Cay Denise

Bay Area artist and illustrator, Wendy MacNaughton, mixes drawing, social work and storytelling into rich and fun exercises for children, through her 'Drawing Together' program, and for adults, through the Grown-ups Table (aka GUT) program.  She is a visual columnist for the New York Times and the California Sunday Magazine. To start 2024, Wendy has put together a daily lesson with prompt for each day of January for the GUT group (made up of many hundred to even possibly 1,000+ adult members).  Each lesson has a bit of narrative followed by an exercise to take a suggested 10 minutes.  Her intention -- to help members build an ongoing practice and deliver basic drawing knowledge.   For this month, I broke out an older sketchbook with a lot of blank pages of which many have been filled since January 1st.  I was especially tickled with a recent blind contour drawing (looking only at a source image while moving my pen over the paper in conjunction with my eyes movin...

I've completed those end-of-year things that some people do, like:   creating a 2023 year-end look-back of accomplishments and progress on goals and objectives; writing down [my] 100 best things of last year; and, creating 2024 goals and objectives.  So what next?  This question stopped me in my tracks over the weekend.  I started to think about it and posed this question to myself -- I've mainly looked backwards, haven't I?  My answer -- yes, and in so doing, I've got a plan without a vision.  Deliberating about this over the past few days, I came up with an idea of 'futurizing'...creating a broader purpose to bring into 2024 that progress on the goals will feed.   So, I've created a new zine with that exact title "Futurizing" (by the way, this is a new word I think I've just coined).  Its purpose is documenting me envisioning my future that the achievement of my goals will support.  So, not only do I have a goal of walking 325 miles in 2024...

It's a new year -- a first day of being able to start with a reset or recommitment to your goals, if you use them.  A new year presents a clean break with whatever you've done in the past/prior year.  Goals are simply thoughts of where we want to see ourselves by the end of the year (or over a longer-term when a project is involved).  Objectives are a more defined vision of what it will take to reach the goals. Making progress on your goals means identifying the reasonable, specific and measurable steps to getting there - these are objectives.     In preparation for my goal-setting and the change in calendar years, I started with a year-end review of my accomplishments and the progress made on my goals in 2023.  It was done in zine form.  The front and back covers (below) bookend 6 pages of the year's highlights, efforts/activities that align with my interest areas, and actual percentages completed -- of my objectives that inform my goals. For goal-set...