The way you look when you want to do something you know you shouldn't

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Today a simple picture of a boy who has to say “no” to his best friend. Head bowed, slumping, arms showing that “what can I do” feeling. Now that’s a good kid! He’s definitely a got more will power than I had when I was a young bird…kid.

Some pages need just a simple picture. I’m thankful that idea appeals to me, but I didn’t get it until I drew too many pictures with too much going on. Now that the deadline of March 31 is crashing down on me, I’m all for simplicity.

Pen and ink scanned as “text”. The great thing about scanning as text is that all of the blacks are pure black and everything that’s not black is white. There are no midtones, which means less time spent cleaning up smudges.

The one where Buddy convinces Jimmy to disobey an order

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I’m getting faster at sketching an idea then inking it, partly because my ideas for my recent drawing are less elaborate. I’m more concerned about getting my point across as directly as possible than I’m concerned about my “art.”

Today’s picture is a good example. My original sketch was just two talking heads that only I could recognize as a butterfly and a jay bird. To get to the point, I drew the butterfly huge to elicit the feeling that despite his actual small size, he was capable of overwhelming Jimmy Jay by persuasion.

Pen and ink again.

Inking Momma Jay warning the tykes to stay out of trouble

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Today was laundry day. I love laundry day. I’m down in the basement in my sling chair reading, watching videos, catching up on my Letterkenny obsession, and drinking coffee. Just what I need after spending a busy week herding cats in my day job.

Every day at 5 pm I make the trip from the left side of my brain to my right. To make the transition I usually eat a lot of macadamia nuts with a cup of Mocha Java decaf, Peets brand. The next step is to fiddle with my Rotring Isograph pens, which are my constant companion these days. After sketching a few geometric objects, I look at my storyboard and decide which image I’ll be drawing. I choose according to my mood, not by chronological order. Eventually, I’ll have done them all.

In this picture, Momma is pointing to the bird-swallowing chimney and warning the kids never to go there. Will her admonition catch hold with those little imps? Only time will tell.

By the way, this sketch was done with pen and ink. In photoshop I used three duplicate multiply mode layers to enhance the line work.

Eventually, before March 31, I’ll know how I’m going to color Buddy Butterfly’s wings. And I’m going to remove that black object in the center of the picture — I was hoping it would look like a rock.

The plot thickens: Momma Jay warns about the insidious bird-swallowing chimney

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Today’s inch forward includes wiping and reinstalling the operating system for my iMac. What a pain!

The sketch shows Momma Jay warning the little tykes not to play with fire, or, in this case, not to mess around with the chimney that has a bad reputation for making birds disappear. We’ll see how well the kids absorb her wisdom.

Pen and ink to be completed tomorrow.

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Drawing Boredom in a Children’s Picture Book

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I had a blizzard of computer problems today. The pricey new iMac is misbehaving again, refusing to update and having a hissy-fit of kernel panics. So I’m going to Plan B. I’m getting out the old reliable Thinkpad and using the Gimp to get the job done.

Today’s sketch shows a bored Jimmy Jay and his concerned friend Buddy Butterfly as they discover the disenchantment and ennui that lies at the opposite end of the happiness spectrum. Pen and ink, as always.

The image below is a mess…I’ll replace it tomorrow when I solve the riddle of the iMac.

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The "guided-eye" sketch inked

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I managed to ink this page in about one hour. When I created the sketch yesterday I figured it would take about 6 hours. But it turns out that I’m a swift inker.

Visual perspective is the challenge in this drawing. The action in the front scenes have to standout from the middle ground action, and the middle ground needs to appear to be in front of the background scene, the guys on their bikes. I can create some of that effect by manipulating Buddy’s wings and having them overlap the background scenes.

Those poor, unforutnate wings. I never draw them the same. One day they’re somewhat realistic, and the next they look like shrunken vestigial limbs that are about to fall off. Lucky for me, in the land of fantasy everything is possible.

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Guiding the eye through the picture with intention

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Up to this point in my drawing life I’ve given little thought to composition — I feel fortunate to just get a drawing that looks something like what I see in my imagination. But I know that there’s more to a good picture than simple verisimilitude. I have three Hiroshige art prints staring back at me from above my monitor and each one is a masterpiece, not because everything in the image looks like a carp, or a geisha, or a traveler in the rain. Nope. The pictures are awesome because of their composition and the way my eye travels through each picture and takes me into the Edo period.

Today I decided to try composing a picture intentionally. I need a two-page spread and I want to combine four pictures of Jimmy Jay and Buddy Butterfly playing games into a single image that flows across two facing pages from one scene to the next. Here’s my working sketch. The blue line is on a Photoshop layer, not in the sketch itself.

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The original sketch was drawn lightly with an HB pencil then given some contrast with 4 duplicate layers, all using multiply mode.

Our Jay Family Arrives at the Bird House

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My square job got the best of me today. Lots of stressful urgent red tape sealed up the day in a bundle of nerves and frustration…which spilled over into the new career I’m building. I try to keep the stress low during the day so that I can have a joyous evening of moving ever-forward one inch at a time.

Here’s my daily inch. I had 60 minutes to sketch, ink, scan, and clean up in Photoshop. It’s a good start. I’ll count myself fortunate that I had those 60 pure minutes. Enough said.

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The great thing about drawing is: no matter how you draw it, it’s right. I love pen and ink.

Battening down the hatches

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In something of a digression from my children’s book project, I spent the day removing anything on my work and art websites that contained references to trackers. I checked my websites for cookies and Javascript such as google analytics and google font servers that might be seen as trackers.

The two articles below give good reasons for dumping Facebook, Instagram, Google, and Twitter, and they show ways to start regaining the privacy that many of us have unwittingly given to the Surveillance Economy.

• Become A Facebook-Free Business

• Fighting the surveillance economy — A practical guide for individuals and companies

I haven’t extracted myself from the sticky web of the privacy thieves yet. I’m not even close. I eagerly grabbed up the free goodies that Google and Facebook were dealing. Two years ago I deleted my Facebook account, and today I began to disentangle myself further. To start with, I deleted 8 Instagram accounts today. I don’t fool myself that the “Account Deleted” message means that my data was really deleted. I expect that Zuckerberg and his creepy cronies never actually delete accounts.

Another big surveillance dealer is Google. I have many “free” Google email accounts that I’ve created over the years. It takes time to deal with those. The number of emails I’ve sent from that account is mind-boggling. I’m sure Google scraped every word of every message. But it’s important to get started pulling off Googles tentacles, one by one. To get started I’ve got a new email account at disroot.org.

And now, back to drawing. Here’s my custom Facebook Free badge.

Redrawing the arrival in Ashland scene

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Today’s inch was to redo the linework for the “arrival” page, but alas, I couldn’t find the original drawing. “Not a big dealt,” I thought. “I’ll just redraw it — it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

But my brain seemed to have taken the day off. The first two attempts had some weird perspective going on, medieval perspective, in fact. The kind of perspective where a bird in the distance looks bigger than a house in the foreground. Eventually I pushed myself away from my sketchbook and took a timeout to eat some macadamia nuts. They jump-started my nervous system, and when I returned to drawing, I came up with the image below, which I think is an improvement on the original, which I can’t find anyway.

I’ve decided to bring the two mice along for the ride. They’ll be appearing just about everywhere as spectators, and who knows, they may end up being the stars of their own story when I finish this book.

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I’ll be adding tails to the mice. Tails are always a nuisance when animals are wearing clothes.