Category: Art

Examples, instruction, advice, recommendations, and more.

Too hot not to cool down

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Like every twenty-first century critter, I am surrounded by exciting possibilities that latch onto the throat of my life and suck out my plasma. Every second is so jam-crammed with diversions: 500 channels, ten billion websites, a zillion blogs and podcasts and videocasts and magazines and art supply stores and people to chat with and email with and lunch with and … gak!

Life is American Idolized as our culture dangles the carrot of success and adoration at every street corner and browser window. Everyone is getting their 15 megabytes of fame. We keep inventing more and more entertainment and interactivity and yet my watch still only manages to tick off 24 hours each day and my calendar only offers seven days each week.
I am a child who’s lost in the candy-store so long he is exhausted from hyperglycemic sugar fits. My cheeks are stained by tears and smeared with corn syrup. My tongue aches, my taste buds refuse to respond. I am slumped in the corner after a glut of trying to podcast and videopod and become a ‘serious artist’ and promote my books and answer every piece of friendly email and delete all the spam and plan my next blog entry and I am lonely from breaking appointments with friends because I am dull and spent and just want to put my feet up and watchHouse.
But most of all, I am sick of what has happened to my drawing.
Between advertising and books and illustrations and design projects and blogging, I forgot what the hell I am doing.
I have lost touch with the most important thing to me, my life as I live it. Not my life as it is ornamented and sugar crusted but the plain old eat-some-cereal, smell-the-tuberose, watch-the-dog-sunbathe life that I actually lead. The life that isn’t destined for some other purpose or audience or analysis but just is. The authentic life that starts each day with an emptying bladder and wraps it up with a stretch of floss.
It’s not just me. It’s easy for anyone to get caught up with the enthusiasm for this drawing stuff to get overly involved in drawing prompts, in posting to a blog, to shopping for art supplies, taking classes, and planning sketchcrawls, and to forget the most important thing, the true purpose of it all. To draw what you live so you will live it more deeply.

Life without drawing is bad.
And drawing without life is bad too.

I am going to go out and have that tattooed on me somewhere prominent. But first, let me do some research into tattooing, pick a type face, plan out a color palette, comparison-shop pain killers…

Trial balloon

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For a while now, I have been thinking about getting out of my journal and doing something a little more ambitious: a real painting. I tend to work very spontaneously and unpremeditated usually; maybe it was working on the HOW cover that prompted to try a piece that would take time and planning, something with some meaning beyond the quotidian that usually lies at the heart of my art-making.

I decided to work from a photograph, something I could study over a long period and that wouldn’t change. I felt that my art should somehow come from the sort of experience I have most, the sort of activity that takes up an awful lot of people’s times and yet is not dealt much with in art. So I searched for photographs people had taken during meetings and posted on the Internet. Eventually I collected a dozen or so high-res images which I narrowed down to an initial candidate.

Over three days, I drew from large black & white and color prints of the photograph, slowly and carefully drawing the contours of every person and object in the scene using a dip pen and waterproof Higgins ink. Then I slowly layered on watercolors. I finished the painting in a burst of activity, after waking up very inspired at 5 a.m. one day the sun had just finished rising when I took a break, sipped a cup of tea and examined my work.

What a turd!

The colors were garish — the dominant hues were drawn from the tacky corporate meeting room decor: a bright teal, a red-violet and some patches of cad orange. The drawing, which I had excused in the initial phase because it was pure line with no shading, lacked any character or point of view, like a cheap coloring book. The composition was mawkish and lead the eye nowhere.

As a final desperate effort, I took the painting intro the kitchen and ran it under the tap for a few minutes. The only color that remained was what pigment had dyed deep into the 140 lb. watercolor paper. It had an interesting pastel effect but was still a turd, a runny one.
I have been thinking about this experience over the three days since the final disaster and I am very happy. I learned so much. I’d violated almost every lesson I have picked up over the last decade and, in doing so, reinforced them to myself:

I drew something I have no connection to. I used a photo I hadn’t taken of a scene I’ve never experienced nor cared about. I couldn’t find any meaning in it because it had none for me. No meaning, no feeling.
I was being pretentious. I tried to make some sort of snarky statement about modern life or work or the human condition like some latter-day Brueghel or Courbet and discovered I had nothing but cynicism to express, hardly the basis for interesting art.
I set out to make something not for its own sake but to hang on the wall somewhere. My art is about what I am living through, a way of seeing deeper in to the moment; the art itself is a by-product of the process. That’s why illustration projects are such a different experience for me. The only assignments I would really, really love to do would ones that sent me somewhere and just asked me to record my experiences.
Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but enjoy the process. There was something quite soothing about working my way through all the details of the image, sort of like doing a crossword or needle point.
And it showed me that, if I want to, I should do another longer range drawing like this but do it from life, of something I care about and derive meaning from.
The best experiments can be failures.
Like my beard, which I shaved off this morning.
Movin’ on.

Posted in Art

A religion

dannygregory2 Comments

oah: HI!
Tess: Hey Danny!
Noah and I are reading your book Creative Lisence in class and it has been one of the most inspiring book we have evr read, and we are on the 20th page! It is like a religion all it’s own. It has all the elements and honestly has done more for me than any religion has even begun to.

Are you religious? This is the only of your books iv’e read so I don’t know if you had alluded to it, but Noah was just wondering. He wants to know if you would want to start a religion with him. o.O

If you have the time, please write as back as we wuld love to be in contact with such an inspirational person ^_^

Thank You,
Tess and Noah
——
Dear Tess and Noah:

Indeed it is a religion.
Here are the ten commandments:
I. Thou shall not be afraid of making things.
II. Thou shall not erase. Well, not too often.
III. Thou ought to keep a journal of your life and draw the stuff that strikes you as cool and make little notes next to it and stuff.
IV. Thou shall not not play around.
V. Thou shall not covet they neighbor’s art work as thine own.
VI. Thou shall remind other people that they can draw even if they think they can’t.
VII. Thou shall not judge too harshly.
VIII. I 8 a dead horse.
IX. Thou shall draw on the Sabbath, but not only on the Sabbath.
X. Thou shall not make lists with more than IX things in them.

Your pal,
Danny

How to draw a How cover

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How:Design Ideas at Work is a great magazine, primarily for graphic designers and art directors. It has a lot of practical advice as well as coverage of the leading edges of design, advertising, and art. Recently, I was asked to write an long (8-page) article about how drawing and journal keeping can feed one’s creativity. It was a topic I’d long wanted to address to the professional image-making community because so many of those folks have lost their touch with drawing, though it was probably the very thing that got them into their chosen field at the get-go.
I am pretty happy with the article and was delighted when the senior art director for the magazine also asked me to draw the cover for the issue, a special one dedicated to Illustration. How has a fairly strict format for the cover, one that revolves around their enormous logo, so I did a design that integrated the three letters into my idea. Because illustration is a personal medium, I liked the idea of putting a thumbprint on the cover, maybe the thumb of an artist sighting his subject. I did a quick sketch of myself in that pose, colored it on my computer, and fired it off to her.


Unfortunately, the magazine’s staff felt that the image was confusing. Some didn’t like the fact that the fist might interfere with the coverlines (the titles of the articles inside). Then some others thought it was a person giving a thumbs up, rather than sighting.
Back to the drawing board. The art director suggested I just draw a hand drawing the logo filled with clouds with some art supplies scattered around. I resisted this idea and instead thought I could make a little design out of pens and stuff. I cobbled together a collage from drawings I’d already done to convey the idea.

My client didn’t like this design much because it doesn’t play up the logo enough and was a two 2-dimensional. Instead she brought up the idea they’d proposed earlier: filling the logo with sky and having a hand drawing it. I gave that a try but thought the hand looked so lonely. Instead I sketched in the artist’s head and torso too. I did another self portrait but shaved off my beard in case that was a turn-off.

The email arrived the next morning:

There are still a few hang-ups. Something about the person coming from the back of the logo is off-putting. The focus needs to be on drawing not on the person doing the drawing. The viewer needs to be in the place of the artist.
I’d like you to draw the cover as if it were a page in your sketchbook where you drew the act of drawing the cover. Forget the hands. Just draw the set up since you’re so good with everyday objects. Leave the middle just a wash background or blank so the focus is totally on the logo. I’ll attach my thumbnail. That may help.


Yesterday I started again, following the art director’s sketch. Just to put a little bit of myself into it, I added her sketch as part of the assignment, lying on the table where I drew from it.

coveriv2a
I sent the final image to her last night but don’t expect to her about it till Monday. We’ll see. It was an interesting experience; I may have been stupid to have resisted the idea she clearly wanted me to execute and insisting on other interpretations. It’s a hard lesson to learn for a stubborn know-it-all, but I am trying.

I do it 'cause it's trendy.

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Recently, I was asked why I thought journaling, and Internet journaling in particular, has become such a phenomenon. I rattled off a bunch of bullet points but I’ve continued to think about my answer and thought I’d share my thoughts with you to see if you want to refute or amplify my hypotheses.
First, there’re the tools at hand. The Internet and blogging let us share our personal work with like-minded people more easily. In the past, one might keep a diary that some descendant could unearth in the attic after we’ve passed, but the practice was basically solipsistic. In the new millennium, while our stories and drawings may not find an audience in our homes or communities, the Web lets us find interested readers from Belgium to Brisbane. The fact that someone else is interested helps to keep us going.
But technology also helps to create the need. I think that all this technology and titanium has made handmade things much more appealing. Even if it ends up as a jpeg, putting ink, graphite, and good old watercolors down on paper is a warm and pleasant break from email and cel phoning.
The next factor is our zeitgeist. We live in the age of memoir and confession. Anything goes and everyone’s an audience. Reality TV, James Frey, Augusten Burroughs, Oprah, Bill Clinton, everyone is sharing their story whether anyone asked or not. You don’t need to be a celebrity or a world leader to be worth listening to any more; now, if you get a publishing contract your personal life is, well, an open book. It follows that we all have a heightened need for self-analysis and -exposure.
Our culture has also become increasingly about individual achievement: the star athlete, the maverick CEO, the non-aligned President, etc. Despite a brief window of collective focus after 9/11, ‘s not about community any more; instead ‘s about self-absorption.
Most if us have the leisure time for journaling. Oh sure there’re a zillion diversions and distractions but if we want to make the time, we can have it. Turn off the tube, the Crackberry, the RSS feed, and do a bit of self-analysis.
And more and more of us have that need because of a growing sense of our own mortality. Baby boomers are the largest group in the population and we are in mid-life. Beginning to sum up, to think about what we’ve learned from life, and interested in sharing what we find.
Another aspect of modern life is reflected in the last essay I wrote here, about the effects of globalization on our environment. The more homogeneity there is, the more we seek quirk and particularity in others and ourselves. If everyone’s wearing clothes from the same stores and eating food from the same restaurants, we have all the more need to make our own mark, to stand out from the crowd.
While the world imposes consistency on us through megabranding, it is also providing us with a lot of tumult and anxiety. We are looking for answers and perspective and sitting down with a blank piece of paper and a pen is a great way to start looking.
It also seems that organized religion hasn’t managed to give us a strong enough sense of meaning in the modern world. I don’t feel that the Pope or the mullahs or the Christian Right are providing any answers I can relate to; instead it seems ‘s up to me to get to the bottom of things and chart a path for passing through these troubled waters. Again, slowing down and meditating on the moment with a pen in my hand brings me peace and balance.
Why have you started journaling? And what role does drawing play in it?

Creeping down the Promenade

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Near my hotel in Santa Monica, there’s an outdoor shopping mall called the Third Street promenade. It’s one of the rare places in Los Angeles where pedestrians are free to wander and, as a New Yorker, I have always been attracted there. The first time I visited Third Street, 10 or 15 years ago, it consisted primarily of old stores that seemed to have been there for decades. Five and dimes, second-hand clothing stores, bejeweled movie palaces, a couple of great old bookstores, that sort of thing.
It’s completely unrecognizable now. Or should I say it’s completely familiar. That’s because all those old, local businesses have been replaced by the march of globalization.
Barnes and Nobles, J.Crews, AMC theatres, McDs, Jamba Juices and, of course, Starbucks line Third Street as they do streets around the planet. I have seen the same line up in New York, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Cleveland, and all points in between. The inexorable creep of multinational corporations rob us of one of the main pleasures of travel. When every street looks the same, you feel as if you might as well have saved the airfare.


While, it’s true that, on one level, human beings crave the safety of consistency and like to know that we can dull the anxiety of being in a very foreign environment with a Big Mac and fries, this dull homogeneity feels threatening to all of us. As animals who are the product of evolution, we know deep down that trying to erase all variety from our environment is a very dangerous game. Katrina showed us what happens when we delude ourselves into thinking that we can control our world, can set up camp in Louisiana as if we were in Kansas, can treat an ocean shoreline like any other line on the map. We are just fragile critters, despite our hubris. Third Street may look like the Champs Elysees but it won’t if the San Andrea fault rebels.
Globalization is not the only story these days, of course. There’s also the backlash, seen most prominently in the Middle East, where the mullahs would take the people back five hundred years, long before the invention of the internal combustion engine, the thong, and the double decaf latte. Here in America, right between the Olive Trees and the Banana Republics, folks are growing fed up and reactionary. They’re also using religion as a levy, trying to hold back the rising tide by opposing Brokeback Mountain and Bolivian busboys. But right-wing politics, which is after all, complicit in enabling the corporations that now dominate the world, is in no position to fight back against it now.

While I completely understand the impotence one feels when facing the faceless, godless corporate landscape, I find comfort not among the supreme mullahs or the Supreme Court but in my drawing book. By slowing down and taking my pen in hand, I can always see particularity in the world. I am able to look at the Third Street promenade and see more than corporate logos. I see people, I see trees, I see the edges of buildings against the bright blue California sky. And I see beyond. I pack up my drawing gear and look for the rest of the city, the real city. I look for moldering buildings, tangled telephone lines, the homeless, the taco stands. If I was content to be a garden-variety, guidebook-toting tourist, I wouldn’t spend half an hour in an alley looking at broken windows. I wouldn’t sit on the curbside watching pigeons eat fast food wrappers. (Now that’s a vacation!)
One of the many great things about drawing is how it helps you find the beauty in anything, anywhere. Really seeing something helps you appreciate and understand it, and to know it from all others. I can draw a pebble or an apple core and see the universe within its pits and dents. With a pen and paper in hand, I am sure I will never feel utterly dehumanized. My drawings show me the world as only I can see it.


Sure, it’s dull drawing the engineered lines and committee-selected colors of a Burger King, but even gleaming plastic and fake brass give up interesting reflections and shadows that can confound its designers attempt at uniformity. The golden arches glow differently under the Pacific sun than they do in the North East, and so I can find beauty there. I have drawn them on Broadway, in Paris, in Florence and Hollywood. It’s my small gesture against the corporate creeps. They can try to force the world through their gleaming cookie cutters but artists will always see the truth.

Home again, home again, clippety clop

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God, has it really been three weeks since I last wrote anything here? So much for everyday mattering. Sorry for the absence. I have just come back from Los Angeles to find that the weather in New York is far more springular. It was pleasant to shed my layers of sweaters and prance about the daffodils in our garden (well, one daffodil so far).
I had a nice enough time in Los Angeles but a certain mechanical loneliness sets in after so many nights away from my family and my bed. Patti and Jack came and spent the last few days with me in Santa Monica and we drove about, visiting friends and being touristy.
I was shooting a new round of five commercials for Chase and your TV will probably be inundated with them in a few weeks. I am quite pleased with the new batch and it was nice to reunite with the same people I have shot and edited with several times before. It’s a pleasant, comfortable routine one falls into with people whom one spends every waking hour with for a month and then never see again for six. Jim, my director, just released a movie (Glory Road, a basketball flick) and the drawing habit I seeded in him last spring is still with him. He now feels comfortable drawing ideas for shots and for the sets he wants, something he’d never felt okay with, despite twenty years behind the camera. Our video assist guy, Ed, became completely hooked on drawing when I first gave him a first lesson almost a year ago and this month he pulled out some incredibly detailed drawings done painstakingly in pencil and most quite amazingly accurate. I’m so pleased he’s discovered the pleasures of drawing.
I find myself in a dubious place, mentally and spiritually, these days. On the one hand, I am in the midst of producing commercials which I have always enjoyed (I have three more shoots scheduled for the upcoming month); there’s nothing quite like spending millions of dollars to turn your flimsy, in-the-shower idea into something that runs over and over in people’s living rooms (or gets zapped by their Tivos). But whenever advertising work takes up too much of my life, replacing my family, my self, my journal, my leisure, even my blog, I start too feel melancholy and adrift. I start to question all of my priorities and the roads not taken. Even the free time I have becomes contaminated. I stop reading ( I have been on a long sequential jag of lovely Dicken’s novels, forsaken for trashy novels and magazines), I stop dreaming big thoughts about what I might do next, I stop talking to friends not involved in my current project, I become overly touchy about other people’s judgments, and I feel trapped, like a wild animal hunkered over his prey and now anxious some scavenger will pull it away. It’s not pretty.
In spite of all this melancholia, I have actually done (or should I say, forced myself to do) a fair amount of drawing in my new red book and I’ve had a couple of other drawing adventures I’ll share here in the next few days. I also have a couple of observations about the world and drawings place in it I’ll post soon.
So, please excuse my absence, and be patient with me as I get back on the horse.

Booking to LA

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I just started working on my 45th illustrated journal and decided to give myself a treat by binding up a variety of really nice papers into a special book. My new journal is an inch thick slab of 8×12″ 300 lb. cold press watercolor paper, interspersed with some colored drawing paper, and so far it’s been lots of fun to work in.

I haven’t worked in watercolors in a couple of months after my detour through kraft paper and white pencil. My monochromatic sojourn has had an effect on my use of colors that I really like.

I painted this while sitting on the john. I wasn’t constipated, just inspired by our coat rack.

Painted standing at the stove while stirring the sauce pan.

A painting of a photo of a painting of a photo.

My first spread in the book, a great horizontal opportunity, 8″x24″.

Unfortunate painting of my lovely boy.

Airports are great places to draw. All those plane gizmos and bored people.

Painted from the New Yorker and then my first afternoon in Santa Monica.

A few drawings that were interrupted in process but I tried to make lemonade out of them.

Again, drawn while waiting, in one case for my colleagues, in another for the pot to boil.

Drawn while waiting for Karen Winters and her husband. I painted it off site and I’m afraid it shows. Plus one of my waterbrushes isn’t happy about being in California.

A very faintly tinted drawing of Ocean. It reminds of something very old and I like it.

I am sort of lonely here in LA, so far from my family (a sentiment that tends to make me draw more). Nonetheless, I will be meeting new friends while here. Last night I was too exhausted to make it to the Drawing Club but I will be at the rainy day Sketchcrawl planned by the SoCal Drawing Room. Then I start shooting on Monday and will be on the set for the next two weeks. I shall post what I make as I do. I doubt I shall have much of particular profundity to report but I’ll do my best.

Advertising and Its Discontents – Part II: Charity

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unravel.jpg

I like nice. I like sweet. But even more I like raw. I like real. And Ilove Charity Larrison. She and I have been corresponding for a couple of years ago and she always cracks me up and take my breath away with her honesty. Charity’s story is pretty different from Trevor’s and it is far from resolved. I won’t say much more in the way of introduction but to say, Charity is the real thing. We can all learn a lot from her bravery, creativity and independence.

The Fundamental Distraction by Charity Larrison


At 18, the idea of going to art school, being a real artist, whatever, you know – seemed basically useless. My family was poor – college was not even an option really. And college for something as abstract as “being an artist” – ha ha. I might as well not even think about it.
I remember spending my whole senior year of high school in a corner of the art room working on paintings - buying extra time here and there doing the whole fluttery-eyelashes thing, “Oh come on, *please* Mister Whatever Stupid Teacher - I finished the assignment in five minutes! Can't I *please* go down to Miss McKannicks' for the rest of the period?? - i'm working on A GREAT PAINTING!”
So like any good comic book loving skateboard punk rocker with no way out of small town America hell – I joined the army.

I remember when I was in basic training my drill sergeant secretly pulling me over to the side and saying: “ONUSKA, take these markers and these flags up to the latrine and draw E-328 Predator faces on them so I can give them as prizes at the end to the other drill's. If you get caught you're in trouble, so don't get caught!”
And then there was the Sunday afternoon when I was in advanced training, learning my 68G10 - Aircraft Structure Repair crap; I was walking through the platoon area on my way to the smoking table when I was accosted by my Drill Sergeant to report for detail to the enlisted club, where I ended up spending the rest of the summer assisting his wife painting a mural of a bunch of Blackhawk helicopters landing on the wall in front of the dance floor.
She yelled at me one day: “YOU DON’T BELONG HERE!” Then it was a few really a lot louder sentences in Korean that I am still glad that I couldn't understand & I remember shrugging my shoulders at her and saying: Don't worry, Sun, I have it all worked out.

I got married. We had fun for a while. I got pregnant. He got kicked out of the service. I decided to opt out and follow him home. Our marriage didn’t survive the strain. I packed my baby and what belongings I could fit into his gold Fiero (dear god) and never looked back. I was twenty. Worked and worked and worked. Lots of crap jobs. Night shifts at the convenience store. Short order cook. Bank teller.
I remember it is two am and I am standing under fluorescent lights in an all night convenience store slicing endless little piles of lunch meat, passing the time wondering who it was that got to have the job where you made all the dumb signs. I would be good at that job.
I remember hanging out at my teller station when I worked at the bank, copying pictures out of comic books every moment of time where there were not incredibly crabby people in front of my face blaming me for all their money problems.
I remember lucking into a seasonal civil service gig with Pennsylvania state parks. Where I got to take care of the computers. Burning another boring afternoon clerking it in the office, doodling on post-its when Kevin, the Assistant Boss Park Ranger dropped a stack of instructions in front of me and said: “Larrison: if you can figure out how to network all our computers and make it work, you can have the internet. (THE INTERNET!!!! FINALLY!!!)

I decided I needed to cave in and try to go to college. To get out and get something better. Thinking to maybe get some kind of IT certificate, as I was so swell at computers and all. Looked it up on the Internet. Looked halfheartedly at stuff, then saw it. The graphic design program. You know: the “oh, that’s what i’m supposed to be doing” moment. (omg – like art school! But like – you could actually GET A JOB) (try not to cry laughing at me :D) anyway – once i saw it, it was too late. I had to do it. So i did. It was insanity. I worked five million jobs and went to school and somehow held everything together with just, pure will. (because seriously, this was the stupidest gamble of all time WHAT ARE YOU THINKING etc.)
See – I loved graphic design. I loved it more than anything in the whole universe. There was nothing like it to me. I knew how to make the pages talk. Then i learned how to make the pages sing. I made pretend magazines and taught myself how to make web pages, and I demanded that i get a REAL internship at a REAL place. Because even though i was just some jackass with an Associates’ degree from a tech school – that didn’t make me not THE BEST. (quit laughing :D)

Anyway, i got my internship. They hired me right out of school. Their art director moved to Atlanta, and I got his job. I was never, ever, ever, so miserable in my entire life than how miserable i was for those six months. I remember my favorite part of the day was whenever I could go down and sit in the restroom just so that I could spend five or ten minutes not having to be in the same room with those people. I mean, holy shit – these guys were some serious assholes. I was so depressed. I mean this? This is what graphic design is for? Lying? And lying and lying forever? GAH. And I’d spent so much of myself learning and it felt like, all for nothing.
I lasted about six months till they fired my ass. I remember dancing up the street Fred Astaire style the afternoon they fired me. Sure it sucked and I was doomed, but lunchmeat at two am was better than that crap.
Not to be thwarted, once i finished celebrating being fired from the ninth circle of hell, I threw my resume up on monster.com and got a call. Some company needed someone who could use Photoshop. Okay. I can do that. Went. Interviewed. They ended up hiring me on the spot. Was a small engineering company. Tired of getting raked over the coals from the ad agency that was doing all their stuff previously, they wanted just someone who could use Photoshop to fix some images for them.
I was all like, well, you know, i can do everything those bastards were doing for you, except better, and cheaper. So they hired me and gave me a million raises and built me a giant office and bought me every toy I asked for. It was fantastic for about a year. I made everything for them from out of nothing. I was like a great hero, rescuing my company from the tyranny of the great evil of advertising agencies.
I suppose you see what’s coming by now. I mean, there’s only so much you can do. After a while my job started to consist of just updating and tweaking and pressing buttons. I joke that it is my George Jetson job. I just rush in push a button then put my feet up on the desk. Which everyone says is so great. Which I suppose it is, but what happens if you are crazy and actually LIKE to work, but have no work to do? It sucks. But you can’t leave your great job when you are the sole support of your tiny family. You gotta just suck it up and go to work.
So, I sit in my giant office in the middle of nowhere America and spend my days floating around the great now of the Internet. I don’t know that I had a plan really when I started out. I mean, I just did the things I already liked to do. I followed comics websites and comics artists and followed their advice about how to learn how to draw, and i just kept trying to learn how to draw. Because that’s what I wanted more than anything. To learn how to draw for real. So i could draw comic books. For real. So i just kept drawing. I made myself websites to put my drawings on, cause that kind of made it feel like an activity. I made horrible comic books. I made friends and enemies.
I have some friends who are writers, they asked me to draw their stories, so I did. Because I love them, and I love that they write stories, and I love making words into pictures, and the challenge of making the pages read and flow. Figuring out just the right thing to draw to make the story move the best way. It’s the funnest game ever. It makes me work hard. I could do it till the end of the universe.
And slowly I started to learn how to learn.
It’s funny about learning. It’s never what you expect. I am starting for the first time ever, to actually get the hang of it, and make some things that are kind of cool and that i really love. I am starting to learn how to see the world, and my heart is constantly in like this odd vice of joy. I want to draw everything all of the time. But time is precious – which things to spend the time on? I want to draw that tree – but really shouldn’t I be working on something serious? I mean, that is the kind of thing I have been thinking to myself lately.
See – honestly, I hate my job. It’s awful. I am all by myself all the time. There is no one to talk to ever, except the dumb internet, and I want out. Having basically one client only for the past four years, my portfolio is utter crap. And, Jesus, I don’t want to be a graphic designer anymore anyway. I want to draw. But how do you make a living from drawing? How do you make a living from drawing without starting to hate drawing, is the main thing i think. I have been trying to figure it out. Trying to figure out what way to push so that I can still love it, and still get out of here.
So I have been trying to remember why I started this. Why I am here. What did I want when I began? To maybe find some kind of clue that will help me figure out what to do. What is important? Why do i do all these things that I don’t actually care about anymore when I would really rather be out drawing trees?

These days I just wake up every day and do what I have to do to buy the extra time down miss mckannicks' to work on the paintings. And think it is pretty awesome that I get to stay here this time and don't have to go to the Army again, because that sucked.