Tips on Elevating Stress Before Travel

In the days right before the beginning of my recent travel, I was swamped with attempts to close projects on all fronts of my life. My stress showed in my inability to finish things, uninteresting choices in colors and design, snappish dialogue, prolonged conversations with myself about boundaries, multiple versions of to-do lists all over the floor around my table, and very dirty hands from inks after refilling my pens. As you can see - neither making lists (something that I do in any situation) nor refilling pens (a very therapeutic activity under different circumstances) worked. But here is what helped:

1) getting online to chat and draw from a windowswap with a friend - using only my portable printmaking tools. 

2) going out to draw on location - with a very limited set of tools (two markers and my portable printmaking tools). 

Neither of these sketches accomplished what I wanted artistically, but both of these brought me to a much calmer mind state.  And a reminder that limits (on time, materials, and other resources) are a very useful tool. 



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