gravity as a designer

found this on a visit to a local college greenhouse. i always fall for complementary colors contrasting each other.
this week has been more sketch revisions and a certain amount of necessary organization (a phrase here which mostly refers to tidying up my desk, but also printing out emails and high-lighting things i am not suppose to forget to do. )
romantically put, it has been more like being a library clerk and less like being rembrandt.

behind the scenes

for the new book, i have been building collages as part of the illustrations. (similiar to my work here )
as i am making sketches for approval nothing is set, so everything is held together by the low tack magic of yellow post-it notes. The backs look like this when i set them on the scanner:
i am quite excited about this book because it is a chance for me to combine my paintings, my drawings and my collage work in one book. if it goes well, it could be a watershed book.
so stay tuned. there is more to come including the front of the collage above.

sketches

i love sketches, even when like these, they go in the wrong direction. i love when they are incomplete and still mysterious.

when i set out to draw, my ideas are vague. it is not like athena coming fully grown out of zeus’s head. i am not copying out an image from in my head. drawing is rather more hiking in the woods and following a sense of direction. i know i am going over that way, because the text is like a loose map. i keep correcting my course with ideas of what i think i want, with what the text requires but mostly just with those little tugs of instinct. almost always i listen to music while drawing, which distracts the overly critical part of my brain enough that i can feel those little tugs and keep going. and keeping myself going is critical, because each mark, each sketch builds on the previous and it takes many many sketches to get to the right one. just like it can take miles of walking to get out of the woods.

but when i do get there i am often surprised and say to myself, “so this is what it is? is this what my work looks like? i hadn’t thought...”