I’ve been in a bit of a creative funk this week. Just not sure of what direction I want to go in. What exactly I want to do. I finished up the sixth of my large black marker drawings about a week ago and since then I haven’t been sure of what to do next. I could make another such drawing but I’m burnt out on them for now. I don’t enjoy doing the same thing over and over. I’ve even done a few small drawings that I intend to make into large ones but haven’t wanted to yet. Even though I knew I didn’t want to work on any large drawings right now I still made the small ones. They’re a lot less ambitious because of their size.
I also have a couple of sketches done for a series of 16×24 inch canvases I have lying around. I think I did those around the time of the first large drawing or two but I was so into the drawings that I never got around to doing the color sketches for the paintings. Sometimes these sketches of mine hang around a little too long and I never make them into anything. I get bored with them and start something new. The two canvases I have hanging around will eventually be painted but I have no idea if I’ll use the two sketches I already made.
I’ve been wanting to do some more writing lately but haven’t been able to. I find writing takes a different sort of concentration than drawing or painting. A concentration that doesn’t come as easily to me. Plus you really have to have a story to tell or something you want to say when writing. That’s not always easy to figure out. I’ve been working on a lot of drawings and character sketches for some sort of comic that I want to do but I still don’t know what it is. It’s tough to write something when I don’t know what it is that I’m supposed to be writing.
I did find a neat new iPad writing app that I like. It’s called Index Card and, as you’d imagine, it duplicates the experience of using index cards to organize writing. That’s an approach I’ve always liked because I often get small ideas that I like to shift around and rearrange. I’ve used physical index cards for that task but not in a while. I ended up setting up a couple of projects including my unknown comic and a collection of memories. Here is a tip for you. If you want to fall asleep at your regular time don’t start trying to remember and write down old stories from your past. Once I started one memory would lead to another and I had a hard time turning off my brain to sleep. I was having fun using the iPad app but I haven’t touched it in a week. I lost the thread of it.
One of the other things I’ve been trying to get done is a sketch comic cover. They sell these comic books that have logos on them but the rest of the cover is blank. The idea is that a fan buys one and then gets their favorite artist to draw a sketch on the cover. My local comic shop got in a few of the blank covered comics so I bought one to draw on myself. The problem is that I don’t know what to draw on it. It’s a Captain America comic so I really should draw Cap on it but I’m not really interested in drawing other people’s characters. I’ve tried coming up with something but so far it’s been a no go. Makes me wonder why I bothered with the whole thing in the first place.
Of course even when I’m creatively withdrawn I’m usually still working on something. Generally it’ll be something small rather than a big project. This week it was 5×7 inch marker drawings. They have been a little bit different than my usual marker drawings. First off they are on watercolor paper. I bought some nice pre-cut 5×7 inch watercolor paper a couple of months ago so I decided to put it to use. It’s the first time I’ve used this paper with markers. Since I’ve been doing the large black marker drawings I’ve really come to like Copic markers. The ability to refill them with more ink relieves me of the worry of the marker drying up in the middle of a drawing. Plus it makes them a lot cheaper. I always hate to throw out an empty marker and now I don’t have to. After saving my pennies for the last few months I even bought a new set of Copic markers. They just came out with a really cool 25th anniversary set of sketch markers that I had to have.
I think the marker drawings are different from my past ones just because I started doing color sketches for them. Before now I liked to keep a little spontaneity in my use of the markers because they are a fairly spontaneous tool. But I really like working out my basic colors before I start on the final drawing. It saves a lot of making mistakes. I do my color sketches in Photoshop these days so it’s easy to change things and work them out how I want them. The colors were a lot livelier in this batch of marker drawings because I worked it out that way.
I also colored these marker drawings right over the India ink line work. I don’t think I’ve done that before. When working on some marker techniques over the last couple of years I usually drew the line with a dark blue marker. That makes for a bit softer of a line than India ink. I think the hard black ink line with the lively colors make for a nice little piece. It’s okay stuff. But I still have to figure out what big thing I want to work on next. There’s got to be something.
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