Trying to hone in on this one character. Once I nail him down the others should (I hope) come easier. Most of the other characters have real-life people driving their look but I could never find a satisfactory reference for this guy, and because of that his face is a little amorphous to me. I know generally what his key features look like, but I don't see clearly how his entire face should look, and that makes coming to terms with him a little challenging.

A good challenge though. I've been putting off building concrete techniques for approaching faces in my work which seems insane given most of my pictures are fairly character-driven. It's long overdue, these face studies.

A weird side effect of all this face work I've been doing is that lately I have this socially-unfortunate inclination to get really into your face if I'm talking with you right now. Everyone's got such a different structure and it's beautiful to behold. My fascination is genuine and pure, if a little unsettling.

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Getting To Know You

There's a big stack of books by my green chair these days. One of the many anthologies of literature from college, for its historical introductions to the Victorian era. Wordsworth, who has been there since Christmas anyway but is being revisited as he was Poet Laureate in Britain from 1843 until 1850. There are many, many books on costume and dress -- some good, some less good, but all are taken into consideration and bits and pieces of them end up in my sketchbooks.



There are lists in all my notebooks. Color ideas. Lighting tests. Characters slowly reveal themselves to me. And the actual source novel itself is getting shabbier and shabbier as I pore over the thing looking for details that may have slipped me by earlier, and try and flesh out the quick doodles made the first time around.



In short: I am in the research phase of a massive new project, and it is pure and utter delight. My work days lately have consisted of just stirring this glorious soup of ideas, coaxing them into sketches. My reference stack is getting higher and higher. And my sketchbooks are getting fuller and fuller. Every rock I overturn leads to more questions, more books on hold at the library, digging and digging. Entire days have been spent in the shadow of this great stack of books, something I haven't really done since college.



For the first time I am really appreciating that English major I ended up getting. An English major asks all the questions about a story that an illustrator SHOULD be asking. Why is that character dropping hints like that? What is motivating this character to ask his boss those questions? What the heck is a "hair-cutting chamber"? What would a cotton-mill look like? What does that work entail? What does it look like? What part of their bodies would be the most tired? A good illustration doesn't merely repeat what the text says. It should add a further element to a scene, perhaps depict what is being inferred. It should be a sort of conversation. A picture should encourage you to want to read the words. That's my goal here, anyway. I want the people who flick through the book to look at all the pictures looking for spoilers to come away with more curiosity.



I finally started to hone in on the actual scenes I'm interested in, and as you can see there are quite a few. I'm trying to thin them down a little bit, though I'm certainly interested in painting all of these. There's actually more that didn't even make the rough cut. I went on a field trip to the bookstore a few weeks ago to see other illustrated novels (typically classics for young readers -- think Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Heidi by Johanna Spyri, Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain). They often employ a mix of black and white line drawings and full-color paintings, but I suspect that had more to do with the cost of printing than artistic choice. It all really depends on which pictures look best once they're dummied up, which is the next phase. Storyboard building. And sketching, sketching, sketching. And reading, reading, reading.

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One of the many interesting things on my desk is a little orange box filled with even litter wooden blocks. I got them initially thinking they'd be fun to play with -- because who doesn't love blocks -- but for most of their time here they've just sat in the little orange box. Then last weekend I learned that this box was the only thing I had that fit my new business cards. (Sorry blocks, we can't be going around handing out business cards all bent and bag-linty.) For a week now the blocks have been floating around my desk, and I'm lucky they have been becuase tonight I learned that they are the BEST thing you could ask for if you are trying to assemble a huge papercut piece.



Once you get much bigger than a single element putting something together like this is a bit daunting. This is a huge non-canvas piece for me -- almost 20" square -- and most of the things were just floating around on the desk. It was incredible comforting to have marks at the edges of where things needed to go, becuase once you start picking things up, layer by layer, once you get to the bottom things look very spare indeed.



But the blocks are there! And by and large you can place things back to where they're supposed to go. Excellent. Thank you, blocks!



And while I have you here, a little about this piece: it is essentially a take on the already complicated omnivore's dilemma. This is actually my personal beef with the movement. I love going into those natural markets becuase they are set up more like art galleries than like grocery stores. I love looking at the food and dreaming. But there is a weird undercurrent of these things are only for the rich when you go to those places. I can get brown rice for $2.99/lb at a boutique market, or I can get brown rice for $0.89/lb at my nearby supermarket. I'm not sure if there's a difference between those rices, they seem like the same quality of rice if you examine the kernels. It seems like it's just more expensive, as if purchasing rice for a dollar more a pound you are somehow fixing the universe with the power of your money.

I should also mention that I think it is totally possible to eat healthy while living under the poverty line. It is not easy to do it if you eat the way Americans are "supposed" to eat, meat-and-three-veg, but if you eat the way most of the world eats (stuff all mixed up in a bowl, legume+grain=a complete protein) then your dollar can get you pretty far. I talk sort of haphazardly about it over here. It takes a population willing to educate the portion of the population who is not fed this information constantly. It's hard work but worth doing. Because otherwise we are just stuck here, with the haves and the have-nots.

To you, these merely a lovely pale yellow, a gentle powder blue, and little palm trees. And really, that's enough. It's enough for them to work in this piece I'm putting together. It's exactly what a little whimsy like this needs.



To me though, these fabrics have enormous sentiment. They are: my childhood security blanket (yellow), my brother's childhood security blanket (blue), and the last little bits of one of the shirts Mom wore so much during that time in my life (the trees). My brother, my mother and me. All in this painting.

If you watch the Reading Rainbow episode with "The Patchwork Quilt" by Valerie Flournoy, you learn about how a REAL quilt is made, with fabric from people's lives. What always stuck with me was the ending, when a piece of the old quilt was put into the new quilt. Somehow this activates the new quilt to me -- it gives it that extra spark of needed life. It gives the new quilt a soul of its own.

It reminds me of other things made up of pieces of existing things. Making new plants from a cutting, or the seeds from last year's plants. Sourdough bread starters that are fed and kept alive rather than made from scratch. Fire lit from a burning stick pulled from someone else's fire. Lighting a whole room by touching one candle to another's flame. Somehow there's comfort in that reliance on what we already have. We took care of it so well that it is still around to give to others. And the more we give it away, the more of it there is.



If I keep using these dear pieces of fabric in paintings, they aren't going to be more, they will be less and less until they are gone. But on the other hand if I put them on canvas then they are out in the world instead of stuffed into the milk crate on the shelf, so in that way they continue living. Especially if I tell you this story. Then those colors up there are more than just a lovely pale yellow, a gentle powder blue, and little palm trees. They have weight and depth and soul all their own.



As time goes on I get more meaningful fabric (sleeves cut from a button up, those unmendable pajama pants, fabric we used to make the lunch bag) and use it alongside the older fabric. An overlap develops. The line between the fabric from before and the fabric from now blurs until everything I have to work with has value and meaning in an vibrant, pulsing way. And I pour that onto canvas and make pictures of things I love with things I love. And the feeling grows and grows and grows.

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Good heavens.



My paint is on sale at the art store this week (50% off!) so after getting that yellow I KNEW I needed, I high-tailed it back home to get to work on finding those other colors I mix and use every day.

Some of this has been rewarding. I did find that pistachio color!



Some of it has been grueling. I worked for almost three sheets of paper before I came even close to my lovely family of cream-green-purply brown.



And of course some of it has made great swaths of color that don't really sing to me.



I am recording all this on paper this time so that I STOP getting that weird grey-green color. It's a lovely color, it just really doesn't have a place in my pallet. (My inner, mental pallet that is. As you can see it takes up a great deal of my actual pallet.) Thus far it's been a lot of trial and error. Trusting instincts, and making clear and careful notes when a desired result goes against instinct. It often does.

There's so much here that can't easily be seen on a computer screen. I paint with gouache -- an opaque watercolor -- but not all gouache is created equal. You cannot take colors at their face value. A dark color may actually have a lot more transparency than you'd think, and transparency and opacity is the sliding scale on which colors assert themselves. A yellow with lots of opacity is going to look stronger than an orange with lots of transparency, even though the color as it sits in a big puddle on the pallet looks a LOT darker than yellow does.



Even if we're talking a dark army green and a lavender. It's all about how much paper shows through when it dries.



It's so baffling at first. How can a darker color look lighter than a paler color?! And when it dries is the key. Because man, that dark green looked a lot darker when it was wet.

Knowing about the transparency helps with mixing too. If I'm mixing a sort of wimpy dark color, it's going to mostly stand in the background. It will certainly affect the color, but it won't take over.



Whereas, if I have a really opaque dark color (like this mauve-y purple I use all the time) my mix will end up being mostly-mauve-with-a-touch-of-whatever.



Mixing white with anything seems to cancel out the transparency problem -- fine if we want a lighter color -- but it also (with a few surprising exceptions) tones down the vibrancy of a color a GREAT deal.



That's okay if we're going for the muted "tertiary" type colors. But no good at all if we want the power colors.



It's a lot like genealogy's dominant and recessive traits. It's not a simple 1+1=2. It's more like, I mixed this sand color with three things and twice I got something gross but that other time I got this crazy gorgeous lavender and how did THAT happen?! So you have to experiment. You have to just get the paint onto paper and look at it. And then by God you have to record your findings so you don't waste so much material next time.



And when you finally find something, and replicate it once to make sure you got it right, you cut out the little swatches to make a crisp, clear formula page.



And then you feel so much better.

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Floating

After being tied to a project for so long it's a bit floaty to be untethered. It's often hard to know what to work on. This time I have something to digest, but how I go about that is wide open. So I'm experimenting.

I am wanting to do something BIG with LARGE blocks of color.

If I do that, I can't really share it with you. Those crayon pictures I did are actually very beautiful, but they are larger than my scanner. With the light available I can only take a terrible photo which strips away everything about the picture that makes it worthwhile.

Been looking at my copy of Jules Verne: the Man Who Invented the Future by Franz Born, illustrated to perfection by Peter P. Plasencia. (Ward-o-Matic has posted the illustrations on flickr.) These pictures are small -- the book is about seven inches wide and ten inches tall -- yet as you can see the pictures are epic. Huge, somehow. He has such incredible depth while still flattening and stretching things the way you must do if you work on paper. I don't know quite how he does it, and one of my next missions is to find out. To come to terms with perspective.

My instincts are still a bit too realistic. I keep correcting things. Overlapping something as it actually appears, rather than showing it off as one is able to do in the world of painting. Anything can be seen. Should everything? Shouldn't some things still be partly hidden behind other things, to create interest and drama? I have smaller goals. Find that pistachio color. Loosen up a little (which, I hope, will help with perspective), bring people comfortably in the world. Digest some of those things I keep wanting to digest -- particularly the adventure stories. Ireland, Canada, San Diego. I really don't want to go anywhere else until I digest those adventures.

Some of these things can be done as I make some pictures about Fair. Other things will just require a lot of looking and a lot of desk time. Which is really all I ever want.

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I don't think I mentioned this earlier, but the protagonist of the "what IS Cyborg Anthropology?" entry is actually someone who existed. I got hold of some genealogy papers a while back and became enamored with the old-timey photos of the various relations who sailed to America from Ireland. Many of them were very fun and plain looking in a dated way, and I used a few of them in some quickies that I posted to flickr. In particular:



Edmund John, son of



Mary-Anne Clarke.

"Edmund" has been a Wheelahan namesake ever since. I don't see Avonia here in my sketches, but I believe she was the same generation as Mary-Anne, also married into the family. I am very curious about her and of course there is little to go on. Avonia. That doesn't sound like an Irish name. Possibly where the gypsy blood came in?

At any rate, something about Mary-Anne's stern brow and frumpiness made her a natural for my cyborg-y explanation, because I needed someone who wasn't young and intimidating. She's done very well, so much so that we are letting her tell even more of her story.



You will not see that here because we will be releasing it as it's own booklet, which is terribly exciting to me. It also means I need to hurry up and finish the rest of it.

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The big rhododendron plant in front of my building is in full bloom right now. This hot pink color is one of my Aunt's favorite color, and it always makes me think of her.



I usually don't go in for pink personally, but I've noticed it mixes well with the teals and oranges I've been into lately, so it's cropping up all over the place.



(Though in this picture's light I admit it looks a bit more like red.)

I've had a bottle of frisket -- a masking liquid especially designed for us water-based painters -- for probably six months now, but today was the first time I'd ever used it. I'd used frisket back in high school and bought this bottle when I saw it on sale somewhere. Just in case. You're supposed to be able to place it down, paint all around it, and then rub it off leaving clever white space. Considering my deep pulsing love of white space you'd think I'd use it all the time, but the kind of detail I need is a little more dexterous than my goopy frisket can manage. I could thin it a bit with water I guess. Frisket also ruins brushes so I'd have to sacrifice one of my nimble thin ones, and I go through those quickly enough without all that. So I usually just eyeball the white space, connecting the invisible lines where I need them to be. A bit more brain-strain and sweating, but that does mean I have a bit more flexibility with my white space.



I don't use pencil lines when I paint. I've never been able to satisfactorily erase pencil out from under yellow or other lighter colors without smudging or making them completely gone. I don't even sketch with pencil actually. I tend to draw with a pen -- a particular kind of pen that I really ought to start buying in bulk or looking for refills online. And then I just take a blank sheet of heavy paper and just go for it.



This is a fairly brash way to go about things, and when I first started doing things this way I wasted a LOT of time trying to figure out how. But at this point it's just the way I work and seems natural.



Which is a good thing, since I've a table full waiting to be finished.

a tedium of footnotes

One of the most interesting things about being an extra in the opera was to get to be around talent that was completely different from my own areas of expertise. It was a wide range of talent, and a wide range of voices, and all of it filled the air we walked through as we went about our evenings. On breaks soloists would be practicing in the bathrooms, piercing their ears with the close-quarter acoustics. They would hum in the halls. They would walk through difficult stanzas with one another in the practice rooms. To say nothing of the children's choir. White noise turned into rainbow noise -- everyone was very liberal with their gifts and all you had to do was be there and absorb the magic.

I recall standing backstage once when we first started rehearsals at the Keller auditorium and listening to someone's aria. I remember feeling an almost opulent sense of exhilaration, thanking my lucky stars that I should be backstage hear such a thing with my own impoverished ears. It surprised me greatly to learn that the soloist was disappointed in her performance, and had a lengthy technical discussion with a fellow soloist about what could have been better. It sounded great to me...

I'm trying to keep that story in mind as I mull over this one, because I feel like this is a terribly imprudent thing to say -- or feel -- but it must be said.



I've finally finished my Sketchbook Project Sketchbook, by which I mean: I have stopped working on it and will send it in here in an hour, because it must be post marked today and I still need to eat before my house today. We're starting a new client this morning and there's nothing like being well rested and fueled up for a raw house.

That will not be the case for me today however, having spent all of last night in to the wee hours trying to get this thing ready, as well as the night before that and the night before that. It's my own fault for not giving it the attention it deserved ahead of time. It's also my own fault for making the project much more complicated than it needed to be. It is a sketchbook after all, it's not meant to be a little cahier of finished paintings like I was trying to do. I think if I'd been a little more casual about this in general it wouldn't have stressed me out so much.

But then again...the whole idea of setting aside a sketchbook in a sketchbook library, publicizing the event heavily, having the books themselves go on a tour, etc., does mean that a certain amount of people will be looking at it, and will possibly be making a special trip to the gallery to go look at it. Wouldn't want to disappoint all that intent. And it means that the contents must inevitably be much different from my own sketchbook -- often merely squiggles and gestural lines and dots that only mean something to me.

And the shameless part: I don't have regular illustration work, and I want it. So essentially anything that leaves my desk becomes, whether it's supposed to be or not, promotional material for me and what I do. And to give out anything that is less than what I am truly capable of feels like an abdication of my ambitions.

Maybe this just shows how green I am. Wouldn't a seasoned illustrator receive a book like this in September and think, now what I really want to do is paintings. So I better start now. But what about the problems of beginning? It took me so long to figure out how to begin. Initially my ideas were completely overbearing and not at all suited to the medium, and even what I went for in the end turned out to be another angle into the same quagmire. It was honestly an act of desperation to swing it into the completely new direction in the middle of the thing -- from eggheady social criticisms in ink pen to irreverent paint and pencil. But shouldn't I have realized that's what I would have wanted to show the world in the first place? Not shaky second-draft "sketches"* but real paintings with colors and life?

It's not easy being green.



*I was forever being teased by Anthony for doing preliminary sketches before sketching in the book, even before the paint took over. What can I say. Blank pages that will certainly be oogled by people intimidate me, in a way that sketching in my regular book, or on bar napkins, or the backs of people's arms does not. The reason the Sketchbook paper never felt as comfortable as my regular sketchbook paper, even though they are THE SAME SORT OF PAPER, was because my sketchbook doesn't have an audience waiting.

I am frustrated with how little I actually finished in the end, and because of this and because this assignment made me at times uncomfortably self-conscious, I at first want to get cynical and say that something like this is just a way to cash in on people's desperation for attention. To recall the sketches and unintelligible notes by now-famous artists and writers and such that get published posthumously for all the world to see. Every thought is worth sharing! Every thing you touch is gold!

But I think that's too simplistic, since it's not like poeple are tricked into this. The terms are very clear. It's a neat sharing-project, and a chance for absolutely anyone to be a part of something bigger than themselves. It's an analog version of blogging, in a way. It is a thing you produce, send to a large open audience. Only in this case people can pick up the thing, feel it, turn the crisp pages. It is longer than most blog entries end up, so the person has the option of dwelling on you and among your thoughts for a long time. It's a reaction against the all-digital world, it is an argument for things that can be done by hand. My own hang-ups about what gives a sketched line life in terms of public vs. private has, probably, more to do with the value I place on true spontaneity and (again) the dissatisfaction of not having finished.

WHAT ELSE IS GOOD?

Given the time frame I was actually in production for these paintings it is a fairly good haul. On Jan 4. I began what turned out to be 48 pages of full color stuff -- all double page spreads, so 24 pictures in all. Some where simple, some were complex, but even the simple stuff (especially the simple stuff, actually,) takes time and care to make sure it is executed effectively.

Given that, and given that in a day I generally can only work about 5 hours after I get home from my day job, it's actually pretty incredible that I almost finished.

And though I made it a frustrating project for myself I did learn a lot. There's something very constructive about squeezing the tube of your creative stamina completely dry every once in a while. I took a lot of notes on the way. Little things like how to texture trees differently, where cheeks might stand in relation to a beard, that I REALLY need to workshop what my faces are doing right now.

My next two tasks are not very production-heavy, which is actually a bit of a relief. I need to learn about this huge printer that's been sitting on my shelf for almost two weeks, and I need to sort through and purge a lot of old sketchbooks from college. Take stock, make shelf room, etc. Hopefully that will be a little therapeutic, in that I can think gosh, look how far I've come!

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