July 6, 2009
Last night at eight, when Kathy got home, I had only two sketches done for the day. I was kind of stressed about it (a big no no with my cardio condition). Didn't feel like doing any, but felt pressure because of the commitment to do 12 a day, in order to finish the 10,000 quest before our trip to Argentina next month.

Anyway, Kathy completely supported me and told me to forget that, and advised me to let go (she is a trained therapist, after all), saying, "Sometimes you only do two."

Well, this totally freed me and after she went to bed, I sat up and finished 10 sketches! Ha.:

And, as you can see, I completed a hitlist of sketch problems: horse's hooves (check), hands (check), damaged saguaro (check), scene composition (check) cultural mash-up (check), Kingman clown (check), bling (check), Spanish dagger (check), hemp (check), obstinance (check) and even a semi-nude (check). All in all, a very successful sketchfest, that I pulled out at the last possible minute.

I hate to admit this but this is pretty much the theme of my life. And it would make sense that it is manifested in the quest to do 10,000 bad drawings. Like in my life, I have squandered many, many opportunities, spending long stretches of time pretending to work, but really coasting and doing jack spit, and then as the finish line looms (312 to go, these have to BE GOOD!), I suddenly get all hyper and super-focused. Or, is it really just obsessive compulsive?

As I mentioned yesterday, I love to work on faces. Here's an example from last January of a page of Pat Garrett's:

Actually very strong, and, although I have been doing black and whites most of this week, I have, in the past, captured a sepia, or amber glow, effect that I like:

And, I have made progress on storm effects, as this July 4th page illustrates:

As for the dialogue balloons, and my quest to find something better, I'm not sure I have made much headway since I did The Doper-roper, back in the seventies:

Ouch!

And, although some of the pen and inks are close, nothing approaches the effects I can get with scratchboard:

Which I have totally neglected since this quest went into high gear.

Sigh.

But, and this is a big But, I am still alive to be doing any of this. Wait until you see the sketches for March 22, 2008. It goes from a living line to a flatline. Tomorrow.

"To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong."
—Joseph Chilton Pearce