General Journal 11-26
General Journal 11-23
As the garden has wound down, I find myself still wanting to do pages like this, so you get to suffer through my life, such as it is!
…wow, I have been shamefully lax about updating here, as opposed to over on Livejournal. (Yes, I’m a dinosaur.) So, the short form!
Got a new dog! Coonhound mix named Lacey, aka New Hound. Good!
Had a minor nervous breakdown! Bad!
Went back on anxiety meds/antidepressants! Good!
Seventh Bride is re-released from Amazon! Good!
…I think that’s the highlights.
Travel Journal Negative Six and Three
Faking the Rough Draft
(And thanks to archangelbeth for the analogy!)
Art derives from artifice and is inherently artificial. I may want to produce gorgeous authentic journal pages in my sketchbook, but I can’t. So I scan the weird little doodles and frantic blatherings in the sketchbook and produce them on the computer, because I grew up on the computer, goddamnit.
And they come out looking like this.
One Week
In one week, I will be on a plane to Botswana.
I am terrified. I have bought two travel journals and they are probably both wrong.
I really want to keep a travel journal–or at least to be the sort of person who keeps travel journals–and I am going with a pack of artists so I totally have to bring one. Sketching will occur. But then I get these books about travel journals and it’s all doodles on Moleskines that are eleven thousand times better than my best day sketching and I KNOW they only put the pretty ones in and not the pages that are like three lines and a doodle of a chicken, but it doesn’t help because ALL of my sketchbook pages are three lines and a doodle of a chicken.
(I kinda like the guy in this one book who just takes photos of everything and jots down notes and then goes back and sketches from the photos after he gets home and colors them digitally. I appreciate that. As a primarily digital artist, I will be at a disadvantage until they really kick up the game on tablets.)
Seriously, though, on some level I really want to be making the journals that look like Hemingway took up scrapbooking and they wind up galleries and then everyone will be terribly impressed at my mad on-the-spot drawing skills and insightful extemporaneous poetry and also how legible my handwriting is.
And while I am dreaming, I would like world peace and a pony.
I know people who take their sketchbook everywhere and draw in them and they are probably better people or at least better artists. I keep trying to get into the habit and it keeps sort of not happening. Possibly it’s because I don’t actually like drawing very much. I love painting. I will paint all day long. Drawing is the chore that leads up to getting to paint. If I’m drawing for fun, it’s basically as a punchline to a joke. This is arguably why I’m in comics.
Anyway, I continue to prep in other ways. I replaced my hiking boots that were pinchy. Apparently my problem is that I am a size 10, not a size 9.5. I was a size 7, once. Mind you, I was also a C cup once, too.
Anyway, everything is as prepared as it gets, I guess, except that you are supposed to make your checked luggage look really gaudy and crappy and distinctive because there’s a major problem with people stealing luggage off carousels, so the safari company suggests making them LOUD. I have purchased hot pink and blue leopard print duct tape. We will do this thing.
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