Illustration Friday: Ripple

I had all sorts of profound ideas about the topic of "ripple", mostly having to do with how people's far distant pasts (ancestors even) affects their current behavior. Malcolm Gladwell had some interesting things to say about that in his book Outliers, and why Southern men are so belligerent and why Chinese students are so studious, even when they are generations removed from the South and from China. Fascinating stuff.

But as far as pictures go, well....I had a friend come over this evening to "play with art supplies"...and these are the pictures I made. It was really fun, but I'm not going to pretend there's anything profound going on. All three of them are "doodles" where I was basically just playing with the materials and seeing what happened with them. the last one I started out with a cool little watercolor pattern, but I promptly butchered it, and did some more stuff to it, butchering it again, and so did some more stuff, etc. This is about the fourth layer, and I liked it well enough to finally stop.

Bearded Man

I can't read in the car because it makes me nauseous, but for some reason I can draw. So here's a sketch. I worked on it both going to Michigan and back from Michigan.

Summer doodle

Sometime I ought to figure out how to do something REAL with this program. Right now, all I'm doing with it is doodling while talking on the phone. I could just as easily doodle on paper, but no....I have to do it on the computer. It doesn't help that my portable phone needs a new battery, so when I talk on the phone, I have to sit in one place rather than walking around doing the dishes, sweeping the floor, and picking up clothes. It was a great way to get chores done.

Illustration Friday: Trail of Glory

**********The young in particular, think that the way to go is in a trail of glory. What they don't realize is that there will always be someone left behind. Someone who will watch them go with a mixture of pride, joy, and sadness.

The expression is tough. I've been reading Gary Faigin's book "The Artist's Complete Guide to Facial Expressions," where he goes through what all the different facial muscles do, and how they work in various expressions. Pretty interesting stuff. I'm not sure, though, in this picture, that the smiling part of this came out. The crying part did, I think, but it's really mixed.

I used absolutely crappy paper, where every time my pen nib blobbed ink, it absorbed it in a blurry puddle before I could even soak it up. And the pen nibs are absolute crap. Art stores used to carry a whole variety of nibs, and you could buy replacements of your favorites, and now all they carry are prepackaged sets from Speedball....