37 posts tagged “pen & ink”
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.
My dears. I've been traveling and drawing and holing up and ignoring most things for the better part of a month. I apologize. The good news is that I have many stories and many new scribbles. I also have a good handful of scribbles that are quite different from anything I've drawn before.
I've been working hard on a new "monstrous hybrid" (mixed media piece). I haven't done much scribbling lately and (obviously) haven't posted to vox in well over a week. The painting/drawing has been going really well, though. It's been a lot of fun, and I hope the end result of all of the drawing and erasing (and drawing and erasing...) will be less than disastrous, and may even be decent.
To give full credit, I stole the term "monstrous hybrid" from a book I'm reading, which stole it from somewhere I can't remember. The book is Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things and is one of the more interesting books I've read in a while. It focuses on the design problems of industry, which are many and terrifying, but it also discusses fascinating approaches to solving those problems. How with a little creativity, we can have industry that actually works with the earth instead of against it. Anyway. This isn't the place for a book review.
And to give completely full credit, the title of this post was stolen from the first line of one of my favorite songs by Uncle Tupelo, "New Madrid" from the album Anodyne.
Here's a scribble:
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):
Drawing & arting & scribbling has been going pretty well. The boyfriend has been persistent in scooting me off to the art room after work. I work on something - even if it's just a new scribble - almost every day, which is far beyond where I was even a few months ago. It's been good. Most days I need a little push to get me off and working because I'm so tired from my 9 to 5, but it's easier than it was. As the weeks go on and as I'm working more, art is becoming a source of energy rather than a frequently stressful drain. I guess it's the difference between a passion and a hobby. I can ignore hobbies, not happily, but it is possible. But when I say something is a passion, the only choice is doing it or having it lapse back into a hobby. Anyway, I'm glad I'm keeping the art going. It seems the only thing I'm sacrificing is reading. I've only read 200 pages of a novel and a graphic novel in the last month or so. It's embarrassing.
I am happy to announce that I drew from life for the first time in years this past week. Part was fear that I'd lost my drawing chops, but most was that I never made time for this kind of art. It's pencil, water color, and oil pastel. I don't know if those three can go together in real life, but they seemed to work here. At least I think they seem to.
And for old time's sake, here's a new scribble. I drew this when I was going to rescue my boyfriend from the bowels of Las Vegas and the stress of living alone with both of our pets. So here we are. This drawing has nothing to do with that, but when I look at it, I clearly remember the turbulence of the flight and how it made the word balloon head look like a zombie. Hope it's not too shaky.
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!
(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.
