July 29, 2009
Yesterday one of my favorite writers came out to Cave Creek and took me to lunch at Tonto Bar & Grill. Afterwards we drove out to my art studio (I apologized for the mess and he said, "If an art studio isn't cluttered, it isn't an art studio."). We spent a good deal of time looking through the 17 sketchbooks I have compiled on my quest to do 10,000 bad drawings. It was quite interesting to hear his take on the progression, or lack thereof of the drawings. He is working up a feature story and I'll keep you posted on the progress.

Meanwhile, here is the first sketches of the first day I started the quest, November 12, 2005:

I had forgotten that barely a month into the quest I had a detached retina eye operation on my birthday (novocaine needle in the eye!) and had to draw with only one eye:

See note at bottom: "Still [drawn] with one eye." Ha. This lasted for about a week. While the consistency is erratic in the early efforts (a point the writer made) I did have some pretty sweet breakthroughs, like this colorful departure, done with felt-tip pens, from the day after Christmas, 2005:

And perhaps the best page of all is from January 7, in the very first sketchbook:

I love the blurred out image of the calf ropers juxtapositioned with the hip hop dude. It's this kind of mash-up I need to embrace more, not less. At the bottom, the note says "accusations of motion." Ha.

"I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies."
—Old Vaquero Saying