refocus

I have a lot of thoughts about digital art vs. traditional media in illustration, but my overriding thought recently has been holy shit I need to actually be able to finish illustrating a book and get a mainland publisher without my kids wadding up my drawings or scribbling on them or hanging off my computer chair. Enthusiastic meddling aside, I only get two hours every evening with these kids, and I actually want to spend it with them. And I can't stay up late, because I can't. The night is my natural enemy. I am the creature that crows in the morning and gets shoes thrown at it. What I needed to do was to whittle more time out of the day elsewhere.

So I invested in a portable mess-free setup, which was kind of a big deal, and now I'm three illustrations into a serious book project. At work. On my lunch breaks. WITHOUT CHILDREN. And I'm obsessed with it. I haven't been really into anything for a long time, and I was beginning to be afraid I couldn't feel that kind of thing anymore. But this book is all mine - written, illustrated, aimed at the mainstream market - and I dream of page layouts and color palettes and character design. I also dream of kisses and footsies, because my sleeping brain can't differentiate very well between one lost feeling and another, but then I shove dream-smoocher aside and get back to imaginary drawing.

I'll still be finishing a drawing a week (or two or three?), but it's a larger work in progress, so there will be less art here and I will be back to talking about my liiiiife in this little space. Mostly about my truck, probably.

REVISED GOALS

1. Finish the book.

2. Submit the book.

3. Publish the book.

4. Rub elbows with Mo Willems and Adam Rex as a peer instead of annoying twitter fangirl.


Yessss.

The lookout for happy

I haven't been feeling much about anything for a few years. My doctor suggested I was depressed and tried to give me something to help with the sadness, and I said no - I'm not sad. I'm not anything. I'm just resting here, it's fine. Moving along in this smooth space and wondering if nothing will turn into happy soon, while being relieved that miserable is over.

 I've started being mindful to notice the happy when it happens.

* sat down with the family to watch a movie, handed Zenny a cup of decaf tea (mine is hot, hers is mostly milk and sugar). She sat with her ankles crossed and the cup up to her face, holding it with both hands and watching over the rim. She drank the whole thing and put the empty cup on a coaster. She looked like the two-year-old version of her twenty-year-old self, which she is.

* drove over a hill in the early morning, saw fog dragged across the farmland in layers of grey and purple. Elbowed Gavin. He looked up and said something about dragons. We drove down into the fog with the windows open so we could breathe the clouds.

* every day on the drive home, we swing the truck onto the small side road, and for ten seconds of acceleration the truck shimmies and rattles while Gavin and I say aaah and listen to our voices shake. When we take the car, there is no shimmy, but we both say aaaah when we hit the turnoff anyway, and then laugh about it. Leif is too absorbed in Calvin and Hobbes to notice, and looks up and says, "What? What's funny?" every time.

* the lilikoi vines cover our front windows. At about 5pm, the sun is low enough to get around the vines and hit the crystal hung in the window, and the livingroom fills with rainbows for 15 minutes. The kids and cats scatter, trying to catch them.

* in the summer the tree drops lychees, and in the winter the vines drop lilikoi. Some evenings we go outside and blow bubbles while the kids pile up fruit, listening to music.

* drawing.

* opening the slow cooker at the end of the day and guessing what I'll find inside.

sketches - bat and coyote

So one time Coyote saw some lizards sliding down a hill on rocks and totally wanted to join in, and they TOLD him not to try sliding down on the big rock, but he was like, PFFFT, and of course he did anyway, and of course he wiped out and got smashed to death by the rock. The lizards were really annoyed, but his gross body was smashed all over their sliding area, so they begrudgingly resurrected him.

We did this story for a school play on Black Mesa, and it was awesome. I wore a paper-mache lizard head and rolled around on one of those little square skateboards everyone crashes into the wall with in gym class. We set up a "hill" on one of the folding cafeteria benches with cardboard, and someone tried to roll down it and fell on their head. A+ theatrical experience.

And today I drew a bat during lunch break. 

Dropped cat sketches

Got a new pad of watercolor paper.

Majestic paradise

Went for a walk with the girl-child the other day. Passed a man screaming obscenities at his phone. Decided this was ok when we arrived at the man vomiting all over the sidewalk in front of us.

Drove downtown by the prison in Kalihi. Passed a man in prison jumpsuit running from the fence, looking over his shoulder and laughing like a person who had just busted out of prison.

Drove back home via the underside of Nimitz. Passed a man dressed in black with a full armored face mask, stalking along holding a giant sword.

Staying home to bake cookies today.

Coyote and rabbit

4x6, pencil and acrylic wash

If I have a niche I want to fill, it's folk tales. Gruesome, bloodthirsty, ancient folk tales. My years on the reservation gave me a love of Navajo coyote stories - which never end well for coyote - but I don't think I actually have any business re-telling and illustrating them. Because I'm super white. But if I could chase down a Navajo author and get their blessing in a partnership, it would be the actualization of a decades-old dream. The stories need telling. I have a battered old independently-pressed book of coyote stories from our days on the reservation, and it is one of the treasures I will run back into the burning house for.

So here is a little picture for my own self. 

Nuts

I found an itty bitty frame for my wall of produce, and the only itty bitty food I could find were 4 almonds in the staff room. Instead of scattering them artfully, I just lined them up. And then ate them. I DO WHAT I WANT, etc.

3x3, pencil and acrylic wash on watercolor paper

I only had brown, yellow, & white paint in my lunch bag. That is called a forcibly controlled palette.

overdue donation

The new-with-tags beanie baby kittens I sniped off of Ebay had been stuffed in a knotted plastic bag in the closet for a year, which is not the way to store a dozen kittens.

I saw them again while boxing up some thrift store donations and unbagged them, put them in a nice box, put the box in a gift bag, and carried them over to the ER. Sorry, babies who have been hospitalized without a kitten this year. Here's hoping these ones find their way into unhappy little hands and serve as some little nugget of kindness to hold on to during those very worst days. It meant more to me than to Zenny that a soft-hearted nurse hunted out a stuffed animal to give her while I was sobbing onto the ER social worker.

So that's that. If I'm going to plug any charity, it is donating to children in hospitals. Do that thing.

Dropped Cat No 1

The Po cat.

This one fits well in the nice wooden frames we have stacked in the basement that we couldn't find artwork for, so I'm happy. 

It's hard to get the right perspective with my phone. 

If her head looks too large, it's because the angle is tilted. 

 3 more splayed rug-cats to go. A skinny, not-black one next, because whoa. Fat black cats are hard to give any definition to. Luckily this one lays with her tongue hanging out and has alarming nipples.

Two weeks of resolve

Week 2: LaVie dove. 

4x6, pencil & acrylic wash on watercolor paper

This is the hairy little nestling that fell out of a 30-foot tree last year. She's doing well, and she goes outside most days to hang out with her boyfriend, then ditches him and comes in to eat and roost when it's raining. He sits outside and gets wet. She's a terrible girlfriend, but a great bird.


Housekeeping note: I have updated my website and I'm moving all the broken blog entries into my archives here, so there are posts for 2014 now.

a challenge is thrown down

Was clacking away at order lists while a patron told holiday stories to co-worker. Perked up when he mentioned visiting St. Penisburg. Wondered where St. Penisburg was and how long it would take to get there and what the souvenir snow globes would look like before the pieces clunked into place in my brain. Oh, St. PETERSburg. This was not much better for me. Went back to clacking at order list, red in the face.

SO. What I've decided, internet, is that I need an inspirational challenge. And what I need to produce is artwork, because I'm getting old as balls, probably, and all I have to show for my life's body of work are manically cheerful dinosaurs and portraits of lettuce leaves. So. One finished drawing a week. Not one a day, because then I'd just be scribbling out doodles of my stapler to get it done, but something a bit nicer that takes a bit of thought and preparation to finish.

Week 1: Pepper the Pissed Off Bulbul. She tries to take my eyes out every time I visit my mother, and this is her eff-you face, with her crown up.

Next I will be working on my Dropped Cats series. I am just warming up with pets. AM NOT A PET PORTRAIT ARTIST. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Except that it's super terrible. Call them animal studies.

Start as you mean to go on

And suddenly it is a new year. Again. 

I did my duty as a first-world holiday glutton and got on the scale. Screamed. Died. Made coffee. Complained to my mother. Knitted for the rest of the day while watching Doc Martin. So that's handled, then.

This is the year to grow roots, says me. A year to renovate the bathroom ceiling, build an outdoor shower, set up my painting studio, finish a quilt, plant vegetables that thrive on neglect. The lilikoi has become an entity, the arugula has taken over the front garden, and the Japanese eggplant has become a monster in the back. My idea of magical cozy homes are overgrown, vine-covered, unruly, and filled with books and artwork.  

Getting there. 

Also this was taken yesterday. See how wintry it is? Not wintry at all, that is how.

Started by raking up a bin full of leaves until my thumb blistered, which took care of one of the holiday pounds. In fluid, mostly. From my thumb.

This is the year something big should change, says my mother. She is tired of being lonely in her little condo with irritating neighbors and a frustrating job. She has been making an effort to ride with her bike gang and write her stories and get out to cultural events. "I should have married," she says. "But I don't like meeting men. What I need is a man I already know. Tell your blog I have a spare bedroom for visitors." She does, boyfriends-past. "That might make me tidy the spare bedroom." That means I'll be tidying it, but that's ok, because I'm a busybody like that. 

My mother, 1982 or '83

And I wanted to start the year with art stuff, to gain rolling momentum, so here is the drawing of Xebo I made for my mother. I did one of Hercules, too, but forgot to take a picture of it. He died kind of close to Christmas, so I was a blazing beam of focus.

Pencil & acrylic wash on Strathmore cold-pressed watercolor paper, 4x6

I'm not going to start a pet portraiture thing of it, but I do want a portrait of everyone in the family on the gallery wall. Well, the hallway wall. It will be a gallery when there is art on it, because I say so.

Also I'm going to knit some socks.

And that's the inspirational Start of the New Year with Obligatory Fitness Remorse post.

Yearly goals encouraged in the comments. (Your own. I know mine already.)