Draw every day

Part of going it alone -- that is, trying to do this without the benefits of a design degree and professors stroking my hair and calling me their precious savant -- is reading stuff in magazines and trying to figure out ways to actually do this. There's the complicated number-crunching aspects which I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of, there's the self-promotion and the dogged perseverance that goes alone with that, and there's the simple How In The World Can I Do This, No One Ever Looks At My Stuff, Oh What's The Point anguish you have to conquer. You'd think when your soul is naturally rejuvenated and revved up by drawing in the first place this would never come up, but you'd be surprised. Thankfully there are places you can go when your brain is completely bare. One of them is the art museum of course, and you can also sit outside and force yourself to do something. But when nothing feels right, there's always the periodicals section at the library.

I've been reading HOW, ID, and print off and on for years now. It started with a bored evening at Barns and Noble when I was in high school. I forget exactly why I had been poking around in the art&design magazines, but probably Lori had something to do with it -- she had to do with SO MUCH in those days. She had been talking up International Artist, which sometimes had some good stuff so presumably I started there. But then I picked up How's design annual (2003) which featured a teal illustration from Anja Kroencke on the cover. It wasn't something I would do, particularly, but was inspiring to me in a completely new way. New parts of my brain opened up to this image. I looked at it and thought, that's a really good use of a magazine cover. So much better than the gaudy fashion magazine stuff, yet it recalls it somehow (it was just a lone female figure in the center with words all around her). I logged the color away to use later on in something (prismacolor-ly speaking: parrot blue softly under aquamarine, light aqua and maaybe a hint of deco blue. Maybe). I noted how the shirt was striped yet there was no actual outline, remembering what I was learning from Hen at the time in Drawing 3 at school. Negative space. Though later I would realize this is also something the cubists were into: defining a shape by other shapes. The figure took up most of the page yet the face was not visible, which was counter to what Lori had been telling kids who drew Warner Brothers cartoons from her stash of cards in the tackle box. Start with the head -- people will notice is you cut off the head, but they won't notice if you cut off the feat.

When I looked inside at the work from the various firms from that year my mind simply boiled over.

I still have that magazine, although now the pages are ragged and feature gaps where I have taken things out for reference or collage. The cover is scarcely attached. But I like to remembered where it started, too. Up until that point, my design world had essentially consisted of the Allergic Child books and vague ideas about doing that forever. Nebulous ideas outline in a Black 0.3mm Zig Millennium inkpen. But this broke the art world wide open. New words like self-promotion and corporate identity. New concepts like art-inspiration.

This is effectively when I left the world of fashion magazines behind forever. I never read them for myself, necessarily, but something within the colors and shapes triggered something helpful deep in my mind that got my sketchbook out when I was running a little dry. The discovery of actual creative publications got me actually painting and thinking in utterly new ways. And there's no need to stop at the big official publications -- once you're in the section it's easy to spill over to the "culture" category and pick things up like Swindle and Anthem, the latter where I found my boy Jim Houser and the former featured him in an article not long after.

Back in July I was at the library, doing just this, and I came across an article in How by a certain Danny Gregory. He said many things in the article, but it boiled down to: draw every day.

Draw anything. Draw a bagel. Draw your lunch. Draw your hands. Draw your sofa. Draw the people waiting outside for the bus. Draw a book. Draw a tree. Draw that weird feeling you have. Draw an egg. Draw anything, but for heaven's sakes draw. Draw every single day.

I try and do this anyway but making it a point, it's an unwavering assignment, intrigued me. Okay, I thought. Let's draw every day. That afternoon I came home and drew part of my workstation:



I haven't been posting accordingly, but I have been trying to make sure I draw every day, even if it's just scribbles out in front of the library on my lunch hour. Work has been very difficult for me for the past week or so -- so much so I haven't wanted to post about it.



Before last week though, the streets had a lot to say.









Slowly but surely the scribbles begin to have more of a life, angles come easier to me, and the rest of the day feels nicer knowing I've spent some time doing what it is I really want to be doing. There's no greater motive here -- I don't usually use this time to sketch out something for a big final project -- it's simply the pleasure of drawing.

Rekindling the fire within is what this is.