365 days. (Finishing 2010. Looking at 2011)

On Christmas day while hanging out with family, I gathered a bunch of little pieces of scrap paper and spun out a whole bunch of small doodles. For fun. But more especially, to finally wrap up my 2010 draw365 project.

This has been a formative little project for me, begun mostly on a whim back at the beginning of January this year and becoming a pretty important part of my artistic development and artistic opportunity. It's also fascinating to look at a couple of posts I wrote during the year as the project progressed: early on at 31 days in, then at 65 days, and again at 276 days.... Mostly it's a fascinating awareness that I am a much more experienced artist now than I was 365 days ago.

So now I am looking at 2011 and thinking about what sort of 365 project I can do for this year; originally I was thinking that I might change up the emphasis; concentrate specifically on a certain medium, or a certain method, or weak area, etc. but at this exact moment, what I really want to make sure I focus on, is doing something every day. I think it was that sort of flexibility that helped me get through 365 drawings this last year: whether it was a small mixed media painting, or an almost completely digitally created illustration, or pen and pencil wordless comics, or a tiny doodle the size of a postage stamp, or a piece of a larger project, or a drawing on a piece of tea-bag wrapper, or even an experiment in using stuff from my surroundings... I was at least doing something artistically. (Here is the whole set of 365 drawings for 2010.)

I'd like to keep that kind of momentum.

I am excited to see what I can do and where I will go with my art-making over the course of these next 365 days.

Meanwhile, that page that has those 15 little doodles on scrap paper... I am enjoying filling in and around and under with even more doodling and drawing (mildly nsfw). I am really liking how these pages are turning out.
#amdrawing

MORE thoughts on Audience

I'm in the middle of a project that has me feeling my identity crisis and noticing how weak my commercial-art muscles are.

I am supposed to be creating playfully titillating images and instead keep veering off into obscurely disturbing images. (BTW, yes, Matthew Barney is one of my inspirations and don't click on that link unless you are prepared to be a bit disturbed.)

But I'm trying to rein that tendency in. Drawing lots of studies of how other artists do "fun" and "playful" (and, yes, "titillating", Woohoo.) I've been delighted by Erika Moen's boobie drawings, and Jess Fink's dick doodles , and amazing 19th century ukiyo-e prints of Tanuki and their unusually large testicles.

For this particular project, I am also trying to take inspiration from the art of Katsushika Hokusai, Hayao Miyazaki, and Dr Seuss.

(To top it off I have been revisiting various artists from my beloved Anthology of Swedish Alternative Comics, but most of them lean towards disturbing, so it's a really back and forth battle.)

Mostly, I'm trying to keep in mind who the particular audience for this project will be, balance that against what I would do with it if it was purely for my own entertainment, (and meanwhile figure out who the hell my audience is anyways.)

Anyhow. I just had to get that out of my system. Now back to drawing.

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(by way of example and for your viewing entertainment....)
here's a recent page full of sketches as I try to nail anime facial features (fun? Playful?):



and then here's a recent personal piece (obscurely disturbing?):

splashy big paint

Finally got around to watching Pollock.
Loving the movie on many levels.
But the various painting scenes throughout are really stroking a need for big surfaces and splashy messy creating. (I've mentioned that need before)
It may be a while before I ever do anything big or messy again. But the thought of it is still thrilling.