Anatomy of a Desk

1. Rapidograph Pens (or, as an insightful and clearly experienced employee at my local art supply store called them, "pain in the ass pens"). I embrace tiny lines for the drawings and need tiny pens.

2. Music, podcasts or other narrative noises. For this project, I purchased a 19 hour audio book on Siberia. Both informative AND bleak!

3. Snack. Note the mug of tea and the neatly clustered stems that were once a pile of delicious dried figs.

4. Horny Toad Paper Weights (a wedding gift from my Texan father). Standing in constant vigilance and silent judgment if I ever stray from my work to the tempting, if unfulfilling, world of the internet.

5. Metal ruler. For straight guide lines, though all lines are ultimately inked free-hand.

6. Tiny cup for ink & brushes. For filling in larger areas of the drawing. Since I over-control everything, the preferred brush is the miniscule size "00."

Fortunately, this set up is working well. I have completed the first page of the book, a minor miracle after so many weeks of hemming and hawing, and now I am barreling forward into the second with full abandon. This is a welcome change: I had been circling my work with complete frustration for a good month, throwing every hour I could spare towards working on this book with no satisfying results. After venting complaints last week to a few trusted ears, 3 people in the same day asked me what I thought the illustrations should look like, if the current drawings were not "it." For the life of me, I was baffled: I realized I only had negative definitions of what it shouldn't be, and a few unhelpful and vague ideals in the positive ("lush" comes to mind). I looked at inspiration images I'd gathered, I paged through favorite books, browsed the sites of inspiring artists, and realized that my "ideal" was some impossible, contradictory mixture of everything. Gouache paintings and etchings, silk screen prints and pen drawings and digital illustrations all were muddled in the back of my mind as ideal styles. This realization was liberating, and I set to work on drawing the way that I know how to draw, not echoing or aspiring towards an impossible ideal.

And so I return to work; the horny toads are looking at me.

Bookish Progress

Early, frustrated notebook

For the past two months I have been laying the ground work for a new book. Getting the momentum going at the beginning was not easy: this is a larger, more involved project than anything I have attempted before, and the difference in scale and emotional commitment was enough to set my feet in proverbial concrete for the first few weeks. I diligently tried to write, and write, and sketch, and plan, and re-write some more, but distraction came easy and I went on a lot of angry, frustrated walks to try to talk through the friction. I ended up spending hours at local coffee shops staring at my notebook, pulling my hair, sipping tea, and going home in defeat.

Through the muck and grime a few ideas stuck, and as I worked to develop a promising thread the other secondary ideas fit in smoothly. I suddenly had a coherent narrative and the whole project made sense. I can't describe what a relief that was! My notebooks grew increasingly more orderly.

In the background: a proper (for me) outline format!

In the foreground: a quick sketch to work through page composition

Steps towards production are moving swiftly. I made a small signature to work through pacing in the first (most fully developed) chapter, to get a sense of how many pages the book might be; I have grant deadlines in my back pocket for this project; I have figured out press sheet and final book dimensions, and so on.  Most importantly, I typed up the project plan in full yesterday and sent it to three groups of trusted & talented friends for critique and feedback. 

It is going to be a hand-illustrated comic/graphic novella with no text or dialogue, just visual sequences. I don't want to give away too much about the story yet; that will come as the illustrations are  completed. For now I can say that I have been thinking a lot about what it is to make work, why I am (/others are) drawn to production and creation and output, and what happens when that fails. Also, fire!