I took the holidays off and now it’s time to get back to it. I don’t really do resolutions. Building momentum, on the other hand, is a different story. I’m starting the year off with a little art and a little statement. Love him or hate him, number 45 is a symptom of the U.S. political disease, not its cause and definitely not the cure. I plan to make myself heard in 2018. This cartoon is my first step and my first bit of momentum.
We’re into the holidays so my posting has slowed a little bit and I might have contracted some minor writer’s/artist block. I figured I should put up something so, here’s an athletic couple’s caricature. I’ll go digging back through old stories. I’ll see if I can tweek something and drop it here.
A basic black and white caricature. No color, no shading, just line and that’s just fine by me. Line is the most simple and most expressive tool in an artist’s kit. I’m a line junkie. Line is sexy.
There is a story in my head that wants out and if I don’t get it out it will make me a little crazy. To avoid insanity these past couple of weeks I found myself writing, or rather, trying to write. Writing is annoying and hard, but I still do it and I’ve discovered something.
I find my writing process has more in common with a blacksmith working with iron than anything else. My ideas collect and pool together, heating up in the fires of my brain. Purifying and distilling themselves. I pour off the impurities keeping the best parts of my idea. At least, I like to think that happens. I’m sure plenty of dross sticks around. I dump it out of my head and on to the page. Hoping to mold it into a general shape. And then beat the crap out of it and try shape it and sharpen it into something presentable, getting burned, banged and bruised in the process.
Someone should have warned me. My lit and writing teachers never mentioned this. I bet it’s easier wrestling metal into submission than my jumbled thoughts. At the very least I would get a useful object out of it, instead of a random piece of writing about writing.
This month is October and I’m an artist, so I supposedly should be participating in, Inktober. Inktober, for the uninitiated, is an art challenge where you create an ink drawing for every day in the month of October. It’s not a bad idea, especially if you’er a digital artist. For me, on the other hand, drawing with ink is literally* my job. So, I could participate, but I don’t wanna. I did do something to go with the madness of the month. I did a drawing based on what I predict will be the hot scary costume for 2017. They’er are going to be everywhere and this is how I’m prepping for ‘It.’ (See what I did there?)
*When I say ‘literally’ I don’t mean ‘figuratively’… EVER.