Daily Paper Sculptures by Charles Young
This post is in defense of doing something every single day. And by everyday, I mean, literally, every single day. Don’t stop. When you do something (anything) every day, you can quickly amass something truly impressive. Charles Young has been doing his particular thing every day since August now and his goal is to create a fantastical paper city. Let’s allow his sculptures to speak for themselves first, many even move, but click through to see them dance a jig for you…
Young got his Masters in Architecture from Edinburgh College of Art. (Talk about an uber place to attend college. Edinburgh is definitely one of the most magical cities on the globe. I have a story I like to tell about Edinburgh… but I promise you we’ll get back to Young momentarily. The first time I think I heard of Edinburgh was on a poster at my college in the Lake Districts of northern England. It was going to be a long weekend retreat for the students to get away from the school for a bit. I was so excited about the opportunity to get out! So I turned to the guy next to me and said “Awesome, can’t wait to go to Ed-in-Burg! Should be fun!” And in an embarrassed, yet gorgeous, British accent he says, “Yes. We do rather love ed-in-BOROUGH quite alot.” I was like woah, EDINBOROUGH? You guys are missing like half the letters! Edinburgh should be spelled differently!” And, yeah, I learned alot that particular day about the Brits and their crazy non-phonetic spellings. Alright, we now take you back to the previously scheduled blog post already in progress.) And Charles says he spends around 30 minutes to several hours everyday working on the models. And man, I can’t get enough of these models. They are minimalist perfection! He even sells a few out on his Etsy account if you are interested.
Which brings me back to doing something every single day no matter what. I personally enjoyed a stint of drawings for several months every single day. I really learned a lot about myself as I was formalizing my sketches and pointing my brain at something different and structured every single day. I have even worked to write every single day during NanoWriMo for several years in a row. A couple books have been finished as well as a result of just sitting down and pointing my brain at one thing. And I’ll be really honest with you, nothing has come of the fact that I’ve written a book. No agent. No publishing agreement. And nothing came of the fact that I have spent several months sketching a new drawing each day. But am I still glad that I did it? Hell ya.
In today’s world, we are distracted and frayed. We don’t concentrate on a single thing for longer than 12 minutes at a go. Heck, somedays, 12 minutes is a great span of concentration. But by stringing together successive minutes or hours (whatever you can manage) to attack a single task, you can do great things. So what is your daily concentration going to be pointed at today? Writing? Drawings? Models? Paintings? Illustrations?