Hey there , hi there, ho bope be doo be dop bop boo!
And welcome to yet another little backwater open thread diary in the great orange satanic estuary of love. 'Tis I, Marko von Fluffy-butt, your host.
I'd originally intended to post photos of my garden this week but I ended up allowing my muse to dictate my actions. I spent the day yesterday following the call of inspiration instead of editing the pictures of dirt I had planned to share with you. Oh well, there'll be more dirt for next time.
If you'd care to skip over the adorable ginger hairball I'll share a few thoughts on inspiration, drop the name of an artist I've met, and show you my latest drawing.
Otherwise, the comments section is yours to play in. Non-Prophets are welcome and will not be required to fill out any forms or be subject to additional scrutiny from the IRS.
So, sorry if anyone was hoping on gardening with me this week. It's been a rainy few days here in Prague and I'm really not thinking much about the cold, grim drizzle outdoors. My thoughts this week turned inward and backward.
I guess I should partly blame my backwards facing nostalgia that I indulge through Facebook. If you dig through my 'friends' list you will find what I think is an unusual concentration of talent. I've known some remarkable people. Now, I consider myself an artist and I have been tottering around this planet for the better part of half a century so I was bound to run into a few artists like myself. Generally I get the feeling that I bump up against artists who are better in some ways than myself. It's not always inspiring-- usually 'depressing' seems to describe how these encounters reflect on me. And yet, a little, stubborn spark deep within me keeps saying that I can do what they do.
Sometimes that little spark catches and I put aside everything to fan the flames in hope that they spread and cause a real inferno of disaster and suffering ... no, these metaphors do take on a life of their own sometimes and pummel me with their rubber squeak toys.
What I'm trying to say is that sometimes that spark itself sparks inspiration. Occasionally that can-do spirit actually gets up and does something.
I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and went through high school and college there in the 1980's. It was a remarkable time and place for aspiring artists to be and many, many world renowned artists in diverse fields of artistry were making southern Wisconsin their personal stomping ground around that time. It was a particularly fertile place for aspiring comic book illustrators and cartoonists which is how I envisioned myself. One of the most amazing artists around at that time was Mark Nelson whose work, and the lovely work of his wife Anita, can be seen at their site "Grazing Dinosaur Press".
I first met Mark through my professors at Madison Area Technical College where I studied Commercial Art. The meeting might have taken place at a gallery exhibit opening of the work of another remarkable comic book illustrator but it's perhaps only important that the meeting was brief and I didn't make a lasting impression on him. Indeed, years later when I was visiting friends at the Madison based video game company Raven Software I found myself, for most of my visit, chatting with Mark as he worked on animating some mechanical device that he had created on his computer. Anyway, I doubt either of these personal encounters left him with any reason to remember my name but I certainly remembered how friendly he was and appreciated how generous he was to share his time and explain to this novice in the world of 3D graphics just what he was doing.
Anyway, fast-forward a couple of decades and I've added Mark to my 'friends' list because he accepts a lot of requests all the time and we do genuinely have a couple of mutual friends on Facebook-- who both, again, happen to be remarkably talented artists. I did also include a message to Mark relating my encounters with his personage because I don't make a habit of flinging 'friend requests' at everyone. I don't play those games.
On Wednesday I noticed via the scrolling spy column on the right side of my home Facebook page that Mark had liked and commented on another artist's work. So, this curious cat peeked and found a beautiful, charming painting of a witch flying on a broom loaded with cats! And thought to look for more of the artist's work and found it on the popular site deviantART (that previous link is to the picture on the dA site) which I had just joined to show off my own work only two weeks ago. I looked through her gallery of work and wrote a comment about how I discovered her and how much I liked everything. And then she and I got to trading comments about Mark Nelson and how we each know him.
And then yesterday, I got up in the morning intending to spend the day squonching photos of my garden down to dKos bandwidth friendly sizes and working on a drawing of a picturesque part of this fair city I live in-- when the spark consumed me.
I had checked my messages on Facebook and noted via sneaky-scroll that Mark was still up and commenting. I clicked on a comment he had made to open up the drawing of his that he had commented on and found that someone had asked him what computer program he used and he had replied with something like, "Croquil and Higgins" referring to the type of pen and brand of ink he uses. I thought about my own drawing on the table, waiting for me to get to work on it. I hadn't finished the pencil drawing yet and I knew that I wanted to eventually ink it. I've made a few croquil sketches over the years of other parts of Prague. Lately all of my ink drawing has been done strictly with a brush. Maybe I should consider using a croquil pen for this drawing? I thought about Mark's intricately detailed and beautiful drawings and popped over to Daily Kos to check for replies and messages and found something in my stream from the night before. An Archeopteryx! A great drawing of one at any rate ...
My last drawing of bird wings was pretty unsuccessful. I should try again-- look at that drawing, look at the feathered details adorning Mark's drawings.
I made a quick drawing that was something of a combination of the Archeopteryx, Mark's wonderful alien shamans, a touch of witch and a hint of my own drawings of dragons-- and got out my old croquil pen and tried a few practice bits of crosshatching on a scrap of paper, then thought I'd do the outline work with a brush for flexibility and then go in with the croquil for all the fiddly detail and crosshatching-- and then, with my old cartooning professor's voice whispering in my ear "... a good round brush comes to a point that is how wide? A single hair. That's finer than your dip pens and it holds more ink", I put down the croquil and spent the rest of the day with my brush. I was pretty happy with the results:
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I scanned the picture and posted it on Facebook, deviantART and Behance. I wrote about Mark Nelson's work being the inspiration for that day's effort at making art but I was careful to avoid the automatic linking that Facebook does when you mention names. But oddly enough, Mark A. Nelson knows all and sees all-- and was kind enough to take the time to 'like' and compliment my work in the comments. It's a mini-victory for me and helps makes me feel that there may be hope for my stagnant artistic career.
There's so many ways that the world can present us with inspiration and give us hope. I want to be the sort of person who is open to any and all sources of inspiration. I think I need them. I'm interested in so many different things that hopefully something unique will be created from the mix. Life presents us with beauty and ugliness, joy and horror-- what will finally inspire us to do something? What will be the result of our actions? What will happen if we choose to ignore the muses.
Still, I wonder and worry about how my creations will be received. I suppose that's the conundrum of being a professional artist. Don't quit your day job. But until something steers me in a profitable direction I'll keep following my inspiration down whichever winding path it leads me. Maybe the secret is just to keep going. A pot of gold awaits at the end the rainbow. I may never get there but then, that too, is the artist's journey. It has no end. You never get there, but hopefully you're making progress.