Scribbles and Scribings

I work full time, it’s what pays the bills. I’m lucky enough to have a graphic design job I really love, even though it eats up a lot of the time I’d rather spend just drawing all day or even doing something a little more interesting with this blog. But the one thing it’s good for is random doodles. Meetings are a necessary part of working life, but they’re not always, shall we say, riveting. Sometimes I’m sitting through an hour-long meeting for the 10 minutes of discussion which is actually relevant to me. Sometimes the discussion gets hijacked by a meaningless tangent for a while until the meeting leader restores order. Hence, the meeting doodle.

It’s a habit I picked up in school. Since I had a pen and a notebook out anyway, and especially if I found myself nodding off, I’d stake out a blank area in my notes and just let the pen do what it will. For me, it has always helped me focus because my brain is always active and my ears are always listening, instead of just zoning out. I’m also a compulsive note-taker, so my college notebooks are quite crowded.

Since these days my sketchbooks at home are mostly full of sketches and warm-up drawings directly related to a specific project, meeting doodles are my “playtime.” Although occasionally the doodles are working out a particular problem I’m having, most often they are pure free-association from one stroke to the next. Working directly in ink means just living with every stray line I make so there’s no pressure for perfection. And I’ve always loved the wonderful depth and line quality you can achieve with a simple ball-point pen.

I’m not much of poetry reader… or writer. So I had to think a bit about this week’s Illustration Friday topic. All of the poems that I like, the ones which come to mind first, are the humorous ones. I had just about forgotten about this one, but when I was looking for ideas through the very cool Poetry Tool at PoetryFoundation.org — which lets you search for poems through a very simple interface by theme or by occasion or whatever — I rediscovered it. I remember seeing an animated version of this poem as a child and being fascinated by the imagry. I assume it was on Sesame Street but alas I couldn’t find it online.

I used the brush pen again this week, but no colors this time. Cringe at my lettering! I was working a bit larger than usual so here’s a detail shot:

I almost posted an older piece which I wrote and illustrated which isn’t technically a poem, but had particularly lyrical prose, until I came up with this idea. I may still post that piece, since it’s not online anywhere else right now.

My husband Jason is using the Illustration Friday topic for his writing, and has a humorous poem of his own as his entry for the week. If anyone knows of a similar informal venue for writers, let us know!

My inspiration for this week’s Illustration Friday topic comes from multiple sources:

I spent most of the weekend cleaning in my drawing studio. It was the first room I had to set up when we moved into our house almost three years ago. I was still in the MFA program and we moved the weekend before the semester began. I was so busy with school and the rest of the house that as long as I could reach my drawing desk I didn’t have time to do anything else with that room. As a result, there were lots of boxes which had been shoved in there without being opened, stacked up in the corners of the room and in the back of the closet. Going through all of this, I found many lost “treasures” I’d forgotten about or had been wondering where they were or didn’t even know I had in there.

To keep me company during this undertaking, I had the TV on. Discovery Channel was showing show after show about ancient Egypt and the modern researchers trying to learn about it. Watching all those people poking around in dusty tombs was something I could really relate to at the time.

Very simple coloring this week, but it’s not a bad effect. It’s not quite a self-portrait, but it’s close.

As an extra bonus this week, and probably most weeks, my husband will be using the Illustration Friday topic of the week to write a piece of short fiction. Please take a moment to enjoy his take on the theme “Discovery”

OK, so this is my first official cop-out for Illustration Friday It’s not that I don’t have ample source material for the word “Geeky” — I live with geeks, I work with geeks, my friends are geeks, and I’m one too — but another drawing project took up all my free time this weekend. This is an old piece from about 10 years ago, which sharp eyes will be able to tell based on the style of computer being used. It was done for work for a poster describing an overly-long computer process, and was created in Adobe Illustrator based on a pencil sketch I’d scanned. I think this was one of the pieces that convinced me how much I prefer inking on paper instead of in Illustrator. Wow, my style has changed a lot since then!

This quick drawing is for the Illustration Friday topic “Twist.” As an added twist, I decided to use my brush pen to ink this one instead of my usual fixed-width pens. I adore my Micron pens, and I still used them here for some of the finer details, but it can be a lot of work to get a vivid, organic line with them. The brush pen forces a somewhat looser approach, which takes a little getting used to since I’m out of practice. Maybe when I have time I’ll add a background and tidy up the details, but I’m very happy with the overall gesture and expression in this one.