Mini Update

It hasn't been a full week since my last post but that post didn't have much in the way of art in it so this is more like a...supplemental. 

Not that this will have much art in it. Because I've not been making much worth seeing over the last little bit. But it will have a little. 

More than the last one at least. 

I haven't been idle -- I've been working on, well...I guess the best way to put it is working on playing? I've been rather dissatisfied lately with a lot of what I've done and feeling that my ideas are stagnant. As well as my skill. I've been suffering the perennial fear that my ability and creativity have fled and that I will never make anything good again and will have to become a waitress in a diner in a small town in the Midwest, become mildly racist, start calling everyone 'hun', and change my name to Flo. 

Anyway, to combat this crippling fear, I've been trying to rediscover the enjoyment in just doodling. I've been pulling out my sketchbook and finding old, half-finished sketches and working on them while I marathon How to Get Away With Murder, not sticking to any strict plan, adding things where I feel like adding them and not getting too worked up when a line turns out messy or something doesn't come out quite right, since they were pictures I didn't even care enough about to finish in the first place, just experimenting with style and line weight and decorative elements and taking bits I don't like and doodling over them and trying something new. 

BUUUTTT none of that is really worthwhile quality to post here. It's really honestly not very good doodling. Not self-deprecating 'oh it's just a doodle' masterworks. Honestly pretty crappy doodles.

However, I had worked on one or two things lately. 

This is the first prompt from a 100-theme list of prompts. The prompt was 'introduction'. I wanted to play with dark and light and with landscape, so I decided to take it literally and make it like...an introductory page of a graphic novel or something. I used it as warm-up art at work for a while, doodling on it a little at a time. 

Like, I said, this is the first of 100 themes, and the idea was to use them as warm up drawing material...but work has been too hectic for me to really have time to do warm-ups and I haven't really been doing any drawing at work for which I need to warm up. Most recently, I have been rediscovering whether I know how to use InDesign, which I...kind of do. I mean, I have had to mess around with it for a few projects so far, but right now I'm laying out a whole media kit and holy crap, from remembering how to do columns and remembering how to do duotone colorization and where blending options live...WOW. And just...you know...laying out the whole damn media kit. With which I am still sure I'm going to crash and burn, of course, but...we're making progress. I think. I hope. Something. I was told today not to have any white type on dark blue because the Boss Man doesn't love it -- and of course, half of what I have has white on dark blue so I'm gonna have to rework THAT, but...

Anyway, back to art stuff. 

The other really pretty cool project that I worked on recently was a collaboration with a friend of mine, and  little different than the kind of thing I usually post. 

I had sketches that I used to work out ideas and figure out our themes and setup and unfortunately, they were drawn in 4-H lead and never detailed beyond the very rough stage, and so I just wasn't able to get a good enough picture of them to even clean up in Photoshop -- the contrast was so low that when I tried to adjust the levels the whole thing just got muddy. 

But anyway, I came up with this idea last Christmas when I was going through some stuff and the theme is dark but it was well...it was meant to express dark feelings and some stuff I was going through. I'm just going to post a couple of the images here but I'll post links to some more extensive sets if you are interested. 

I think, tonight my doodling will include a little tightening up of the concept sketches I made, and then I'll come back and add them in. Oh and the links: cocktail hour, suburban necktie, the Joy of Cooking, Clean conscience.

Now, time for tea, art, and murder. 

Until next week!