The Inkerers

Shortly after I went out on my own last summer, I emailed a friend of mine who is a crackerjack creative herself.

In our first exciting meeting over coffee, I discovered that we had both been trying to strike a balance in our lives between selling off our creativity to make a living, and saving some for our own enjoyment. It's hard, we discovered, when your hobby and your job involve the same skill set, to make time to draw (or whatever) for pleasure. Both of us seem to get too hung up on the blatant lack of purpose behind this fun work, and we seem to worry about whether someone will like it. Old vestiges of our mercenary Inkerers Full Logolifestyles, you see. Worse, we feel like we have to finish EVERYTHING else before we play—paid work, chores, email correspondence, physical upkeep. Needless to say, neither Wendy nor I have been using our skills. So we decided that the best solution would be to have weekly meetings where we show off our purely selfish work of the week before. And have breakfast. It soon devolved into just breakfast, but then accelerated into the idea of teaching classes for design students, Valentines makers, and being the producers of the first Special Edition "Wang" for Articulate City. At least we figured out a name for our club. 

The process of creating the Wang was good. It forced us to follow through on some drawing projects with a real deadline, but it walks dangerously close to real work. I'm looking forward to trying to get back on a schedule where I can just produce drawings to produce drawings. Long live the Inkerer.