Only 5 sketchbooks in a year beset by creative blocks and the temptations of consuming over creating. Still, the physical affordances helped tremendously to keep up this essential habit. I wanted to forcefully become more creative this year and started some good rituals in Jan. it was such a challenge maintaining those habits with a fulltime job & the endless commute.
Onwards to Feb, the evolution that I was hoping for was nowhere in sight…but I flew too close to the sun and the inevitable of course happened.
In April I took a workshop at Jaipur Design Week – Poetry, Presence & Practice. The first time I have ever spoken about my drawing in a public forum!
And then on to Kochi.
and my wisdomous brown boy
“What you don’t know should not stop you from, enjoying life”
If you found the easter egg you might agree with Linda Huang:
His love for Sebald is evident in the way these were conceived and designed as collages. Each of them, especially The Emigrants, is thoughtful, poetic, and a nod to Sebald’s writing—fragmentary and nostalgic—without being overtly melancholic (we don’t want to sell sad covers). They’re so gorgeous I want to buy them all only to rip off the covers and frame them.
Like I said the other day, I just have to keep up with the scenius. Keep drawing daily, find opportunities to study the form, and keep trying, good or not, as Lynda Barry has said.
One thing we forget with digital media is the material properties of the materials…the organic flow or the way the materials shape the outcomes.
I haven’t any experience with watercolours and so pushing myself out of the comfort zone of flat colors which is what you need in comics but – my friend Raj always complains my drawings look a bit flat.
So tried a bit of depth in last night’s sketch – coloured this on Procreate where inks don’t bleed haha.
Austin Kleon often talks about gathering a scenius, and I have to say – for me that’s @pacificleo @royalbengal@whackonondo & @the_legend_of_raj. We have a group called Wider than the sky. What is great is that my scenius is not just talking, but also doing. They’re constantly making things, churning out ideas, art, films, explorations – so I have no option but to do, and keep up my end!
One of the things of being a parent is that you have to spend time with your kids. Lucky for you if they are entertaining. As in years past, our tornado still takes forever to eat a meal so I use the time to draw. It’s great to have a living breathing human being at close quarters to draw from! Between mouthfuls, we chat.
Sometime in August I was making notes for my DesignUp talk, and thinking about “belonging” when Orin chimed in:
“You belong to your parents, but you live with us!”
“Do you know centipedes lived in the time of dinosaurs?”
Here we were discussing our best movies/TV shows of 2022. The brown boy chose Better Call Saul, while mine was Dune, and the tornado chose Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
A book that has given me immense joy is Making Comics by Lynda Barry. While she herself is a big inspiration, her books are inimitable and exceptional. Ms. Barry teaches drawing and comics to young children and this book is a set of those exercises and her unique insights around drawing, imagining, and teaching. I’ve often done some of the exercises with our little tornado and his friends when they needed to be calmed down, and soon we are all giggling at each other’s drawings.
Here’s an exercise where she asked us to imagine ourselves as Batman, and draw what we did the day before. I had gone to the Aadhaar Centre nearby, worked from home, and went for a walk with a friend.
Ms. Barry also believes that anyone can draw, and so do I. My drawing wasn’t anywhere near the best in design school, and in the animation studio where I interned, our boss had despaired over my unfit-for animation drawings. He used to challenge me to do 20 iterations of bird flight cycles, or 50 iterations of floating balloons, and I persevered. All by hand, of course.
What happens through repetition and practice is that you get better by training your hand to follow your eye or your mind’s eye, as closely as possible, without any gen loss. The repetition also allows your conscious rational mind and your ego, to quieten, and you’re in flow until there are just the forms on the page…
“There’s the drawing you are trying to make and the drawing that’s actually being made – and you can’t see it until you forget what you were trying to do.”
Lynda Barry, Notes from an accidental professor
If you think you don’t know how to draw, this book is for you. Ms. Barry starts with basic stick figures to help you start envisioning. She also says,
It’s not your job to judge whether your drawing is good or bad, your job is to keep drawing.
inktales 