You May Be Right, I May Be Crazy

Last night I stayed in the stu­dio until after mid­night when I real­ized I was parked in a street­clean­ing zone and was risk­ing a $35 ticket.

I worked on a few drafts of the back­ground of this Rotring Art­Pen and Vis­con­ti ink bot­tle and did­n’t come upon a solu­tion, so I went in to the bot­tle to do the first lay­er of hatch­ing. That’s as far as I got before remem­ber­ing I was parked on the Mon­day side of the street. I decid­ed to do the hor­i­zon­tal hatch­ing since it’s eas­i­est to do tight hatch­ing on the first layer—afterwards the pre­vi­ous lay­ers get in the way both visu­al­ly and in the tex­ture of the paper. The first lay­er is the dark­est area, so the lines won’t be as vis­i­ble as the lines that will go into the areas that are now unfilled.

I’ve tak­en to lis­ten­ing to pod­casts as I draw. I find it very hard to do any draw­ing if, for exam­ple, the tele­vi­sion is on, but the sound of a cou­ple peo­ple talk­ing does­n’t get in my way. The part that’s strange is that I can pay atten­tion to what I’m hear­ing and what I’m doing at the same time. Per­haps the com­pre­hen­sion of spo­ken words uses dif­fer­ent parts of the brain than pro­cess­ing images and relat­ing them to the kines­thet­ic sense. It’s the only time I believe I’m actu­al­ly mul­ti­task­ing. If I have a pod­cast on while I’m writ­ing or pro­gram­ming, I’ll peri­od­i­cal­ly real­ize that I have no idea what’s been said in the pre­vi­ous few min­utes. The focus on lin­guis­tic pro­cess­ing for out­put edges out the unre­lat­ed input.

(I’m also a ter­ri­ble mul­ti­tasker. I’m very aware that I can’t do two things at once—I can only switch between tasks. My abil­i­ty to switch between tasks is very poor. I focus on a task, then when I fin­ish, I have to dis­en­gage and start think­ing in some total­ly dif­fer­ent mode. Some peo­ple can switch tasks well and can have a lot of things up in the air. I’m lucky to be able to do three dif­fer­ent kinds of things in a day.)

Last night I lis­tened to Art & Sto­ry’s fourth episode, «The Big Cop-Out». They were talk­ing about dif­fer­ent kinds of short­cuts that they have used, and at one point one or the oth­er of them men­tioned peo­ple who fill up entire fig­ures with extra­ne­ous cross­hatch­ing and I had to laugh because leav­ing white­space in my draw­ings is just not some­thing I do very often. I have been accused of spread­ing the atten­tion in too many direc­tions by pro­vid­ing detail or tex­ture in areas that aren’t focal.

So that got me think­ing about my com­po­si­tions and how I fill them up. Maybe I need to sim­pli­fy my tex­ture work, maybe do some work with visu­al short­hand. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I need to start work­ing larg­er. In order to do these sort of close lines with a 0.13mm rapi­do­graph I have to get right up close to the board. When I leave the stu­dio I can bare­ly see after focus­ing that close for hours on end. Fur­ther­more, I’m sure that I’d have a bet­ter time get­ting the line qual­i­ties that I want, espe­cial­ly with the dip pens. Per­haps even more impor­tant, work­ing so small entrench­es some bad habits. I end up mov­ing my wrists too much and draw­ing with my arm not enough.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I like mak­ing prints at the actu­al size of the draw­ing, but if I start work­ing larg­er, I’m going to want to pho­tore­duce the work in order to make prints that will be rea­son­able for putting on a wall. The only way out is to try one piece larg­er than usu­al and see how it works.