Drawing at the post office beats the bus

I'd almost forgotten what it was like not to have to allow for a bumpy ride!

January 11, 2011

Turns out when you draw a shorter person who's standing in front of you... you get a really big head on a wee tapering body. So later I went over the initial sketch in ink and re-sized her head. (She had the neatest haircut, all different lengths.) Plus I cropped out the tiny feet. They were kind of creepy anyway.

Detour



November 2010



For months I've been weighing going to art school against keeping my day job, or dreaming up scenarios that combine the two, all the while conducting serious consultations with my husband on the topic of trying for a second baby. Sometimes I feel like I've been at the art vs. job crossroads for years, never getting anywhere. Other times I feel I've been making incremental, steady steps in the direction of my goal of doing more art more often, and that that is good enough.

Where I can now be found on my breaks

by Summer Pierre

Some of the best tips in Summer Pierre's book The Artist in the Office relate to finding ways to make your day job inspire or support your art. Since reading them, I've noticed I'm better at finding creative ways to meld the two without hurting my day job.

I have a scanner at home, but by the time my workday and chores are done, it's surprisingly hard to drag myself and my laptop to the back of the house where the scanner lives. Part of that might have something to do with the fact that I usually have to scan something two or three times to get my clunky scanner to work properly… Well, I discovered that there's a resource centre -- with scanners! -- here at work. I checked it out this morning. It only took a couple of minutes, way less than the 15 minute break I usually take twice a day, to scan in this morning's bus drawing.

Your favourite daredevil/annoyer



January 11, 2010

I felt a bit bad drawing this lady's backpack this morning. She looked uncomfortable with the attention I was giving her stuff. I think she was trying to decide if she was annoyed or not, but eventually landed on the side of ignoring me.

Sometimes I feel like a daredevil when I draw people; other times I feel a bit like a jerk.

Intent and not-so-intent

January 10, 2010

The fellow on the left stayed glued to his Blackberry for over twenty minutes. He didn't move so much as an eyelid (I was watching). I drew the guy on the right (whose ear suffers from a clear case of foreshortening) later the same morning and he was as jumpy as anything. I had to use all my stealth powers to avoid getting caught. I guess the reports on his Blackberry weren't as gripping as the first guy's.

...and distracted

After laboriously trudging through a drawing of bus interior architecture, a subject I return to constantly because it is SO HARD, I got bored and pulled out a drawing pen.

January 3, 2011

Thwarted

January 5, 2011

I did this little cartoon of a waif that was inspired by a girl sitting across from me. She was really on the ball, so I couldn't do her portrait. Too bad, because she had the most amazing forehead -- high, domed and shiny.

If I can't get away with drawing somebody, I usually cartoon them instead -- next to her is another example: this preteen boy looked soooo sleepy. He was wearing lime green headphones. It looked like he spray-painted them himself. A photograph would be way better than this, but anyway.