Jimmy is bored with his life. It happens to all of us, unless we’re living on a higher plane. I’m talkng about the plane where we look within ourselves for meaning. Jimmy isn’t there. He just needs some excitement. Fortunately, his friend Buddy is a wild child who’s going to disrupt everything. Hooray!
This post almost didn’t make it. My Apple products started acting really bitchy and didn’t want to cooperate. I thought back to the desperate solutions I had to resort to in my Windows days, which included, at worst, wiping my hard disks and reinstalling Windows from 14 floppy disks. I’ve actually had to reinstall OS X several times just recently, when the horrible Mojave update caused me weeks of chaos. Apple, what’s going on over there in Cupertino? Anybody home?
Today I didn’t have to reinstall anything. I just rebooted everything, iMac and iPad, and it worked.
Here’s the fancy montage that’s intended to lead the viewer’s eye sequentially from the top left down to the bottom right. The line weight increases from back to front. The heaviest lines are given to the final image showing the boys listening to music in the pool. What a wonderful life they have.
Jimmy and Buddy are still enjoying their idyllic friendship, this time by riding their bikes around town. I don’t know how they got the bicycles … maybe they’re rented. And that butterfly looks like he may actually be a competitive cyclist. Just look at his legs — they’re tree stumps!
I used Procreate’s line smoothing feature for the wheels and bicycle frame, the inorganic forms. Normally I would have drawn everything by hand and lived with the wobbly lines. Wobbly lines are part of my style, but the next deadline is rapidly approaching and I’m taking all of the shortcuts I can.
Moving the story along, we’ve got the Jay family, along with Buddy and the two mice, moved into their cozy new tree house. The only dour moment, so far, is that Momma Jay has firmly laid down the law about staying away from that bird-swallowing chimney. This picture of the boys drawing each other begins the middle of the story arc, where everything is going along just great. We see the boys doing some carefree goofing around and having innocent fun. Their life is idyllic, and you know that can’t last long. It never does.
For Buddy’s eyes and Jimmy’s glasses I let Procreate smooth the circles. The arcs of Buddy’s thorax and antennae also use digital line smoothing.
I’m posting this from my iPad. I hate typing on the shitty glass keyboard. Golly, can I say “shitty” if I’m writing a children’s picture book?
This picture was originally a lovely watercolor painting.
Posting everyday has been a boon. I’ve learned to honor my limits. When it’s 7:15 I stop whatever I’m doing — inking, painting, drawing. When the day’s time is gone, my day’s work is over. I export the image and write a little post like this one. I call it a day and move on to family time.
My new attitude has carried over to my day job. In the past I’ve worked extra hours to finish up some incomplete project. Sometimes I would toil away until midnight just to be able to check the task off my to-do list. But I don’t do that anymore. Now, when it’s 5 PM, I check out. Whatever is left undone can wait until tomorrow. I like this way of living.
Here’s Momma Jay Warning the Kids in it’s final form. I may yet tweak some of the line work. In this project, nothing is ever complete, perfect, or finished.
I’ve got nothing witty to say today. Re-inking is a heads-down, nose-to-the-grindstone thing. The more I ink, the faster I grind my nose. Speaking of which, my nose was the feature I hated most when I was a teenager. I would look in the mirror in the boy’s restroom and say to my nose, “Nose, you’re ugly. You’re the reason everyone hates me.” Once someone told me that I had a Roman nose, and I took it as an insult because I’d never heard the phrase before. I thought it meant “big, ugly nose.”
Today’s picture is a work in progress. I created the blue line layer by creating a layer above the layer I’m retracing. I filled the layer with blue and set the blending mode to screen. I think the blue lines look cool.
After the bird house disaster in my front yard yesterday, it’s ironic that I’m re-inking the Jay family’s new tree house. The repair job I did on the bird nest in my Oregon Berry bushes didn’t turn out well. It rained last night and this morning the nest was tilting perilously. It looked crushed and rain-damaged. The original nest was perched high in a stable branch that leaned against the house, and it was sheltered under the eaves of the roof. If I were a Stellar Jay, I would not be happy with the poorly rebuilt nest. I would look for a safer place for my family.
Despite my disappointment in the condition of the nest, I tried to prop it up a little better, just in case my jays return to reevaluate their nest. My only solace is that the birds are healthy and it’s early in the mating season. There’s still time for them to build another nest. I hope.
Tomorrow, April 15, is the deadline I set for publishing this book. Actually, it’s the second deadline — the original deadline for publishing this book was March 31. I set that deadine in December 2018. And now, with my decision to re-ink all of the images, I must reset the deadline again. When I reset the deadline to May 15, I successfully convinced myself that I could redraw 32 images in 2 weeks. That decision was based on oblivious pride and a delusion. Now I’m going to swallow my pride and set a realistic deadline. Damn it! This book is going to take another month. My deadline is now May 15.
It’s not that I’m procrastinating. I work steadily every day using what time I have after my day job. I’m sure that I’m putting everything I have into this project. I’m confident that I’ll complete this project, and that’s a great feeling. As a worker bee, I’ve completed many projects for my employers. This is the first time I’m confident that I can complete my own project. My life has been pockmarked by innumerable unfinished projects, including a several unfinished novels that I worked on for 10 years and just gave up on. I’m confident now because I have a system working for me. It’s guaranteed to work. The plans mantra is, “Do something that moves you forward every day, even it moves you only one inch.” Moving one inch a day isn’t the meteoric progress I’d like, but I know it will work. And I’ll do it one day at a time, one inch at a time.
As usual, I’m doing the line work in Procreate. Notice that Buddy Butterfly has flown up the new house. He’s hard to see in the black and white image, but once his wings are painted a bright orange, he’ll be easy to spot. He’s such a showoff!
In this case, south is definitely relative. Ashland, Oregon is only the South in that it’s in southern Oregon, a fairly northern state.
Today I pruned the Oregon Berry bushes in the front yard. They’re hardy, thorny, glossy-leaved bushes, just about the only thing that thrives in our granite soil. They were growing against the house and I had delayed pruning them for too long. As I was pruning away, I noticed that one of the shorn branches had a nest hidden in it. I thought this must be one of last year’s nests, and tossed the branch, nest an all, onto the brush pile. I moved to the other side of the yard to prune, and noticed a mated pair of Stellar Jays fluttering over the bush I had just pruned. Then the male flew to the brush pile and started looking around near the nest. At that point, I realized that I had cut down their home. I was horrified.
I told my partner about the nest, and she also was horrified. She rushed to the garden shed and found a ball of twine. We removed the nest from the pruned branch and perched it in the crotch of a three-pronged branch, as high as possible, then secured it with the twine.
We moved away from the nest hoping that the jays would return, but, alas, there were gone. Eventually we went back to our chores. Then I noticed a movement out of the corner of my eye — the female jay was in the nest and the male was perched on a branch above her. Then they both flew away.
We’re hoping that the jays will accept the nest and stay to raise a family. I realize that their original nest was perfect for them — they chose the precise location they felt safe in and built their home one twig at a time. As good as our intentions were, and as hard as we tried to duplicate their original nesting, I would not be surprised if they don’t like the new, more exposed position of the nest. They may decide to build their home in a friendlier neighborhood. Ah, as much as I understand how they must feel to lose their home and return to find it mangled, I would love for them to stay.
