Today I’m getting stuff ready to do. Art stuff. That’s because I haven’t been able to get anything done. Getting stuff done has been tough all this this week. Life if that way sometimes. I did get a couple of things done but not consistently. I finished marker coloring my faux comic book cover “Dreams of Things” #55. That’s been sitting around waiting to be finished for a while. I’ve got four other covers in the series waiting to be finished too. I got number 55 finished because I told myself I had to finish something so I dove into it. It took me way longer than it should have but I got it done.

The other two things I got finished were the pencils for another faux comic book cover series: “The Painted Lady.” I think it was last week that I finished the pencils for issue number 18 but it was just yesterday I finished drawing the cover for issue number 19. Once again I had no motivation or inspiration for doing the drawing. I just plain made myself do it. It was either that or sit around and do nothing and that way lies madness. Once again it took longer than it should have but that’s the way things are when motivation is lacking. It came out pretty nice though. It’s amazing that a person can still make a nice thing even when they’re not in the mood to make a nice thing.

I have gotten some little things done. Little in terms of size and effort. Mostly my art cards. They’re baseball card size so they’re small and take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour to make. I was making the ten minute variety this week. I made about a half dozen of my mood cards. Maybe one or two a day. Not a great triumph but they’re starting to add up. I think I have twenty five mood cards finished now. I post them on Instagram as the mood strikes me.

The other little thing I got done was some ink cards. They’re the same size as the mood cards except they’re drawn spontaneously with ink and a brush. Sometimes with my busted brush technique and sometimes with a good brush. These are real hit-and-miss. That’s the same with any quick-technique that depends on spontaneity. I’m looking for something new and different with this type of drawing so I have to make a lot of drawings in order to get some good ones. I only drew six of them and none of them stood out. It’s a technique that depends on putting more time into it than I did. Oh, well…

So after getting those bits of things done this week I came to a total halt today. I tried to get things going but nothing happened. So I switched gears. I have an 11×17 inch aluminum art box that I keep things to be done in. It’s where those “Dreams of Things” covers are stored while they wait to be finished with markers. I also have finished ink drawings in there that are waiting to be digitally colored but I haven’t been in the mood for digital coloring lately. So I decided to fill up that box a little bit more to give myself some choices in the future.

The first thing I did was set up those painted lady covers to be inked. That means scanning them in, putting the drawings into the template that has the logo and trade dress in it, and printing it out in blue line to be inked. It’s not a long or involved process but it takes a little time and concentration. Luckily I had just enough of both.

The next thing I did was to look through some 6×9 inch drawings that I had sitting on the corner of my drawing table. I had completely forgotten they were there. I made most of them a month or two ago plus there were a bunch of blue line sketches ready to be drawn. The blue line ones needed more drawing work done on them but the finished ones I could print out to be inked. As long as I could figure out how I wanted to finish them.

I turned one of those drawings into a “Dreams of Things” cover and printed it out to be inked. That was easy. I was going to do that with a second drawing but then I looked at the drawing closely and it was too unfinished. Sometimes a 6×9 inch drawing isn’t enough so I took that one and blew it up to 9×12 to be redrawn at that bigger size. That went into the aluminum box too.

One other thing I got done was to scan in my ink book drawings. I usually fill up eight pages a month in my ink book and scan in the pages as I go. I’ve heard horror stories of artists losing their sketchbooks so they lose all the work that’s in them. If I lose mine I’ll have most of it scanned in already so it won’t be as bad. Except I hadn’t done much scanning lately. I needed to scan thirty pages. That means it’s been months since I bothered scanning my ink book in. I have no idea how that happened.

At least I’ve been getting some pages drawn in there lately. Sometimes time can slip by without me working in it. That happened at the end of June. I filled four pages in the first half of June but then it was June 28 and I noticed I hadn’t drawn anything in there in two weeks. I don’t know how that happened. So I got three pages drawn in three days and almost caught up.

So that’s the story of trying to get stuff ready to do when I can’t get anything done. My aluminum box of art is filling with things to do and that feels good. I like to have things at different stages of being finished so I can do whatever floats my boat at the time. It’s not always easy to manage but here we go.