“Around Nine” ink drawing for the first painting 11×17 inches
I decided about a month ago that I wanted to do some painting this summer (it’s May 23, 2025 as I write this.) Of course the eternal question is, “What to paint?”. So that’s what has been going through my mind for the last bunch of weeks. It’s often not an easy question to answer.
I’m not an abstract painter so I need to make an image for my painting. On my computer I have a whole bunch of scans of drawings that I’ve done over the decades so, at first, I thought I’d look through them to find something I wanted to paint.
I’m always coming up with ideas for pictures and then drawing them but they go no further than that. Often I’ll look through my archive of drawings and choose one to make a finished piece out of. I do this when I don’t feel like going through the process of coming up with a new idea for a finished piece. I work out many ideas so that I can always go back and pick one. But even more often I work up a new idea for new piece. If I want to do a new, “Dreams of Things” or “Last Night I Dreamt I had a True Love” finished piece I’ll work on a new drawing for them.
I figured that for the paintings I want to work on this summer I’ll look through my drawings rather than make new ones. That’ll save me some time. But it didn’t. Nothing jumped out at me that I wanted to paint. There were plenty of drawings that I could have made paintings of but none of them really spoke to me.
One of the first ideas that came to me was to do some portraits. I haven’t made any portraits in a long time. They’re really not my thing but I thought maybe I could do some this summer. One of the tough parts about doing a portrait for me is choosing who to do one of and then arranging for them to sit for me or have me take a photo of them. That was all too much for me so I abandoned the idea.
After that, I thought that I could go through some old family photos and pick someone from the distant past to make a portrait of. But I find it tough working from photos I didn’t take for the purpose of making a portrait. Plus all the scans I had of old photos needed cleaning and sharpening and that got me distracted by leading me down an AI restoration rabbit hole. Spoiler alert AI restoration wasn’t cheap nor were the results particularly good.
I also thought about some themes for the paintings. I have four canvases and could tie them all together thematically. At first I even thought about taking this four paneled drawing I made years ago and making it into a four paneled painting. Once again that didn’t excite me and it would be a lot of work. I abandoned the idea after a little while.
I also had the idea to do four faces with word balloons. Sort of like my cartoon art cards but as big 24×36 inch paintings. I drew a whole bunch of faces in my inkbook but it never worked out. The idea was also similar to the tiny drawings that I have been making. One face, one word balloon, and one word. It was too familiar. I lost interest in the idea.
Then I went to my pile of three marker drawings. I’ve drawn a lot of them over the years and often I’ve used these ink drawings as the basis of something bigger and more finished. I looked through them and one stood out to me. I printed it out at 11×17 inches in blue line to work on the drawing some more. I’ve been doing most of my preliminary pencil drawings at 6×9 inches but I thought this one would work out better if I drew bigger.
It took half a day to make the drawing and I liked the way it came out. But it was a bunch of small figures and no big faces and after letting the drawing sit for a day I couldn’t see working on it as a painting. I really wanted some big faces so I lost interest in this drawing and moved on.
Finally I decided that I had enough of this particular struggle and that I was going to start over from the beginning and come up with some images. I went back to my main method of doing things and started to look through my inkbooks full of thumbnail drawings that I could turn into finished drawings.
At first I was looking for thumbnails that I could use for my “Dreams of Things” series of marker drawings. I usually set up four or five blue line drawings for this purpose so that I could choose between them when I want to work on something. As I was picking through the thumbnails I started to see things I could use for the paintings too. I ended up setting up about a dozen 6×9 inch blue line drawings to be worked on. About half of them were for the paintings.
So far I’ve finished three of the 6×9 inch drawings for possible paintings. They went pretty well. I like all three drawings but I figure that I’ll do even more. I decided not to rush. I think I was rushing before.
I even decided to blow up these drawings so that I could ink them at 11×17 inches. I don’t always do that with drawings that are going to become paintings since it’s usually not necessary but this time I thought it was. I can always make the ones I won’t make into paintings into prints.
So far I’ve inked two of the drawings and I like the way they’ve come out. They’re my two favorites out of the pile of drawings so that’s not too shocking but just a few days before I couldn’t get anything done.
Now I have to do color sketches with the ink drawings. It’s’ all coming along. I’ll keep you updated.