to the process.

C: I share the image on the day, with midnight being my deadline for posting it. At the beginning of the year I made a private Instagram and told a few friends what I’d be up to. I’ll share an image there each day. I wanted the sense that someone was going to see the images, just to keep me accountable, but because I changed my style and subject matter a bit, I didn’t want to release the images to everyone in the midst of figuring it out. At the end of the year I’ll likely open up the account¹ and let people know, and maybe they can have a look at the whole year.

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You can check out Kelly’s Patreon here. She writes in a way that’s there to help, and her simple way of talking about the creative process really demystifies it.

Cheers,

Chris

1. But if you’re one of the people that reads my footnotes, then you’re welcome anytime.