B3D: K

One of the great things, I've told her, about her bein' so pretty is that I'll never match it, y'know? No matter how good I draw or paint or smear coffee onto paper, whatever beauty I manage to capture and confine there, she'll always do me one better.

The unattainable goals are the best ones.

B37: Rocky Mountain I

The assignment: a "map" (not necessarily geographical) integrating a self-portrait and some form of personal information. The result:

From the get-go I wanted to do something with the Columbia river since it's the geographical feature that ties my two "homes" together, and then to integrate the Pacific coast and Vancouver island since it's taking on increasing importance for me as the oft-visited home of my bonny lass. I was stumped about what to do beyond that, though. The composition finally came after much doodling when I realized that the mighty Columbia follows the outline of my beard pretty well, and when I saw that Pend d'Oreille would be sitting, appropriately, in my ear, I took pencil in hand with intent and worked my meagre magics.

In critique, the question was raised of whether this is watercolour or gouache. The answer is water colour, gouache, coffee, and white acrylic. The colours look awful on the computer by comparison with the genuine article. I did a bit of tweaking in GIMP, but I'm just never happy with scanned colour artwork.

Lastly, "Ag Mneas" was the name of a planet in a science-fiction story I tried to write a few years ago. I have no idea why it popped into my head for a title. Peculiar, because I haven't even thought of that story since the last day I worked on it.

B32: The Sneaky Stack

A couple of months ago as I was trying to assemble a portfolio to challenge placement in a second semester of basic drawing class. Part of the required portfolio was supposed to be a sketchbook. Well, I've always hated sketching in a book, so, naturally, I don't keep one. Instead, I decided to cobble together a sampling of loose-paper sketches that I had laying around. This task was met with some difficulty though, as I kept rifling through papers thinking, this is all lousy stuff! Don't I have any good stuff?

Apparently, I'd consolidated my good stuff into a pile some months previous, and subsequently forgotten where I'd stowed it. I was quite pleased to rediscover that pile today. I came across this little drawing (about 8cm wide) that I'd forgotten all about, and I thought, that little doodle needs to go on the blog! Transistor talk. PNP parlay? Something like that.

Incidentally, my challenge was successful, even though my "sketchbook" was all B-grade stuff. Yay getting-by!