Random Musings

Here is a fish story. Pretty self explanatory action going on. I wanted to try background treatments with this one. It is easy to get carried away and overdo things which requires overdoing even more.

We awoke to snow the other morning and it influenced my next story.

I like the background in this one…snowflakes in some kind of other action…more snow, flurries of pine needles…something moving in the air. It took a very long time to make all the marks to create this atmosphere. And then this morning.

The page will be turned and the story will continue with predictability onto the next two page space. And I count on myself to come up with something else when this story ends. All the blank pages are just waiting for me to think up of ways to mark them up. I thought I would be using color by now out of shear boredom but the various ways of mark making in ink are keeping me engaged.

Somewhere I wrote a small piece about a child always on the outside of the group of other children. It might make for a good drawing story and let me do kids in their different clothing and body language. I will have to find it.

Lee is pacing from window to window because the sun is out but the frost and cold air are keeping him from putting on his jacket for the next few minutes anyway. It is hard for him with a history of always being outside building roads to just stay indoors. Now that he has all the leaves chased off, there is little for him to do when he does go out. His rocks still hold some appeal but now he does not know if he should move them. Later the caregiver comes and will take him out for walks, stick gathering and back inside for “cop shows”.

I will be stitching the next batch of books to send to Australia.

Til later….

This the page I forgot to show last time. The rock pile on the left was finished off with another rock on the bottom because I had an ink smudge there and I kept looking at it. The mountain was just a test to see if I could give a rock a different surface. Then the stone wall where I was reminded of Shel Silverstein. The more I work with the dots, the more I see them as good for only illustrations…preferably in children’s books.

Then a return to hard lines of black and white in this stylized version of that leaf I was so enamored of several weeks ago.

Next trying dots and hard strokes on the same page but not on the same subject.

An experiment with landscape…could I get distance using the same pen to make the dots? The problem here is that you can’t take the marks back and the “river” became way too dark. The only solution was to get more marks (dots) in the surrounding areas.

It does not solve the problem but could be worked into with more dots to darken the left side. But I have spent so much time on this already and the lesson has been learned. To the right is a bunny of very few and therefore safe dots and some grass and leaves. See what I mean by children’s book illustrations? The only line of text that would fit here is,

“And the bunny hopped away to sit in the grass under a tree.”

I suppose that if one was a serious illustrator and using the stippling method, then the image could conceivably be lightly drawn in with graphite. Then dots added to appropriately fill in the image and pencil marks erased. Which may be exactly how they do it. I am only interested in getting confidence up with using pen directly on the page to create a “picture”. On the other side of this bunny is an attempt at capturing a feather, then a chickadee on a branch that will eventually hold a nest with an egg in it. Giving depth to all the stems and grasses that make up a nest using only stippling should be quite the challenge. Then what?

Once I have met all the challenges I set up for myself, what else do I do to fill this book….

I might get myself a micron .005 pen and return to parallel lines i.e. Edward Gory. But fill the entire page with subject, background and atmosphere. Tell a wordless story in so many pages. Sounds fun, right? An ultimate challenge.

Sadie seems barely interested in my ideas. But she will sit with me while I keep one eye on the page and the other on Lee.

Out of the clear blue the other day Lee reached out to give me a hug. We are not huggers of each other. I can not remember when the last hug I got from him was…..maybe forty years ago, maybe more. I got this spontaneous hug because a hair on the edge of his nostril was driving him crazy and I used the tiny shaver, that only I have access to, and cleared it away. He was positively joyful about the absence of that pesky hair.  I don’t get hugs for cutting his hair the last 54 years. Nor do I for using that same magic razor to trim what we call werewolf hairs from over his ears, but one hair on a nostril and a hug! I hugged him back and told him it was my pleasure to be the barber in charge. We laughed at that and then went back to our own worlds.

I am supposed to be working on the books or finding out what to do with Ellie.

So I am off.

Til later.