project journal: tea, cakes and le tour

wherefore art thou, Art?

Since sending off the Sketchbook Project I haven't drawn anything for myself at all, and I'm feeling the lack. I am currently doing a couple of projects I enjoy, one very geeky and one full of sweets. But as far as personal work goes I'm filling up with half-baked ideas and no work, and currently the inside of my brain feels like the bottom of my purse: filled with useless or only half-useful junk.

like this, only with 500% more receipts, tissue paper bits and other scraps.

Currently baking: A way-after-the-fact travel diary of the places I've been. A series of paintings more or less involving mermaids. A BBC Sherlock fan comic and some animated gifs. Drawings of all my stuff (and I have a lot of stuff). More doors. Gah.

more vintage stuff

For someone in Cebu City; you know who you are. Watch out for them slick cowboys!

Have a Graphic Birthday! Wait, that came out wrong...

According to Google, one of my best friends shares a birthday with Cezanne! Hooray! To celebrate, here is a lovely modernist poster I scanned off a vintage National Geographic. Happy happy birthday, A!

what's next?

Some things I'm working on.

STOP THE PRESSES

I will happily eschew the iPad if I could have THIS!!!

The Axiotron Modbook: a full-on Mac laptop TABLET.

It's so beautiful I can't even..............*_*

Note: link updated 18-07-2013

last pages

Last dirigibles from the Sketchbook Project. It'll feel strange not to have that notebook with me wherever I go.

Things I learned, which may only apply to me:

Clouds make everything better (or at least more three-dimensional).

You'll always have some pretty crap pages. Don't fixate, just move on to your next idea.

You think there'll be time to do the cover. There won't. Do that first.

Prang kids' watercolours are not only easier, but nicer to use than you'd think.

Goodbye and good luck, sketchbook.

The inevitable post-submission spiral of panic

I SENT IT I SENT IT I SENT IT

The sketchbook is safe in LBC and ready to wing its merry way westward. Now I'm finally allowing myself to look at other people's work.

And I'm flipping out.

I haven't completed a project in so long that my massive inferiority complex, dormant these many months, has come roaring out of its cave again, ready to engage.

I mean, look at this stuff. Just look at it. Alina Chua's beautiful watercolours and pen work. Nicole Deyton's idea for an epistolary narrative with illustrated articles straight out of alternate-universe issues of Popular Science. Rossana Bossu's sensitive, wondrous illustrations. And that's after 15 minutes on Google.

I mean, I'm happy with a lot of my work, I just can't shake the knowledge that hundreds of people are going to be thumbing through it, thinking hmph, I've seen better. And that's normal, and part of being an artist, and it's actually true and something I have to deal with unless I want to live in a cave for the rest of my life and never show my art in public again.

But I don't have to like it.

--

Will be posting the last of the notebook and thoughts on the process of creating it, soon.

ALMOST DONE part 2

Some of these have quite haphazard cropping! I need to clean them up for my upcoming portfolio site.






My favourite, a mash-up of Gibson and Hogarth (and my own silly notions).

ALMOST DONE

Submersibles first, as I really think I did a better job with the dirigibles.

The last one may have been subconsciously inspired by Pushing Daisies' Darling Mermaid Darlings.