I've tackled a huge personal project. I'm dubbing it Dare To Draw Badly. I've been stuck on a plateau due to not drawing much at all the last few years. The result has been I feel like I need to produce good work if I'm going to draw at all...so I haven't been drawing. To fix that way of thinking, I'm going to make an effort to do 10,000 sketches in as short a time as possible. Hopefully by the end of 2014. Why 10k? There's a well-known quote about everybody having 10,000 bad drawings in them and it's best to get them out as soon as possible. So, setting my count back to zero I'm going to try to do that.

I'm currently over 400 sketches with more up on a (mostly) daily basis. So far, lots and lots of life drawing. The blog is here if you'd like to follow it: http://daretodrawbadly.tumblr.com (WARNING: Artistic nudity!)

I've got a Kickstarter up for the project now: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/950095344/dare-to-draw-badly

The goal amount is intended to cover supplies. At the rate I'm burning through the small hoard of sketchbooks and sketchpads I have on hand, I'm going to go broke when I start having to buy them as I go. To give you an idea, so far it's been about one sketchpad a week. They're usually around $3 apiece if I can find the cheap ones, so best case scenario is about $175 for sketchpads alone if I buy locally, including taxes. I'm also seeing a noticeable dent in my pencil set, so I'm probably going to have to replace it every thousand sketches or so. The pencils run about $1 apiece if I buy them individually through dickblick.com, plus shipping. The remainder of the goal amount will cover shipping for any physical rewards due backers plus take into account the taxes I'll end up owing and Kickstarter fees.

Over that? It'll help get me out on field trips so I can sketch more interesting things. I may also be able to get more resin skull replicas to study from. And if it goes really well, the over-and-above backing means I'm less likely to fall into that "starving artist" thing for the duration of the project.

So, that's the summary of it. If anybody backs it, I appreciate it!