Kai Christopher Aiken

How to experience all the little deaths and still stay in the flow.

So for all the convenience of digital creation methods, I don’t think I’ll ever become a fully digital artist. I need limitation. And to me, artmaking is training for life: how to confront problems, accept our decisions and their consequences, deal with our finitude and fallibility.

When you put a stroke of paint on a canvas, your attention and decisions have physical consequences. You make a mark in one way and you see the result. Of course there’s usually some way to erase, but that’s a physical process and often not possible without leaving a trace of your past decisions.

But I nevertheless find, when my attention is spread among so many different channels— Bluesky, Facebook, Substack, Pinterest, YouTube, etc. etc. etc.— it can eventually feel like my attention is everywhere and nowhere at once. I become a disembodied consciousness, floating around, disoriented.

I’ve started following Adam Ming’s Blueprint for Children’s Book Illustrators. I created this account, a Substack account, and a (very nascent) website. Ming’s guidelines provide some orientation, something to hold on to among a flood of posts and feeds and likes and notes.

A great collection of Canadian children's book artists and illustrators to follow. I <3 Canada!

go.bsky.app/NrTPNQf