So, yeah…about Holidailies. Didn’t get around to finishing that. Eh, there’s always next year. While I haven’t been posting, I have been doing a heck of a lot of drawing.

Started the year off with this fine specimen.It was 11:30 at night on January 1st and I was determined to start the year off on a good note by drawing something. I also found a mini-marathon of Star Trek: TNG, and got a little distracted. So I put the two together.

I did a bunch of animals, and played with ink washes and brushes:

A day or two later I got stuck. It happens to me a lot, because I get hung up on Working on My Career instead of just Drawing Pictures, which is sort of mission-critical for, y’know, working on my career. I had this funny little image of a cat in a flying sailboat that I kept putting off drawing because I didn’t know precisely what a sailboat looks like.

I let go of the precision I thought I wanted and got the idea down, just so I could move on to something else. Which is pretty much exactly what happened. I don’t know why it still surprises me that it works like that.

Plus,  I decided I liked the awkwardness of my little sailboat, and didn’t try to refine it when I went back and did a full painting based on my doodle a week or two later:

So that was last night. I’ve been wanting to work on my watercolor skills, so I went through the pages looking for something to paint (ohhhh, is that what sketchbooks are for? How novel!). I didn’t mean to finish it all in one go- I want to work on not rushing through projects and being able to finish things that I leave for more than one sitting, but I got carried away. It turned out pretty cute. There will probably be more flying sailboats this year.

But tonight I was going through my Drawer O’ Art Junk, and found an unused block of Master Carve. So I made a print block featuring my little buddy:

The speech bubble is empty on the block, so I can make the owl say anything by writing or typing into the speech bubble. I was thinking of using it as a personal bookplate.

So, stuff. The holidays were stressful at work and I spent a lot of my free time recovering. Then the new year got off to kind of a rough start- lots of sadness for a lot of my friends’ pets (in total, we lost two dogs, a cat, and a hamster within about two days of each other), then my dog got herself injured and needed stitches. Then we had a rather large earthquake here in Eureka. So it was just one thing after another that kept me away from the ol’ blog. But I kept drawing, so I had to share.

Tags: art, being blocked, cats, doodles, drawing, ink wash, linoleum, musk ox, owls, painting, pets, print, watercolor

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

Tags: art, batman, doodles, drawing, felt pens, gumby, jerry garcia, journal comic, lynda barry, manatee, meredith gran, octopus pie, peacock, pie, sable brush, spock

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.

Tags: audio, drawing, funny, mice, varmints, work

I have been daydreaming and doodling a lot because it frees me up in a way that “sitting down to Draw” does not. I can sit and stare at a blank page for hours and get nowhere, or I can make my pen move and come up with a page full of stuff like this. The choice is obvious.

I can always extract stuff from these pages full of doodles and make them into something finished later. But right now the key to staying in the habit of drawing seems to be to keep the pressure off. So I haven’t been making comics, and I haven’t been adding designs to my Zazzle shop, but I have been filling up my sketchbook with pages and pages of stuff!

I made the drawing of myself, and then turned the book 90 degrees and did the rest. At first I wanted to present the page oriented the way most of the drawings were oriented, but it started to seem kind of self-portrait-like the more I looked at it with me oriented properly. Plus it fits my blog design (which I have decided I hate and will be changing again soon) better.

Tags: being blocked, comics, doodles, drawing

I’m actually using this as a real checklist. I have pens and paper, but all of the other preparations beyond that need to be made!

Tags: 24-hour comic, checklist, comic, drawing, journal comic, works in progress