Daily Art: Nathan's Drawing

February 25th:

Just before Christmas of 2014 I visited my sister and let my niece and nephew each draw on a page of my cut-up sketchbook. I left it entirely up to them what they wanted to draw. My nephew, Nathan, drew a dragon and my niece drew what I can only assume is a fanciful galaxy of some sort. She wouldn't really tell me what she was drawing: just that she would make it pretty. The drawings are located somewhere between pages 30-40 of my sketchbook, so I won't officially get to them for some time, but I couldn't resist doing a bit of work on them on a day when I was thinking a lot about those kids.

My strategy regarding the pages with the kids' drawings is to leave all of their work untouched, but to do my own work on every bit of white space they left blank on the page. I want to incorporate their drawings into my own designs in a manner similar to that in which I incorporate the existing patterns on the patterned pages of my sketchbook, but with the intention of respecting the integrity of their drawings much more than I do the printed images.

My work in the above image is all of the tiny patterning set between the marker strokes in the head, arms, and torso of the dragon.

Daily Art: Mushroom

February 24th:

I have a thing about mushrooms lately. They're so whimsical without being quite as cliche as flowers. They've become one of my favorite things to doodle.

Daily Art: Lightning Bolt

February 23rd:

Another quick sketch. February wasn't an incredibly productive month art-wise: I made a lot of quick sketches during this period instead of grand projects.

Daily Art: Cut-Outs

February 21st:

This is the sketch on page 28 of my Cut-Up Sketchbook. On February 21st I just did a bit of x-acto knife work on the page cutting out the portholes that had no yellow in them. The portholes with the yellow were already cut out back when I cut out the portholes on page 27.

Daily Art: Birds and a Crab

February 19th:

I drew a couple more characters peering from the ovals on page 25.

A bit of background here: The ovals on this page are traced from the cut-outs on page 26. There's a previously existing sketch on pages 27-28 that I already have a plan for, so I cut out the spaces that I wanted removed from page 27 (and consequently page 26, since it and 27 are the front and back sides of a single page) awhile back to ensure that my work on pages 24, 25, and 26 would support my plans for the 27-28 spread rather than conflicting with them.

Daily Art: Eyes

February 18th:

I started some real work on page 25. The Valentine's Day hearts were just something that I drew on the page because I wanted someplace to draw hearts and they seemed to work with the Phoenix cut-out. These illustrations were more premeditated.

Daily Art: Organization

February 10th:

I got a week or two behind on posting my Daily Art, so I spent some time on the tenth of February organizing my artwork for 2015. I created a calendar set-up for the year in InDesign with the intention of posting images of my Daily Art in the corresponding cell for each day. I may even turn it into a real calendar for next year: images of my previous year's work to motivate me to create something every day next year.

Unfortunately, within an hour of finishing this - before I even got a chance to catch up on posting the images that I organized - I came down with the worst stomach flu I've had since I was a child and, consequently, didn't produce a single piece of artwork for the next two days.