So tonight was our oldest son’s 6th grade band concert. I tend to get antsy at these because there’s so many people. I’ve been thinking lately that I need to do more sketch book sketching anyway, so I grabbed a fresh moleskin sketch book and mechanical pencil to give me something to do while listening to the band and to take my mind off the throngs of people.

moleskin

I used to carry a moleskin all the time, but I found it cumbersome. I need more pockets. I was excited to be able to draw on my phone, but I think I’ll start carrying the moleskin around again too. I need to settle on a nice pen to go with it. The pencil smudges too much on the smooth pages.

 

I made some rough attempts at self-charicatures at first. I’ve been thinking about Revery a lot recently, and I’m itching to work on it. However, in the 15 or so pages I’ve done so far, I’m not thrilled with the way I draw myself. Given that I’m the main character, I rely on reference photos, which tends to steer me towards drawing myself more photo realistically. It’s alright, but everything else has a bit more of a “style” to it. Plus, the more photo realistic drawings take longer, and I do want to finish this graphic novel one of these decades. So I want to come up with a good stylized version of myself, and I need to practice. I got kind of frustrated, so I quit doing that and just started a random doodle and let it take me wherever it wanted to. The featured image, who I dubbed Willy McEyeballs, is the result.

As far as other current projects, life has been interfering with art far too much recently, leaving me very irritable and grumpy. I did manage a little work on a t-shirt design today, which will be the last major one I’m working on before getting all the designs formatted for printing. Then I need to figure out the Etsy connection to the t-shirt printer so I can finally open that up for business (and post some of the current art I’ve been developing for this endeavor, rather than just posting old art). After that, I’ll get back to work on the last few pages of that 10 Things children’s book, then…maybe Revery related stuff? I need to re-familiarize myself with drawing the world and the other characters. I read through some of the thumbnailed pages in my sketchbook the other day when I posted those pen and ink nature studies, I think I’ve got something with some potential on my hands. I probably need to do a little editing and reworking before getting too far with finished pages, make sure everything flows right and I plug any plot holes. I also have a slew of other t-shirt ideas, including a heap of ideas that just came to me in the last few days. It’s good to have art on the “to do” list, I just need to work on maximizing my studio time.

In the next day or so I’ll post up the Plunger Monkey card I made for my brother and his wife for their impending baby. On the heels of the Mother’s Day Card retrospective I just did, I’ve been thinking about doing one for all the PMD cards and envelopes I’ve done over the years. I’m also thinking about combing through my sketch books for all the little doodles of him and putting together an evolution of PMD of sorts.

Lots of plans…