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Drawing 936

Drawing 937

  Drawing 938

Drawing 939

  Drawing 940

So here I am again, playing catchup. Work pressures, health pressures, lack of time pressures, blah, blah, blah! Who wants to hear it? I'll just go on coming back, trying to catch up with myself...

There are some random thoughts about my drawing-a-day process in my head just dying to be poured into a post:

1. Why do I keep drawing-a-day going, even on days when there's no time/energy/inspiration? Because a day without it doesn't seem right, there's something missing (duh!), I do want to keep drawing daily even when there are pressures conspiring against it, it's good for my drawing ability/discipline, it keeps me watching and interested in shape/form/texture...
2. Limiting my material and colour choices was a good idea. It promotes inventiveness and, sometimes, procrastination: if I don't have to choose which colours or which paper, I just get on with it instead of being overwhelmed by choice. 
3. Drawing is like an ouroboros: it feeds on itself. Drawing engenders more ideas, more luscious shapes and shading and textures, more drawing, more painting, more sculpture. More writing. More of everything.
4. There are (generally) so many ideas in my head that it makes the poor thing ache. Pouring them out upon a page, even in serial form, provides relief.
5. Drawing is pure pleasure. The lovely swoop of a curve, the shine of metallic pens, the sexy silken feel of flowing ink, the friction of graphite against paper. Even the little dusty leavings of the eraser being blown off a page. Just made of Happy.
6. My current materials: a Mills & Boon paperback novel from the 70s/80s provides the paper; a 2B pencil; an eraser; black fineliners, a dozen in a box from Office Works; a red Sharpie; two shades of grey, Zig fine and chisel pigment ink pens, one Steel Gray, one platinum; occasionally a ruler and a compass.
7. Ideas. Hmm, more complicated. Sometimes I'll have a shape in my head, from a book/tv/newspaper/film etc. Sometimes I just begin and see where it takes me. Sometimes I wake with an image in my mind, not always from a dream, though that happens, too. Going to an exhibition or watching a tv program on other artists will create ideas. Thumbing through my "visual diaries" inspires ideas; I used to keep a "proper" visual diary, now it's a box into which I throw newspaper cuttings, bits and pieces of stuff, the little sketchbooks I keep with me at all times which are more writing of ideas in words and thumbnails than sketching, anything which is grist for the art mill.
8. Often I work in series, getting a particular shape or line stuck in my head for days or weeks. Usually it unsticks itself spontaneously, sometimes I get so sick of it I boot it in the arse to get rid of it, sometimes I'm forced to find another addiction to replace the problematic one. Is that the lesser of two evils, or simply evil upon evil?