Sketchbook – Page 50

WEEKEND SKETCHBOOK

Monday, April 23, 2007

hawkline is the name of one of the bands that my buddy corey drums in. i was trying to come up with a logo for them.

I’ve been seriously slacking on the book, spending most of my Work time reading (today it was Vonnegut’s GOD BLESS YOU MR. ROSEWATER and a great article on commuting in the New Yorker with a great spot illustration by Kevin Huizenga) or messing around with the sumi-e brush. Yesterday I just entered random junk into Flickr and drew whoever looked interesting (except for the third drawing — that’s from a picture of my dad and my brother Nick).

I really love working with ink and brush — I can be fast and loose, and everything just kind of flows out. Working with the woodcut style, on the other hand, is a real pain in the ass, but I like the results a lot better.

Best of all, though, is free-associating with a regular old gel-ink pen:

(Meg is mortified that I would publish a nudie drawing on my blog.)

Nothing beats straight pen-to-sketchbook drawing. Check out these pop-up drawings by Jim Woodring.

I keep thinking about serializing the book as a way to keep up work on it. I was going to write today a bunch about the potential to make a long book out of a weekly strips, but depressingly, I wrote about that last summer. (Almost a year ago, and I’m still stuck on the same idea.) That post has a Vonnegut quote, a George Saunders quote, and a Mark Newgarden comic in it.

Why can’t I write posts like THAT anymore? Yeesh.

COLLAGE: WHERE TO TURN WHEN YOU GET STUCK

Monday, April 9, 2007

“I remember great pleasure in cutting out Andy Cap and Flo with manicure scissors, and then cutting little slits in a magazine picture of a big bowl of Beef-a-Roni, and fitting Andy and Flo into them so it looked like they were rising out of the Beef-a-Roni. I remember laughing my head off at that one. I still love collage and I’ve always turned to it when I get stuck writing or drawing.”

—Lynda Barry

Today, obviously, I got stuck.

OUR STATE OF MIND

Monday, April 2, 2007

Clouds have lifted around our place. I think we’ve figured out what we’re gonna do for the next couple of years, and that always feels good. My wife and I are two people who like to have a battle plan.

I was reading a Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi book in Half Price yesterday, and he was talking about happiness/sadness in terms of mental entropy. I like that idea a whole lot. Our brain wants to take chaos and make some kind of order out of it. With art, it’s the same thing. Putting order — our style, our worldview, whatever — to the mess of experience.

Anyways, I found this doodle/sketch in an old book, and it just felt right for today.