Scribbles and Scribings

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone out there (whether or not you live in the US where it’s being formally and nationalistically observed) has a moment this week to spend with their family and/or friends and reflect on all of the good things in their life. I have quite a long list myself, including my wonderful extended family, all of my dear friends (both online and offline) and my dear husband and the life we’ve been building together. I love that I have the freedom to pursue my art and maintain a comfortable life at the same time, and am grateful for all of the blessings, large and small, that have filled my life. I just finished making pies for tomorrow’s dinner with my husband watching goofy old movie serials on our little kitchen TV and you know what? It’s a pretty good way to end the day. Especially taking into account that the rest of the day was spent cleaning the whole house because we’re hosting Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.

I don’t have any more thematic artwork to post at the moment (we’ll see if I get a chance tomorrow, but it seems unlikely) but I thought that regular visitors to my blog would appreciate seeing a little work-in-progress. Yes, I have finished ALL of the ink drawings for my Chinese Zodiac series: The Ox, The Pig, The Dragon, and The Monkey. The Ox is actually a re-drawing of the Ox I did way back at the beginning this year, the first of the series (since this IS the year of the Ox) but I decided it just didn’t hold up to the rest of the drawings I did since then. Two of these are partially colored, and the only one that should take an exceptionally long time is The Dragon — I just can’t help throwing all the bells and whistles into a Dragon, after all.

I don’t know about anyone else, but as much fun as I’ve had doing these (and they have been very fun) I will be happy when they’re done. I’m a bit eager to start in on the next project. I’ll be posting shiny new color versions of the whole series everywhere as soon as they’re done… with any luck in the next couple of weeks!

Have a great holiday, those that are having one!

Looking back on this year, it’s been a very busy one. Unlike some people out there, most of the chaos has been good. Crazy-making sometimes, but usually for good reasons. I have lots to be grateful for and despite the current state of things in the world I have a good deal of optimism for 2009.

As far as this blog goes, the thing I’m happiest about is that for the most part I’ve been able to keep a steady schedule, in part thanks to Illustration Friday. At the beginning of this year I committed to posting something every week based on the IF topic. I didn’t quite make that, but given my horrid track record for diary-keeping I’m amazed I did as well as I did.

Out of 52 weeks in the year:

• I posted IF illustrations for 43 of them (only missed 9, although technically a couple didn’t make it to the blog in time to post on IF)
• 39 of those were new, original drawings, three of which never got further than a rough sketch.
• 14 were existing work I’d done for another purpose but were appropriate for that week’s topic (and one of those was significantly edited for IF)

I’m pretty happy with that. The hardest part was getting back into the habit when I missed a whole month over the summer due to my insane schedule.

I don’t know if I can make the same vow this year, since I may have more illustration projects coming in. However, I do promise to post something to this blog every week, and participate in IF when I can. I’m also going to start merchandising my existing art more, making better use of my redbubble account and my CafePress store, and making more art that is directly in line with that. Toward that end I’d like to redo my website (including this blog!) but that’s a secondary priority to making more art.

Is anyone else making an “art resolution” this year?

Last weekend I attended the Illustration Conference in NYC. The whole weekend was exhausting, but a total blast! I met so many fellow illustrators from all over — from those just starting out to those who’ve been in the business for years, and those who are transitioning out of (and into) illustration to/from related fields. There was a fair amount of business talk and shop talk, but there was so much creative energy and talent on display  it was practically crackling through the air. I had the chance to share portfolios with some amazingly talented artists.

I came back home re-energized and full of ideas! Being a compulsive note-taker I did more writing and looking than sketching at the conference, but there are a few scribbles scattered around my notes.

I didn’t have a chance to participate in the big SketchCrawl that preceeded the main conference, but I heard so much about it, it’s an idea I’m definitely going to have to explore. The man who spearheads it, Enrico Casarosa, really hit the nail on the head when he talked about carrying your sketchbook everywhere but never taking it out of your bag.

The conference itself took place in a hotel in Manhatten, but I was crashing at my brothers’ apartment in Brooklyn. I found that the fastest way to make the train show up was to settle in for a really detailed sketch of my surroundings. But I managed to snag a few informal sketches along the way.

 Of course, as is the case after every conference I’ve ever been to, I’ve come down with a nasty head cold. This one totally snuck up on me Tuesday afternoon, when I thought I was “safe,” so I’ve barely had a chance to go through everything I brought back with me, much less e-mailing all the wonderful people I met… but I will! But not right now… this is the most I’ve been upright since the cold hit me and it’s time to lie down…

I have a full-time graphic design job which I love. The work is meaningful and creatively rewarding, my co-workers are great, and the company is good to us. Maybe that’s why I barely noticed the time passing. But it still came as shock to realize that I just passed my ten-year anniversary with the company.

My actual anniversary date was months ago. Technically, my anniversary as a salaried employee was in November, but I’d started working as a contractor for them way back in June 1997. So, why is it only hitting me now?

Last week, the head of my department handed me my anniversary gift. The company is generous in many ways, but cash awards are not one of them. So on service anniversaries we get a small catalog of gifts to pick from and we tell them which one we want. I picked mine out back in December, the lovely little necklace pictured below.

(My husband voted for the portable smoker, but I knew it would have just joined the waffle iron and the sandwich maker and deep fryer sitting unused in the cabinet. They’d seemed like a good idea at the time too. So I picked something sparkly that was just for me.)

Even going through the catalog didn’t phase me particularly. But when our department head walked in on us during a meeting with the familiar gift bag (with a terribly impersonal memo from HR still stapled to it) it really struck me: wow. I’ve really been working here for more than ten years. That’s officially longer than I’ve done anything else, and I was in the same elementary school building until 8th grade. In a few years I will have been living in my adopted hometown longer than I was in the town I grew up in, depending on whether you count the college years. It doesn’t help that my manager, who was there when I received my gift and was hired about the same time I was is completely in shock that he’s been in one place for ten years too.

It really didn’t help matters that people kept thinking it was my fifteenth anniversary instead of my tenth, either.

I guess that’s just getting older. I still think of myself as “just out of college” but that’s getting further and further away. It’s just driven home by the newest addition to our dept who was, like me, hired almost right out of college. Only much more recently.

I know I’m not “old” but I never exactly was one of the hip, with-it kids to begin with. If anything, I like to think that my cool-factor has increased somewhat with the greater confidence I have now. I was the stereotypical scrubby nerd throughout my youth. Now I’m taking better care of myself both physically and emotionally. I actually have a pretty clear idea of what I want my future to be like… and I know what I need to do to make that happen.

It could be easy to take this milestone as representing the relentless passing of time and inevitability of aging, or even a certain amount of career stagnation. I’m trying to take this milestone of how far I’ve come: my skills have progressed substantially over the years, I have the respect of my co-workers, and I survived the layoffs a few years ago. I have a job that I truly enjoy, and at the same time I’m confident enough in my abilities to get more aggressive about pursuing the other things I really enjoy which it doesn’t provide, including my illustration work.

Oh, and I’ve gotten married, earned my MFA, and bought a house, while I’m counting milestones. Not a bad start, really.

And that young co-worker? She’s coming up on her fifth anniversary soon…