Getting nothing done. That’s been my story as of late. The sinus thing that knock me down last week knocked the motivation right out of me. Or the direction. Or something. I really shouldn’t exaggerate since I’ve gotten some things done just nothing big. I’ve done a few drawing videos that I post over on my YouTube channel. Those are fairly easy to get done, at least they don’t take a lot of time, but they do take a bit of energy because I have to draw fast.
I make the videos with my small camera and my small tripod. The camera and tripod are underneath my chin and I draw on a small piece of paper under the camera. I usually use a five by seven or baseball card size piece of paper. Then I just start drawing using my surrealist automatic drawing method and don’t stop until I’m done ten or fifteen minutes later.
Normally I use one of my markers for this but a few times I’ve used pencil. Since people who watch the videos like the sounds of pens and pencils on paper I usually keep quiet so those sounds can be heard. The markers make the best sounds. Or at least the easiest to capture sounds. I found it hard drawing with a pencil last time since I had to bear down on it harder than I usually would to get it to make some good noise. That took more concentration than usual. That’s what these drawing videos take more than anything else. Concentration. I’m used to drifting in and out of concentration as I work so totally focusing for fifteen minutes as I work fast is different. Or maybe it’s just the speed. I’m sure I’ve spent more than fifteen minutes in a row at a task.
I’ve wanted to film some of my regular drawing but I haven’t figured out how to do it just yet. There is not enough room for bigger paper with the small tripod right on my desk. I’ve been looking at buying a tripod boom extension to maybe get the camera to be over my shoulder but I haven’t found one I like yet. Plus it often takes a few hours to draw something and that makes for a boring video. I’m not a fan of the speeded up drawing video style but I have’t thought of anything better. This is gonna take a while.
I also cued up two more Organics pages for me to draw and ink. I did the layouts for them back before my sinuses hurt but only printed them out in blue line this week. I drew the layouts at a small size and then blew them up. Now I’ve got them read to pencil and ink at ten by fifteen inches but so far they’ve just been sitting there for a few days.
I was tired of mot getting anything done so I also started an eighteen by twenty-four inch painting. It’s going to be an acrylic on canvas but so far it’s only pencil on canvas. A couple of days ago I got my ambition back briefly and decided to start on a painting. I looked through my ink book until I found a drawing that I liked and them printed it out on a six by nine inch piece of paper. That’s the size I do a lot of my layout type drawings. I only need a layout for this type of painting so after I did that I scanned it in and made a color sketch. For the next step I transferred the drawing onto the canvas by grinding it up and redrawing it on the canvas. I had quite the busy morning that day. But I haven’t pulled my paints out yet. The canvas sits on my easel with only pencil lines on it waiting for me to get some more energy.
I’ve also been trying to get some writing work done this week. I have three writing projects in the works right now and it’s slow going on all three of them. I do write my comic strip every morning and this blog once a week so I’m getting my usual writing stuff done but not the three other projects. That had lead me to trying to find a method to write the stuff I want to write. A way of getting the basic ideas fleshed out. Lately I’ve just been writing stuff down and then forgetting it. That doesn’t seem to be working so well.
So this week I’ve been working in a notebook and making some art cards with writing on them. I’ve been keeping a writing notebook open in front of me while writing down some key point or statement of story intent on an art card and then drawing on the card too. If in the middle of the drawing I came up with an idea that needs writing down I switch to the notebook. The notebook also has small drawings in it too but mostly writing. The whole method is new and I’m not sure how it’ll work out in the end but I am at least getting some interesting little art cards out of it.
The other usual thing I’ve just managed to get done is drawing in my ink book. I fill one book a year with little drawings and it takes about an hour or so to fill up a page. That means about ten hours a month which doesn’t seem like a lot until I realize I’ve fallen behind. That happened in the middle of October. I was only about five drawings behind but I had to consciously decide to catch up instead of just filling a page as I felt like it. This probably happens twice a year. I’m pretty much all caught up for the first week of November which means I had to get two or three pages done and somehow I managed to.
Yeah, I’ve been okay at getting some of the little things done. Now if only the big ones were so easy.
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