I've been trying to come up with something with the appropriate amount of gravitas to say for my first post of the year. This has been unsuccessful, so now I'm just going to say something and move on.
This year, the main goal is to stop thinking about shit so much and instead make like Shia LeBeouf and just do it. This is particularly pertinent to my art — I made some progress in overcoming my aversion to "wasting" sketchbook paper last year, but I've noticed I'm still not immune to the pressure to find the perfect scene or reference to draw. This eats up a lot of time that could be spent doing literally anything else.
At some point in the future, I might be mentally stable enough to do something more measurable like daily drawings. As it is, I'm a completionist, and having any concrete evidence of days that I've failed to do [x] thing only makes me more likely not to continue doing [x] thing because I've already gone and fucked up my record anyway. For now, I'll just do what I can when I can (and make an active effort to find the time).
On the topic of finding the time, I've started pulling out my sketchbook and drawing something around me whenever I feel the impulse to check my phone. Most of the time, that "something" is a mundane man-made object, so I can't waste time looking for something photogenic. Also, sometimes it sucks. It's fine!
Spontaneous travel sketches done in green pen (Platinum Preppy 03 inked with Diamine Evergreen). Left: A sketch of traffic done while waiting in traffic. Right: A sketch of a table at a mall coffee shop.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm feeding into the online sketchbook consumption problem by posting pages, even bad ones, here, but this is a shitty unserious blog that I don't really expect anyone to look at. If it stops being that, I'm dead and have been replaced by a body double. Happy new year!
Two drawings of sunflower bouquets in brown ink and alcohol marker. The marker was used in single-colored rectangles surrounding each of the flowers. The drawing on the right features black eyed susans and uses yellow, light and dark green, and orange. The drawing on the left features lilies and uses yellow, pink, orange, and peach. The author is bad at flower identification and can't tell you much about the rest of the flowers.
I've been faffing around with a Sailor fude nib I bought a few weeks ago. Fude nibs are bent upwards so they provide line variation as you change your pen angle, similar to a brush or brush pen. I'm still pretty bad at using the nib intentionally, but it does cool stuff if you mindlessly draw with it. You can block in color really fast with it, which is awesome but also requires frequent dipping, even with the built-in feed it comes with, because that is a fuckton of ink.
I think fude lines are bold enough to stand on their own, but I plonked the marker on top to make things more fun!
An ink and watercolor painting of a plate of dim sum. (Clockwise from top left: pork bun, pan-fried dumplings, snow pea leaves, barbeque pork, and shrimp dumplings, with chili oil). A pair of black chopsticks rests on the edge of the plate, which is porcelain with floral patterns glazed on in blue.
The paint palette and pen used on this painting are pictured beside it.
I picked up a box of Platinum Carbon Black cartridges at a local art supply store yesterday. It's waterproof, so I thought it would be a good tool to have when I'm out and want to draw something to paint later.
I was holding out on trying Carbon Black because it tends to dry out from neglect in speedy fashion, and I'm a professional art supply neglecter (real title, it's on my resume). Fortunately for me, Tina Koyama's idle testing found that Platinum pen caps seal tight enough to keep even pigment-based ink wet for months. I had a spare Platinum Preppy laying around, so it's the designated Carbon Black pen now (and until the end of time, probably)!
I got lazy mixing colors, so I used a whopping ten paints (not counting white). I panic-added yellow gouache at the end because I didn't feel like the chili oil was orange enough, and I don't have yellow watercolor... Perks of only using secondhand tubes!
This is a reprint of my submission to Salad Magazine issue 3. Check out what everyone else submitted too!
An ink painting of a spilled ink bottle. (The bottle in the painting holds the ink that was used to paint it.) The spilled ink transitions into a painting of a starry night sky looming over a forest of deciduous trees. The trees and stars are reflected in a lake. The sky was created by dropping ink in water, resulting in abstract blooms that resemble clouds. Glitter varnish was brushed over the sky to create the stars.
I've been thinking about my sketchbook in terms of "how" instead of "what": I pick a medium or color palette I want to experiment with or improve at and dedicate the entire spread to that. It's helped me avoid succumbing to perfectionism-induced decision paralysis because I just think about cool stuff I want to try instead of getting stuck on making a pretty picture.
Drawings using one ink and water. Left: A coffee cup drawn with Diamine Pick Me Up, a brown ink, and Diamine Safari, an olive green ink, used to draw its own bottle. Right: A tree drawn with Rohrer & Klingner Alt-Goldgrün, another olive green ink.
