Hello, Holidailies crowd! I’m back for another year (technically my fifth, although as I say in the comic, I haven’t finished yet.) This year would be the year to make it through, though. I’m older, wiser, and blogging a lot more often. I’ve taken on a number of Big Projects this year, and gotten more work done on my own than I ever have before.

I’ve been out of my usual routine for the last couple of weeks, so I haven’t been posting, but now that most of the Holiday Madness at work has been put to bed, and all the traveling is done for me and mine (Brad and I went down to LA for Thanksgiving), I should be able to hunker down and get to work. At the very least I’ll be doing one-panel daily comics like this one through the end of the run.

The little owl in the comic is sort of the embodiment of my work-ethic. He first started appearing in my comics earlier this year, and co-starred with me in the 24-hour comic I did back in July. He appears from time to time to help me break up what would otherwise be giant walls of text in my comics.

I started drawing myself with the pudge I’ve put on in the last couple of years, but I noticed that I’m drawing the owl a little fatter than he was over the summer, too. We need to lose some weight. Christmas time is a great time to get working on that. Not.

I don’t remember the last time I had so much work, as well of the prospects of creating more in a pretty short space of time, that a sketch dump would even make sense to do. But something has clearly shifted, and I have neat stuff coming out of my ears. Part of it is definitely being willing to waste art supplies.

This is from a few weeks ago, when I said I’d been painting peacocks all day. This is the first one I did. I wanted to play with my watercolors, so made a fairly random decision to do a designy-looking peacock and not look at any references, just start painting and let it come out however it wants. It doesn’t look anything like a real peacock, but I do like the simple shapes of the body, and I enjoyed the experience of painting those ridiculously long tail feathers. The flowers just decided they wanted to be there, so I let them.

This alphabet exercise that was sort of suggested in What It Is has really helped free me up and enable me to even work on something like that peacock above. What I have been doing pretty frequently* is writing the date and the alphabet on one sheet of paper, and then doodling around from there until I’ve filled the page up sufficiently to feel like it’s okay to stop. There have been a lot of Really Cool Things coming out of these pages, and some things that are just silly and wonderful.

I did one with a brush at one point, and a page or two afterwords, I did this:

…which is pretty funny because of the work I’ve been doing lately, and the possibility that a brush-and-ink comic is in my future. This is due in part to the acquisition of a very fancy sable-hair brush that everyone sings the praises of. I’d been doing the thing where I’d want to try the Very Exciting Tool, in this case, this brush, but instead of just buying the one I want, I’d keep buying brush after brush that was cheaper, but much lower quality, until I’d spent more than the cost of buying the one I wanted in the first place.

People fail at diets for the same reason. They want to eat a brownie, so they eat a bagel. Unsatisfied, they have a quesadilla, a salad, a smoothie, and maybe 4 oranges before they finally break down and eat the brownie they wanted all along, getting the brownie calories plus the everything-else calories to boot.

There’s this great comic called Octopus Pie, by Meredith Gran, that she inks with a brush. I was wanting something to practice on, so tonight I came up with a couple of figures that are in a similar style to the ones in Octopus Pie:

This is the second day after having gotten my fancy new sable brush. I like it a lot, though I still need some practice keeping my line under control. One thing, though? I am keeping way too much superfluous stuff on my drawing board, because some of the goofiness of some of these lines are a direct result of my arm movement being restricted by something. I need to organize my stuff!

Lastly, I have this little guy, which I did earlier this evening:

…who was also doodled in watercolor with  no particular plan. This might be me rebelling against the rigidity of doing watercolors the traditional way. But I do feel like a little planning can be a good thing. My little spatuletail hummingbird from the other day had just the tiniest bit of forethought**, and I think it came out pretty nicely. Whatever, I’m going slow, like the manatee says. I don’t need to make any masterpieces any time soon. I’m just happy to be turning out any kind of work I like.

*For the first month I was doing one of these alphabet pages daily, but I fell off the wagon just after my 24-hour comic experience, when I went out of town the very next day.

**no pencils, though! I spent a good ten minutes staring a a blank peice of paper, waving my wet-but-empty brush over it and going “hmm,” like an artist! XD

There was this video that came to my attention earlier this week about an unusual little bird from Peru. The Spatuletail Hummingbird is this tiny little creature (endangered, of course) with only four tail feathers. In the males, two of those four tail feathers grow long and have these dark blue-violet paddles at the end (the spatules). Imagine a peacock’s tail, how huge and beautiful and totally, impractically unweildy it is. Now imagine that on an itty bitty hummingbird. The males don’t fly much, and when they do, it’s only for a few seconds, and it’s just to impress a lady (of course!).

I love hummingbirds, and I’ve been playing around with ink and watercolor in this little spiral-bound watercolor book lately, and the spatuletail hummingbird kind of captured my imagination, so I had to have one for myself. I wish I hadn’t done the leaves- it would’ve been a stronger composition- so if I do it again on nice paper I’ll take them out. But go watch the video, because they are really amazing.

I haven’t been posting them, but I’ve been playing with seamless repeating patterns since the beginning of the year. While it’s mostly been flowers and other sort of geometric shapes, there was this one file I started with the intention to fill with as many unique, organic shapes as I could, and this pattern of sea critters started to take shape. It took me a three or four sesssions to finish it (over the course of several months!), but it’s finally done!

I learned a little trick while I was working on this one. I kept testing it out and in spite of all of the unique shapes, I was still really aware of exactly where the tiles were seaming. I had overlapping shapes, but it wasn’t until I started using certain motifs over again within the tile that the rhythm finally broke up enough for me and the pattern started to feel more natural to my eyes. The tiling isn’t 100% invisible, especially at this small size, but it’s a lot better than where it started (I don’t see any strong path of  white running through it anymore, for instance), and I’m really proud of this one

Some of you may have noticed that I occasionally refer to my place of employment as the TV Farm. That’s because the TV station I work for is located in a metal building on the edge of a field that grazes cattle. We get all manner of field critters in the building, either by accident or by design on their part, including a mouse that was in the upper corner of the sound insulation in the (very warm) audio booth with me this morning while I was recording a VO:

eek a mouse (47sec mp3 of audio booth hilarity)

PS: Yes, this is a very old drawing, but I’m at work, and he fits to nature of the post. This little guy first appeared in the Osprey to accompany an article about natural pest control.