A break from writing

  Once in awhile I get the urge to draw, though I have never done enough of it to come close to drawing well. Still, I love drawing trees and eyes. As far as eyes go, if I just stopped with them, I would be fine, but all too often they want to be surrounded by faces. Not my strong point.

  Since I have a thrifty soul and no real expectation of drawing greatness, I tend to fill up whole pages with different sketches until they overlap. This is what I was working on/playing with over the last couple of days:

  I started with rolling hills and a poorly drawn, extremely improbable watchtower. More like a chess piece than a safely climbable structure. The sketchbook is too big for my scanner, so I scanned the page in pieces. The edges tend to be gray where the book hangs over the edge of the scanner bed. Also, there is some detail work that the scanner just couldn't seem to pick up. I'm not saying that the pictures would look any more impressive if I had a more thorough scanner, only that they'd be slightly more detailed.

  Then I decided to draw some tree roots. Just roots. But a tree insisted on growing from them. An old Sequoia-type tree, with a broken top.

  Then I drew a left eye...from the viewer's perspective. A nose emerged to accompany it. Then a right eye. Then cheeks. Then hair began to entangle itself with the landscape. NOBODY has irises this big...but it was fun, anyway.

  Some other weird tree of no known species grew in the lower corner. 

  I really like the Sequoia-ish tree. I'm even fond of my person looking down. Cartoon eyes and all.

  I got tired of wasting time looking around for my beloved pencil set (so much reorganization going on at my place that I can't find anything at all these days), but happily, pencils don't cost much, so I bought five of my current favorite pencils, Cretacolor Monolith woodless, in different hardnesses. I don't know how real artists feel about these pencils, but I love the weight of them and how they feel in my hand. I know that if you know what you are doing, you can do the most amazing work with a simple #2 pencil, but I don't know what I'm doing and I find that cool drawing equipment is an inspiration all in itself.

  One of my favorite artists, John Howe, conjures characters and worlds and moods out of blank paper with plain old Steadtler pencils. He shapes the tips with a craft knife--not with a pencil sharpener!--sometimes exposing more than an inch of lead (which he seems miraculously to be able to draw with without its breaking. I do not have that kind of control, though since I've never actually tried his technique, what do I know? Maybe the lead is stronger than I think. Maybe I'm not quite the klutz I think I am.) A few broad strokes and a little cross-hatching, and he produces backstory, a sense of motivation, and imminent action.

  I think I will work on my trees.