poo trails and painting woes

I have so much work to do, it's insane. Here's what I have to do in the next six weeks:

1) Many many paintings for an art show in September.

2) Concept designs for a collaboration for an online / interactive thing - due next Wednesday.

3) Sorting through and organizing motion capture data for another project, which includes some technical glitch-figurin', and making things work in three different pieces of software - due two Wednesdays from now.

4) Film Festival Submissions for Perfect Detonator (my most recent short film) - six need to be done by next Wednesday.

(2) to (4) are fairly procedural - I'll know when they're done, and it's just a matter of taking the time. But painting is the big scary one.

For starters, I never know how long each painting will take. I can't whip off a painting in a set amount of time. Some go fast, some take forever. And in the case of watercolours, sometimes I can fuck them up by working them too much, which is what I did tonight.

Also, I need to gather inspiration for the paintings, so in between (1) to (4), I'm spending a lot of time exploring with a camera, printing photos, doodling and trying to give myself open space to think and imagine. That's not especially easy with all the other stuff going on, not to mention that I have to move at the end of August.

...

Something I think I've learned from bushwhacking lately - if you scare an animal in the bush, they usually take a little poo before they run off, so even if you don't see the animal, you can go to where you last heard them and figure out what kind of animal it was. Of the last three times I've scared something in the bush this week, all three times there's been a poo trail left behind. Two deer and one bear so far.