35 posts tagged “drawings”
This is a scribble from my recent travels. I saw this phrase on a sign in Boston near the main library. I thought the phrase was hilarious. Some people didn't take it as lightly and seemed offended that a sign told them they're boring, which is sort of hilarious in its own right. Anyway, here is the scribble based on that sign. If you are bored, I am not accusing you of being boring. But if you are bored, you may want to do something exciting - just in case you do happen to be boring.
Things have been going okay, I guess. The drawings keep coming along, so life is good on the art front. My scribbles are moving in another new direction, which may or may not be a good thing. My dad also sent out my old easle and a bunch of stretcher frames, so I have the best of intentions to get started on another new something that's not (just) a scribble. Hopefully I'll get that going in the next few days - or at the latest over the weekend.
The only thing I'm struggling with, I guess, is that even though I feel like my identity is moving away from my day job and into art, I still only have a little bit of time each day to do work that really means anything to me. I say I'm an artist and I don't feel like an office manager, but I can't really do my art and I am really still just (yes, just) an office manager. It's frustrating. The light at the tunnel (to use a hackneyed phrase) is knowing that one day I'll be arting full time. It's easier to deal with my 9 to 5 when I keep that in mind, but it's been hard lately.
Here's a doodle from a staff meeting:
Here's a scribble from a few weeks ago (he's pointing at a torn out page):
I drew this earlier in the week, determined to reunite with my long-lost colors. The crayon job on this scribble isn't great by any means, but I think it adds a fun dimension to my normally black and white drawings. The head shape on this guy was inspired by my ferret, Ms. Weasel Marie (not her real name), but I ended up adding the chin part of his face to make him look a little less weaselly.
My art + work adventure has been going better than I expected. The boyfriend (not his real name) is doing a great job of getting me into my studio, even after a full 8 hour day at my frequently stressful job. The art I'm making probably isn't as good as it would be if I were arting full-time, but I am getting pen to paper - and now crayon to paper, too. Oh, colors! How I've missed you!
I am healthy again! Thank you all for your well wishes. My flu was short lived, but severe. I haven't been that sick with just a head cold and a fever for a very long time. Ah, well. The important thing is that I feel better. I watched more daytime television than I care to remember and a lot of rental movies (Recommended: King of California, Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf?. Recommended if you have nothing else to watch: Waitress. Not recommended: Dan in Real Life. Please, if you have any respect for yourself and your time, stay away!: Darjeeling Limited, Into the Wild).
Sorry for the non-art digression. The good news is that I am well. The sad news is that I was so sick I couldn't pick up a pen to draw some awesome fever-induced hallucinogenic scribbles. I am back in the saddle, now, though and realized that I don't need a fever to draw hallucenogenic scribbles! My drawings sort of have that great "fever induced" quality to them anyway.
The scribble I'm posting today was drawn when there was a lot of talk on various art blogs about the importance of drawing what you see. I felt a little guilty that I hadn't been drawing more things inspired by real life. The last time I painted or drew a still life was in college - and that was only because I had to. The last time I painted from a picture was ... about a year ago in a painting that I never finished. All of that explains the word balloon. The few of you who know me in real life may think that this looks like someone from my real life. That's just a coincidence and you should not read into it. It adds no extra meaning to the scribble. It just turned out that his mouth looked weird so I turned it into some facial hair. And to you whom this scribble resembles: I mean no offense; the resemblance here just wasn't intentional.
(Or The Flu: Part 3)
Yes, friends, I have my third bout of the flu since this flu season started. I blame the first sickness on law school stress, the second on my sick cousins who don't know when they shouldn't come to Grandma's house for Christmas, and the third (and hopefully final) flu on my dear boyfriend who brought this particularly resilient strain back from a conference in Ely, Nevada. They grow strong bugs in eastern Nevada (perhaps because it's near military testing sites?). If all is fair in the world, I won't get sick again for three years.
I am finally well enough to sit up and not feel like I'm going to faint, so I figured I'd take a second and post a new picture. This is a fun, self-referential scribble. I wish I could take credit for the word balloon. When I started this drawing, all I knew is that I wanted to do a drawing with a "C" shaped mouth. I drew the "C" mouthed man, who ended up looking angry. With a "C" mouth, he looked like he needed to be screaming something, but a few days went by and I couldn't come up with anything worthy enough for the balloon. Frustrated, I asked my cousin M-----l for help. He had a list of pretty hilarious possibilities (inluding: "Damn robots!" "Come back here, bird!" and "I love everyone!"), but this one eventually won.
Hello again folkies! I'm sorry I've been away so long. A few of you know that I recently moved to a new city with nothing but some clothes and my sketch books. Well, even more recently (the day of my last post, actually) I moved my boyfriend and all of our stuff to the new city, too. I am thrilled to have my boyfriend back, and I'm kind of happy to have all of my things back. I wish I could say the last two weeks have been a joyful reunion with my estranged art supplies and that I've been holed up in my new art room playing with colors and materials I haven't had for about a half a year. (sigh) Instead, I've been pulling things out of boxes and setting up our new home. It's time consuming and energy draining, but I'm happy to say that the new house is (almost, nearly) put together. I've managed to steal away a few snippets of hours here and there for scribbling, but I've sadly had no time to work on the bigger projects I've been thinking about. The drawings since Stuff and I have been reunited have been really hit-or-miss. I blame it on busyness. I don't have any of them in my computer anyway, so a drawing that's a few weeks old will have to suffice.
This drawing makes me smile. Like most of my drawings, this one just sort of fell together. His hair was modeled on some graffiti art I saw on a walk, but I like how it works here since it sort of looks like feathers or like he's un-materializing (if that's a word).
I called this one "Family Curse" because even though it's a self portrait, the face reminds me of my brother when he was younger. I didn't think my brother and I looked at all alike until I drew this, and I definitely see both of us in the same face. By the same token, it doesn't look like either of us because I just was scribbling from my head again. I was in a coffee shop and just had a conversation about the unintentional representation of people I know in my scribbles. I decided I might as well draw one that I intend to look sort of like me, and not just capture my thoughts.
By the way, I don't have a dark cloud over my head (most of the time - certainly not today), and from what I know my brother doesn't either. If there is a Family Curse, it is that we all tend to head into the arts. My dad and his brother, my brother, and several of my cousins are in the arts (painter, musician, poet, photographer, poet, etc).
This scribble was inspired by one of my single best street finds: a full play written by a kid. It was this crazy story about war and gods and demons, and it was fraught with amazing misspellings (like "groull"). I have a plan to turn it into an illustrated story, but this was just a random scribble from one of my favorite parts of the play, where a newly introduced demon character groulls for no apparent reason. As the caption along the left indicates, this particular scribble was much cuter than I intended or wanted, but I have high hopes that the full illustrated version will be fantastically strange.
I do a lot of things. They all influence and make up "who I am" in some way or another. There are some things, though, that are more fundamental than others - things that make me who I am even after you strip away the labels of office manager and liberal Democrat and backpacker and canvas-bag-toting hippie bike-rider and Ohioan turned Nevadan and brunette giantess. This isn't a drawing about all of those extraneous things. It is just about those things that I wish wasn't a part of the self equation (particularly the label of "office manager"). Where even saying "this is not who I am" as I plod off to work helps, in some way, to define who it is I really want to be.
Here are two scribbles, drawn almost a year apart, with basically the same theme. Both drawings are loosely based on real people, which is a rarity for me, and both depict painfully shy women I've seen on the bus or meandering the streets. Neither woman looked like she wanted to be noticed - let alone exist - and they both managed to disappear completely to most of the world. Needless to say, I found them fascinating and oddly beautiful. Unfortunately, when something piques my interest like they did, I can't bring myself to look away. I've got this artist's glare. I'm sure that since they were trying to disappear, they were none too happy that some weird gal with a Moleskine was staring at them.
January 2008: I saw this woman walking through the streets of Reno.
March (ish) 2007: This woman was on a bus in Las Vegas.
