It Started with a Sketch

Watercolor Wings

Wings & Words

More watercolor sketching (though I did use some pencil under this one).  The background is a pale green wash that doesn't show up in photos.

 "All art is always created from a base of someone else’s work. There is no 'new.' No one invents art. You always have a base of someone you’re—I can’t think of any other word to use—you’re *copying* them even if you don’t remember it. It might be Picasso, it might be Michelangelo’s finger, it might be Da Vinci’s earlobe…but you’ll remember it. That’s the creative process: you look at things and you’re impressed by it, and your job then is to show it to others and say, 'I like this, look at this.' Or, 'I hate this, look at this.' That’s what the artistic
life is all about."
Ed Emberley

Little Red Sketchbook

Yesterday I started decorating my little red moleskine with a white gel pen. Today I filled in the "scales" with poster marker & decided to watercolor over. 

Also got in some observation sketching, with watercolor instead of pencil.

Fold & Paint

Slacked off in drawing this week past, but still keeping up with the creative endeavors.

Anatomy

Started a list of story skeletons. Building them up, bone by bone, until I have enough structure to grow muscle & organs. Until they are walking on their own.

Note to self: anatomy lessons 

Letters From Space

A story found me last week.  It's been such a long time since one appeared so clearly, I almost let it fly out the window.  

I've been finding letters. Tucked into corners, on windowsills or in my laundry basket or slipped inside a kitchen drawer. One morning I woke up and found an envelope under my pillow. Another stuck to my ceiling.  Balancing carefully on a chair to reach it, I felt a slight static-like crackling as I peeled it down. But it wasn't static electricity. I don't know what it was. I only find them in the apartment. Never anywhere else, not even just outside the door and certainly never in the mailbox with the bills and advertisements and occasional letters from distant friends. 

 The content of each one varies, the first appeared to be a standard written note, the next a rough sketch of a plant or animal. A few have been what look like maps of stars. None of it is familiar to me. The writing is in a language I have never seen, the shapes almost akin to those of the English alphabet in places, but altered beyond my understanding. The same sort of slight similarity occurs in the drawings.

Just Create to Create

I am playing in my sketchbook, reacquainting my hand with the flow of pencil on paper.  Remembering, rediscovering, opening, expanding, exploring.

Blank Page

They give me the need to fill the space, and yet I find myself frozen, hand hovering just over the surface, poised to make that first mark - and the empty white space rushes up around me and blinds me.

Swimmer

My mother found me in an abandoned rowboat, washed up on the beach. They didn't know I'd been born in the ocean.

A man, a single fin on his feet, swimming across the television screen as a voice announces him as the longest-breath-holder in the world. Only a moment of my attention. Instant inspiration. An idea forms and will not let me go. Here I lay a fragment of it; but it is the strongest fragment, the piece that stays in my mind and tells me "Here, look here!".