A pile of three marker ink drawings.
Creatively January is probably the hardest month of the year for me. Part of it is coming out of the Christmas and New Year season where I go from being really busy with family stuff to not busy at all and part of it is me looking forward at the new year and wondering what creative projects I should work on?
I usually end up getting the stuff done I always get done, such as my “Four talking Boxes” comic strip and my “Dreams of Things” covers, but somehow that doesn’t always count in my brain. It always wants to get new stuff done too. I’m not sure what that new stuff is but here is some of the “Mundane” every day stuff.
One of the basic paper sizes I work at is 6×9 inches. I buy pads of 9×12 inch Bristol board and cut those pages in half. I do almost all of my pencil drawings at that size before blowing them up to 11×17 inches to be inked.
Almost all the 6×9 inch drawings start out even smaller. Often they start as 2×3 inch thumbnail drawings in one of my Inkbooks. Those are my sketchbooks that I draw small ink drawings in to get down visual ideas. I work in ink so that I don’t get caught up in trying to make the drawing “Good” and just get down an idea instead.
One of my inkbooks has around nine drawings a page and each book is about 100 pages. So that is 900 drawings per book and I finished book 25 last year. I’ve got a lot of choices when I want to make one of them.
One of my types of drawing I call my “Three marker drawing.” It’s pretty easy to figure out why. I use a fat marker, a medium marker, and a thin marker to draw them. All of them are black markers. I actually hadn’t made one of these type of drawings in months so I just kind of forgot about them. I’ve made plenty of them in the past but not many in the second half of 2025.
In one of the drawers underneath my drawing table I keep three envelopes with 6×9 inch blue line drawings in them. I keep them loaded up with drawings ready to work on. They are labeled “Three Marker Drawings,” “Dreams of Things,” and “Random Drawings.” I’ve been working out of the DOT one for months so I kind of forgot about the other two.
I was looking for something to draw the other day and grabbed one of the Three Marker Drawings sketches. It’s a blown up thumbnail from my Inkbook printed out in blue on a 6×9 inch piece of paper. The edges are also taped over so that I can draw right over the edge of the drawing. That keeps my line consistent and I can peel the tape off at the end to clean up the edges. Hence my “Tape Peeling” videos were born.
I finished five of these drawings over a couple of days and they came out well. I’ve used these drawings as the basis for some of my “Big Ink Drawings” so maybe I’ll get some of those done this year. It’s been a while since I’ve worked on them.
I even set up a bunch more 6×9 inch blue line drawings to be made into Three Marker Drawings. These take more effort than normal 6×9 inch blue line drawings. The normal ones I just pick a thumbnail, open the scan of the page the thumbnail is on, put the thumbnail into the 6×9 inch template I have ready, then print it out in blue line.
I do the same thing for the Three marker drawing ones except then I have to mask all the edges out with removable tape. I put a piece of tape along the edge up to the border of the drawing and then trim the tape so it doesn’t hang over the side. I do this for all four sides. It doesn’t take forever but it takes a few minutes. I set up ten drawings that way.
I also set up about six more “Dreams of Things” drawings to be pencilled. I already had about six of them ready but more is always better. I like choices when I’m want to draw something. The method is exactly the same, minus the tape, except that I have to keep track of where the logo is going to go. I need room for that.
Just because I was already spending my time on the mundane task of setting up all these 6×9 inch blue line drawings I decided to set up eight random ones too. I kind of had it in mind to make some “Last Night I Dreamt I Had a True Love” or “Great Gatsby” prints so I mostly concentrated on figure thumbnails for these ones but they can and up being anything.
As I was setting up all of these 6×9 inch blue line drawings I came up with something new. In looking at all of my thumbnails I noticed some of them had interesting landscape spaces. I don’t usually do a lot of landscapes but often have landscape spaces in the backgrounds of my “Dreams of Things” covers so I’m sensitive to them.
I do a lot of 2.5×3.5 inch Art Cards and lately I’ve been looking for new things to do with them. I’ve made some abstract Art Cards and now I thought that I could make some of these weird landscapes. They were simple too. I decided that was their strength and so I shouldn’t complicate them.
I ended up drawing them straight in ink on one of the cards and then coloring them with my Pantone ink markers. The drawing itself is simple enough to draw in only a few minutes. Most of the work is done in the thumbnail which leaves time for the coloring. I think they’ve come out pretty cool. I came up with the name “Strangescape Art Cards” for them.
That’s a little look at the mundane world or going through a lot of thumbnail drawings to find the gems and making 6×9 inch blue line drawings of them. Hopefully something exciting comes of them.