A few scattered thoughts:
To actively develop my photography skills, I’m going to choose a weekly theme (which will end up as a set in Flickr) and make an effort to find photo opps that fit. Things like “hope,” “yellow,” and “triangle,” for example. This week the theme will be…hmm…”solitude.”
I’ve been wanting to work on my illustration skills for a while, and yet nothing’s been happening. (Other than the cover of A Christmas Carol.) Getting ideas for subject matter has been slow — mainly because I haven’t been actively looking — and so I’ve decided to start illustrating existing stories, as practice. I’ll most likely be working on scenes from the Chronicles of Narnia and other favorite children’s books.
Something else I’m really interested in is font design. Since FontLab et al. are rather expensive, if anything happens with this it’ll be via FontForge. FontForge has all the basic functionality to create fonts, albeit with a horrifically ugly interface. ~sigh~ But it’s the only way (unless I shell out hundreds of bucks for Fontographer or FontLab, but since I don’t know if I actually have any talent for font design, I’d better test the waters first :)). (Oh, check out a cool post by Raph Levien on Typophile. I don’t know if anything’s happened with this since then, however.
One of my main interests with fonts and typesetting is Unicode. Four and a half years ago I re-typeset Henry Sweet’s An Icelandic Primer using TeX and the Omega system, and it was blissfully fun (especially in getting Omega to display the Icelandic-specific characters properly). I miss it. This is one of the reasons why I want to typeset foreign language texts for Riverglen Press. I just need to start making more time for RGP work, rather than getting caught up in schoolwork and such. ;)
Keeping the Moleskine sketchbook in my pocket is working, I think. Today in class I pulled it out and doodled instead of, erm, taking notes. :) Having it more accessible — the weight in my pocket reminds me it’s there — will help me draw more. And design more.
Throw in your two cents