A Drawing Coming To Life: The Beauty of Watching A Drawing Grow

When you get an idea for a drawing you are excited and you want to see it pop up on the page just like that. In the midst of creating it's so easy to get all carried away in the manic energy that often comes with inspiration. It's also very easy to fall into a rut and go for weeks without making any progress in your drawing. Figuring out the balance between spurts of creative fury, which often produces a whirl wind of under developed ideas, and creative dry spells which produce nothing at all, has been my quest over the past several months. In many ways I am an artist still at the very beginning of my journey. At points further down my path I hope are series of paintings, gallery shows, and community with other artists. That path that I hope so desperately to progress on is paved with drawings, studies, and prototypes. With this in mind I have been trying to better my process of creating. I want my work to take more time because I am including more details and layers but I don't want it to take so much time that it never gets finished. So here is another drawing from the series I mentioned in a previous post. These ethereal little girls are going to eventually star in a series of paintings about the expectations placed on little girls by various entities in their lives. Calling upon the pageant culture and my own childhood experiences for inspiration. I am posting three pictures of this drawing in progress to show how taking time to build the drawing is just as much art as the finished drawing itself.

Obama In A Crane Machine: The Art Of Absurdity Is All Around You

Obama? In a crane machine? Yes! There was a Romney too, I just couldn't get a good picture of it. As an artist I was just born with different eyes. For some reason they are ultra sensitive to things that are ironic, absurd, or over the top. This is probably why upon walking into Walmart yesterday my attention immediately snapped to the crane machine in the corner sporting the giant plush heads of Barak Obama and Mitt Romney. To me moments of absurdity like this speak so much about our culture. The sight of the political candidates as toys in a Walmart arcade game brought a little bit of the "larger than life" of the personalities of Obama And Romney into my little, small town corner of the world. This splash of personality and satire is exactly why I feel that catching this image was capturing a moment of art. Art isn't a static picture on a wall. It can be a moment, a phrase, or something that is simply absurd. What is absurd in your world? What moments of art can you capture?

From The Craft Table

Sometimes you have to take a break from drawing all those details and make something fun and colorful. Inspired by by my love of street art and retro video games, I decided to make some Space Invader coasters. The fact that I had a giant bucket of Perler beads was a factor as well. I found the zen of placing each bead calming and meditative. I started with the intention of making a set of four but I ended up making five sets of four. Having all of these great little 8bit aliens in front of me made me muse about throwing a giant 8bit party. I should do that sometime. Anyway gaze upon my neon coasters, any ideas you have about making them for yourself and using them for pasting up purposes instead of home use are not my fault.

Tiny Work In Progress

Several days ago a friend of mine and I decided that we would swap artistic creations. I asked her for a color and a theme and she gave me red and mantis shrimp. She continued to tell me that she found mantis shrimp inspiring because they have the most complicated eyes of the entire animal kingdom and that they could see a much wider range of color than any other animal. I also found that inspiring. This is my progress so far on this fun project:

Sketchbook Update

Here are some things I have been working on in my sketchbook lately. I have an idea for a series of paintings that I have been developing drawings for.

I just have to put this out there because it's on my mind. I know that the shooting in Colorado has nothing to do with me, I didn't know anyone involved and, thanks be, I definitely didn't know the shooter, but every time I see something like this I always feel so strongly about the fact that if you need to express yourself, use art. We all have dark feelings, we all get angry. Lots of people out there feel the need to express shock or horror, that's why we WRITE and PAINT, We scream out punk vocals, or sing a heart wrenching balad. Whatever you have to do, but you make a creative record of your experiences. Hit people with ideas and images not fists and bullets. You will still be remembered and you might actually create something beautiful instead of something destructive that no one understands.

Exercise is good for ya!

I was in the library doing research for my art work and I found a book of drawing exercises and this drawing is what resulted from doing one of them. I had to pick two numbers which randomly assigned me the two words elephant and bathtub. My job was to make a drawing using the two objects and I came up with an elephant feeding his pet fish who lives in a bathtub.it was silly, but exactly the kind of thing I need to get myself rolling again.

Resurrection....

It has been a long time since I have posted a new blog. I could rattle off all kinds of reasons but, honestly, I have no idea why I am prone to letting important things slip through my fingers. Luckily there is grace and there are second chances in this world so I am affording those things to myself and starting again. Over the time that I have been absent I have been focusing on increasing my skills in drawing and painting. I have recovered from surgery and sickness. I have fallen into pockets of depression only to come out of them realizing that I have wasted months of my life. I have a long way to go, but I am still young and as long as I am alive I get to keep trying. That was a lot of personal information, but I started this blog not only to give my creativity a voice, but to exercise honesty about the things that make me a creative person.