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

This past weekend Brad and I moved my drawing table out of the dark corner of the bedroom and into the frontroom, in front of a nice big window, in the hopes that it’ll make it more pleasant to sit and work at. So far, it’s working.

I’ve been doing a lot of journaling/listmaking about what I can do to be a more productive artist. I doodled a lot, and kept coming up with little owls with speech bubbles, making suggestions about what I should do. I found it a really amusing way to process my thoughts. Anyway, I decided through these little guys that what I should do is get out some of my nicest paper and plan on wrecking it. “Waste Paper!” the owls kept coming back to this basic principle of moving the pen for the sake of moving the pen, giving yourself permission to make a mess of whatever materials you want to play with at the time. Sounds like something I read recently
…imagine that!

So in answer to my own question: yes I am wasting paper! (I also made a shrinky dink of one of these advice-giving owls) And I’m having a great time. And, oh wait! I have something to post about! I think the owls are on to something…

Tags: art, drawing, fun, lynda barry, moving the pen, owls, shrinky dinks