I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eleven new comics.
Check them all out here:
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Sometimes things take a while. A long while. Let your mind drift back in time to the year 1999. That’s when I first started this project. Fifteen years ago. Or at least I think so. That’s the creation date I have on some scans but sometimes those dates get mixed up. I’m pretty sure this one is right. It all started because, on rare occasion, I like to work with someone else’s images rather than my own. That lead me to discover that I could buy old photo negatives on Ebay. So sometime back in 1999 I discovered and bought some black and white medium format (2-1/4) negatives of nude dancers in Paris from 1964. There were eleven negative in total all of behind the scenes type stuff. A woman showing off and dancing for the camera not on stage but backstage near the dressing room. But what to do with them?
First of all, back in 1999, I had no scanner that could handle scanning in medium format negatives. Such scanners were rare and expensive then. But at work, back in my good ol’ Marvel Comics days, I had access to a scanner that at least had a transparency adapter on it. That meant I could scan them in but the scans might not be very good since it really wasn’t meant for photo negatives. And so I scanned them in. Just as predicted the scans weren’t very good. I had eleven substandard scans of photos that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with. So they sat. The scans on my computer and the negatives in sleeves. I’d occasionally pull them out and look at them but nothing got done. No ideas leaped to the front.
Dancers in Paris 1964
Cut to nine years later in 2008. I had just gotten a bunch of old medium format negatives from my mother of family pictures. I needed something to scan them in with so I started looking at scanners again. Turns out that not only had scanners gotten cheaper but they’d also gotten much better at scanning medium format negatives. I ended up buying one for just a couple of hundred dollars that could do the job well. It took a couple of thousand dollars to buy a scanner in 1999 that could do that. So I rescanned the Paris nude dancer negatives. And then nothing. They sat.
Usually when I do one of my large photo collages I have an idea in mind before hand. And a lot of photos. For example I have made large photos of the weddings of friends of mine. I take pictures during the whole wedding and then arrange them into one large photo in such a way as to try and capture the event. In these days of digital photography I can easily take a thousand pictures at a wedding to choose from. Eleven pictures is a lot less.
The lack of color was also daunting. Often my ideas in my photos have to do with color. I’m forever using color to draw the eye around the photo and always use small bits of photos just for their color. I have all sorts of photos of odds and ends that I use for their color and texture in any given composition. A bit of blue sky here, a bit of green grass there, and some leaves of a red maple can really help pull a photo together. But none of that would be of any use with old black and white photos.
Now we’ll change time-frames again to this past summer. Once again I was looking at Ebay for stuff and found a photographer selling his negatives. They were medium format black and white negatives of alt-model Nettie Harris who I am familiar with through following her Tumblr blog. I figured I’d bid on a couple of them and ended up with two single image negatives. I decided I wasn’t going to make one of my large 20×28 inch photos out of it and would try to make one of my smaller 10×15 inch photos with the Nettie Harris negative as the main image. I would use a bunch of my own street photography to build the rest of the composition. The problem was how to integrate color and black and white photography. I’ve found that to be troublesome.
The obvious answer is to add color to the black and white photo. But that’s not as easy as it seems. With a computer and Photoshop there are lots of ways to add color to a photo but most of them are unsuitable for all sorts of esthetic reasons. I must have tried a dozen different ways until I found one I liked. And it’s simple. I used Photoshop’s “Monochrome” image mode to turn pieces of the black and white photo to black and whatever color I choose. This kept the values of the photo mostly the same for visual continuity but allowed me to drop in blocks of color. In other words it doesn’t interrupt the image as much as other ways I tried to add color. So I finished the Nettie Harris photo.
Nettie Harris Photo 1
Then my mind drifted back to those Paris dancer negatives I bought almost fifteen years ago now. I knew I wanted to use just the eleven photos and not any of my street photos and thought the monochrome blocks of color would work to tie the whole thing together. This time I used a transparent border around the color bits though. I think the small border added a cohesiveness to the whole thing. I even went back and added those borders to the first Nettie Harris photo.
The funny thing is that I scanned in the Paris negatives yet again but then after a day or two of figuring out the layout and composition of the whole thing I discovered I didn’t like the scans I just made. So I had to change some settings and scan the negative for a fourth time and then rebuild all that I had just done. The final image size is 20×28 inches on a 22×30 inch piece of paper. Yes, I really did make an actual one of a kind physical photograph out of this. I print the large photo out in pieces, cut the pieces out along their white borders, and then paste the pieces down onto a large piece of drawing paper. So the white borders are actually the paper showing through in-between the photos. I like the physical nature such a finished piece provides.
So here it is, fifteen years later, finally finished. Things don’t usually take me that long so I find it a little hard to believe that I actually finished it. It’ll sink in though.
Nettie Harris Photo 2
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.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got nine new comics.
Check them all out here:
I just made myself a delicious eye sandwich so in the spirit of my chili making blog I though I’d write a little how to on making my particular egg sandwich. It’s not a hard thing to make but it takes a little know how.
I start off with a small frying pan. I think it’s an eight inch frying pan if memory serves but it’s a fairly tiny eight inch pan as the sides of it slant in at a sharp angle. It’s easy to handle and just the right size for two eggs. The first thing I do is drop a small amount of butter into the pan. If you’re not a butter fan you can skip this step and it won’t effect the outcome that much but I like a little butter. I’ve also made it without the butter and was fine with it so that’s your choice.
The next step is the spices. I know most people uses salt and pepper on their eggs (as well as in everything else) but I don’t. The three spices I use most are thyme, oregano, and basil. As I mentioned in my chili blog I’ve had trouble finding thyme in my local supermarkets as of late and so have been buying “Italian Seasoning”. That’s thyme and oregano in one jar so it fits the bill okay.
After I put the frying pan over low to medium heat I put about half a pat of butter in the pan and wait for it to melt. Then I sprinkle the three spices into the butter to cover the bottom of the pan. You don’t want full coverage of the bottom of the pan but about a third to half way. A nice even coat where you can see about half pan and half spices. Maybe a little less. If you’re a garlic fan, as I am, sprinkle a little garlic on top of that. Less than the other spices. Now it’s time for the eggs. I’m making them over-easy by the way. With broken yolks.
The egg part is also easy but has to be done a certain way. I crack the eggs one at a time and put one on each side of the pan. Sure they run together but as long as you can split them in half with one yolk on each side things will be fine. After the two eggs are in the pan I use the spatula to break the yolks. This keeps the eggs flat and makes it easier to build and eat the sandwich. Since the eggs are cooked over easy some of the yolk is still soft but no so runny as to make a mess.
At this point, since the heat is on low to medium, I take a moment to slice some cheddar cheese. I think it’s your standard eight ounce block of cheese and I cut six slices. Three for each egg. That’s not a lot of cheese as six slices is probably less than a standard pre-sliced piece of American cheese. But it’s enough.
After my cheese is sliced I check on my eggs. I cook them slowly so what I do next is to check and see if they’re ready for flipping. I take my spatula and run them down the center of the pan splitting the eggs in half with one yolk on the left and one on the right. Usually this doesn’t take right away since the eggs aren’t cooked enough. So I just run the spatula between them a few times patiently waiting for the eggs to separate and stay separated. When a good base of cooked eggs is formed on the bottom it’s time to flip them. The tops of the eggs aren’t cooked at this point so flip them gently. I don’t have any fancy way of flipping eggs except that since I’m right handed I find it easiest to flip the left side egg first and then turn the pan around so the other egg is now on the left. That way I don’t have to contort my arm or change hands to flip the right side.
After the eggs are flipped you should be able to see a nice speckling of spices on the now top of the eggs. I take my cheese and put three slices on each egg. If you want to get fancy you can put a lid on the pan at this moment to melt the cheese a little. I used to do that but don’t anymore. I find the heat of the eggs melts them fine as they sit in the sandwich. It takes less time to cook this side of the eggs. Maybe a minute or two before you can turn off the heat and remove them. If you like your eggs firmer than that leave them on an additional minute.
Now a word about bread. I’ve used all sorts of bread with my egg sandwiches but I toast them all. A bagel is good and I also like a Portuguese roll and a ciabatta roll. The key for the bread it that is has to be firm. I’ve found that something like a Kaiser roll is too soft even when toasted. The bread has to have a good crust but not one that you have to tear at with your teeth. Some Italian breads have too thick a crust. I’m a fan of hot sauce so I sprinkle a little of that on the bread and then I put the cooked eggs, one at a time, between the slices of bread and let it rest for a minute or two. I find the sandwich firms up and is easier to eat after it rests briefly.
To continue on about bread I’ve been doing things a little differently lately. I’ve been using English muffins. Since they’re smaller than most rolls and bagels I’ve been going open faced with them. First I toast the English muffin so that it’s nice and crisp and then I sprinkle some hot sauce into the nooks and crannies. The eggs are put on a bit differently too. After the eggs are done cooking I cut each egg in half with the spatula and pile one half upon the other on top of half an English muffin. That way I end up with two open face English muffin eggs sandwiches with two layers of egg and cheese on each. It sure is tasty.
The summer shows have ended and the fall shows have begun so I think it’s time for another TV recap. What have I been watching?
Legends – A summer show I stumbled onto by chance. Legends is a spy/thriller/conspiracy show. The main character is an undercover FBI agent and his undercover identities that are called legends. Hence the title of the show. This one is part police procedural and part action adventure. He has a team of FBI agents he works with: the boss, the agent in charge that he has a little conflict with, and the tech person You know the drill. But it’s also about the main guy not remembering his past quite clearly enough and mixing up his legends with reality. Or is his reality a legend? That’s the questions that get asked in season one along with the bad-ass FBI agent adventures. A solid show.
The Strain – Another summer show that, as a comic book fan, I was aware was coming but I’ve never read the comic. It’s a vampire show where the vampires are evil and ugly and not sexy and beautiful. The twist is that the lead character is a doctor for the CDC and treats the whole vampire outbreak as some kind of medical epidemic. That’s the terms he sees it in. Plus we get his young son, loyal love interest/assistant, a tough city worker with lots of practical knowledge, an old vampire hunter who has some of the answers, and a bunch of other characters who come and go. I’ve read some people complain that they don’t like the way the main vampire looks but I’m not a special effects guy so it doesn’t bother me. I’m happy to see a good monster show.
Extant – This was the sci-fi show starring Halle Berry that ran this summer. There were two main plots. First, Halle Berry was an astronaut who came back from a year long solo mission in space to find out she was pregnant. What’s going on? Was it an alien baby? What’s with the conspiracy at the company she works for? Are they covering up the real reason for her mission? Second, Halle’s husband is a scientist who is working on creating artificial intelligence which takes the form of a robot boy who is their son. I liked how fast this show moved and that they gave you answers. Too many mystery shows these days string you along never revealing too much. This one revealed what was going on in a timely manner so I wasn’t left frustrated and disinterested. I like that.
Broad City – I think this show ran last spring but I didn’t catch it until this summer. It’s a comedy show about two young women living in NYC. I liked it. Lots of funny stuff. It’s filled with drug humor and raunchy humor. If that’s not your thing than stay away but it was good for me.
Scorpion – A new show for this season. I’d call Scorpions solidly mediocre. It falls into the quirky detective show category except this time our detective is a team of misfit geniuses. We get the leader genius, the math genius, the gizmo genius, and the psychology genius. They team up with an FBI agent and have a regular mom with her genius little son thrown into the mix. They solve and stop crimes. Nothing about the show is original or great but it’s still entertaining for an hour.
Gotham – Batman is so popular that then can make a show about him that he’s not even in. Gotham is a drama that’s all about Gotham City before Batman shows up. Bruce Wayne is there as a little kid right after his parents are murdered but he’s still five or ten years away from becoming Batman. Instead the show is about Jim Gordon (Batman’s Commissioner Gordon) as a young cop dealing with crime and corruption. Lots of Batman’s future friends and foes are there before they become colorful villains. Catwoman, Penguin, Riddler, and maybe even the Joker were all seen. Plus lots of non-super gangsters from the Batman comics. All in all the show works pretty well for me as a police drama but it’s a little weird that Batman isn’t in it and they really can’t show any super heroes or villains yet.
Forever – Here I go with yet another quirky detective show. They really do seem to be my favorite. The twist in this one is that the main character, a NYC coroner, is secretly immortal. He’s been alive for a few hundred years and anytime he happens to die he’s reborn (fully grown) in nearby water. He’s partnered with a NYC detective as he investigates death and his own condition. He is also contacted on the phone by a guy who knows about the immortality and also claims to not be able to die only the new guy is a couple of thousand years old. And he’s messing with the younger immortal just to entertain himself. A solid quirky detective show.
The Blacklist – I mention this show because I’m giving it another try. I watched the first six or so episodes last year and gave up on it. It wasn’t moving fast enough for me and I got frustrated with the slowness of the plot. I watched the first three episodes this year and I like it better. I still have no idea what is going on since I missed a lot of episodes but things move much faster. I like that and will watch it a little more.
And some returning shows. I don’t have a ton to say about them since they’ve been around for a while and are known quantities but I like them all.
Agents of SHIELD – A lot of my comic book friends complain about this show but I like it. It’s not like there have been a ton of good SHIELD comic books that they have to live up to. It’s a solid super spy show.
The Big Bang Theory – Not a show that the hipsters like but I don’t care. I find it pleasantly funny.
Brooklyn Nine Nine – Now in its second season this has turned into a nice ensemble comedy after a slow start. One I look forward to laughing at.
Castle – Nathan Fillion as a quirky detective. You know I’m there.
Comic Book Men – Once again a lot of my comic book friends don’t like this show but some of us do.
The Middle – The least hip comedy on my list but it’s consistently entertaining.
Modern Family – A funny and creative show.
New Girl – Another one that I look forward to laughing at every week. I like the writing and find a lot of the quick aside jokes hilarious. “Depression era garbage man” cracked me up.
Supernatural – Back for its tenth season they’ve always managed to keep this show fresh and fun. Two brothers fighting monsters. Simple yet they’ve managed to get a lot of complexity out of it.
There you go. What have you been watching?
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got thirteen new comics.
Check them all out here:
There were a couple of times this week where I couldn’t get anything done. It could have been the sinus headache or it could have been general artistic directionlessness but either way I had nothing going on. So I decided to dig into my pile of drawings that I have printed out in blue line to ink. Sometimes I feel like drawing and coming up with new things but I’m not in the mood to ink and therefore finish things. So I scan in the pencil drawing, print it out on bristol board, and put it on the pile for another day. Today was that other day.
Inking, for me, is mostly about reacting rather than acting. I’m trying to finish off a drawing with a definitive black line rather than the grey of a pencil. That grey can look a bit indecisive at times. You can always go back and fix it later but with ink you’d better get it correct now. But since ninety percent of the drawing is already done it’s easier to get it correct. I find I can ink my own work with less mindfulness than drawing it. I can pick up a brush or pen and just go when I got nothing going on. So that’s what I did.
The first piece that I inked is called “With Everybody”. This is a case of the inking taking me longer than I expected because I didn’t have as much of it worked out as I usually do. Instead of the ninety percent that I mentioned above I probably had about seventy five percent worked out. All of the basic shapes were there but I still had to figure out what I was going to do with them, And none of the blacks, greys, or positive vs negative shapes were worked out.
The first thing I notice about this piece is the guy ended up looking like some sort of moth man. He didn’t start out that way since I didn’t have all the black spots worked out but he sure ended up looking like a moth. He has wings that are spotted and even extra eyes on his chest.
I started this drawing, much like I’ve started many drawings in recent years, with a felt tip pen that’s been refilled with india ink. The regular ink in a felt tip pen isn’t really suitable for artwork but if you refill the sponge in the body of the pen with tech pen ink you can get a nice black line out of it. You have to be careful though because it makes a mess out of French curves and straight edges. You have to clean them a few times a day. Make that a half dozen. At least.
After I make the mechanical lines with the pen and straight edges/curves I pull out my brush and bottle of India ink. That’s where those thick to thin lines across the center of the body come from. I also thicken up some of the outlines that I made with the pen. I don’t always want the perfectly even line of a pen. Often the less even brush line is livelier. And if I mix the two I can get the best of both worlds.
I also had to figure out where to put the small parallel lines that make up the greys of this piece. They’re not really grey, of course, but create the illusion of a mid tone. None of that was indicated in the original drawing so I had to figure it out here. That took a while since the space is all about flatness and it’s often easier to organize the illusion of space because that follows rules. Flatness has rules that are different and not always easy to see. I think I figured it out here but it took a while. I’m not sure exactly but I’d say the ink work on this drawing took five to six hours.
The next drawing that I did this week probably took half that time. It’s called “Race Away” and is mainly the marked up face of a person. I think of him as a male figure but he really is a bit androgynous. Most of the black and white parts were figured out in the drawing except for on his shoulders and chest. And they were fairly easy to figure out.
This one is made up of two of my favorite things. Faces with designs on them and spirals. I’m forever putting triangles on faces and often filling the sky with spirals. Sometimes I make spirals out of hair two but I got baldness going on in this one. I’m not sure why but the whimsical triangles and circles in the background remind me of music or musical notes. Maybe it’s a “Follow the bouncing ball” thing. I’m not sure but I can almost hear a song when I look at them. That’s unusual for my drawings. I don’t think they often suggest sound.
The space in this drawing was a lot easier to figure out than the first one because it’s mostly “Real” space. It’s not real in any exact location sort of way but there is a sky and some ground with maybe a fence on it. Could be some waves and water behind him but it seems like he’s in a real space. The Mothman could be anywhere. His space is more of a story space than a real one. I have no idea where he is. And where is that giant face coming from? Who knows?
In both of these drawings I not only mixed the line of a brush with the line of a pen and edge but I also mixed in some freehand pen work. In the glasses of the man and the spots of the Mothman’s wings I made some short pen marks. They don’t have the perfect spacing of the mechanical background lines and so add to the natural flavor of the piece. Really, too many “Perfect” lines to deaden a thing.
So there you have my week of not having it going on. I always find it a good idea to have something in reserve for when I just want to get zen with things.
I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got nine new comics.
Check them all out here:
I’ve been getting some artwork done on the computer lately. I find working on paper and canvas to be a far more satisfying experience but some ambitions can only be fulfilled with the help of a computer. Specifically I’ve been working on a book where I tie together lots of my artwork with some stories. I’ve been working on it for a couple of years now and I still don’t have anything finished. As a matter of fact I have three separate books started but none finished. That’s because I’m still struggling with exactly what I want to say and what form it will take. That and this stuff takes time. So this week I decided to take some of that time.
The book that I decided to work on was named “Textures and Art”. I started this one some time back in March or April and I think the concept was to integrate some of my past drawings and paintings with photos of textures that I took while out on some of my walks. And some unknown story would tie it all together. Or at least that was as much of the plan as I could remember. I had completed about fifteen pages back then and then abandoned it. Pretty much because I prefer to draw or paint. But I want to make a book. I really do. So I steeled myself to do some work on it this week.
I wanted to make it to forty pages but since I was nowhere near that number I just started with the next one in line. Last Spring I had worked out a basic design for the background and the idea was to pick through the scans of my drawings and paintings to find things I could visually tie together and eventually make a story out of. I also would use the photos of textures as design elements to help things out.
One thing else I would add was some of my street photography. I didn’t want them to be straight up photos so I decided to use some of my Photoshop filter recipes on them that take a photo and make them look different than your ordinary photograph. The few filter recipes I have make them look a little more like illustrations and a little more like pop art. Of course that means even more work.
My basic process for the whole thing went like this. First I choose a background design. There are four of them and they’re all basically the same neutral grey background only oriented four different ways: top, bottom, left, and right. I also started with a blank white background on occasion and then covered the whole background with a photo.
The next step was to choose a main image and decide where to place it on the page. The main image could be a drawing, a painting, or a photo. Sometimes the main image became a secondary image through the process but I had to pick one to start. All the work on the paintings and drawings has already been done since I routinely scan my work in so I have lots and lots of them to choose from. But it’s still always more work than I think it will be to design a page.
If the main image is going to be a photo then I have more work to do. None of the photos are finished. It doesn’t take a lot of work to make one since I have all the filter recipes saved as actions but it still takes a good ten to twenty minutes to get a photo done. And that’s me working fast. If I’m slow that day it all takes more time.
After the main image I pick a secondary image. I usually like to pair a photo with artwork but it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes I’d pair a drawing with a painting. Then I had to find a place to put the text. I chose a yellow/brown box with a black outline back when I originally made the design so I stuck with that. I had no hard-and-fast rules for the size and shape of the text box so I worked one or two of them in as they design saw fit. There is not a lot of text on the pages but I need some place to eventually fit the words.
After that I put in the tertiary pieces of art. This is where the most creative stuff happened. I usually went small with them and there could be any number of pieces but there were no other rules for this part. I’d interlock pieces and cover them up as I saw fit. No single tertiary piece was that important so I tried to get them to work as a whole. I even made some main pieces into tertiary pieces on later pages to tie things together.
I ended up getting about five pages a day done this way. I’d say it would take me about three hours to get five pages done and that’s all I could get done in a day. Or at least that was all I could take. I could and have spent a lot more than three hours a day on a painting or drawing project but those are a lot more satisfying to do. With this book design I would get frustrated after two to three hours. I’ve learned over the years that I have to stop then. I actually want to get this project done and too much frustration can make me stop so it’s important that I pace myself.
I ended up reaching my goal today and got that fortieth page done. That made me happy until I realized I hadn’t though about how to end this thing. I need some sort of visual ending but instead I had an ending they just stopped. It was a weird feeling. I almost always have an ending in mind for whatever I do but for this I had none. And as I ended the fortieth page was when I realized that. I don’t know how that escaped me.
Oh, well, at least I know the next thing I have to work on when I get back to that project. That pesky ending.