Once more unto the breach

The first page of the new sketchbook is done. The cherry is popped. It is defiled by my pencil. No self-respecting collection of paper will have her now. Mwa ha ha ha.



There's nothing truly special about this page, but any artist would know you don't want to waste page 1 on something...experimental. You experiment in sketchbooks so you can keep your failures HIDDEN - who wants to be reminded of the sucking every time the book is opened?

Sure, I played it safe, but at least it's not *too* painful. Hey, even if the page is unremarkable, I still know what book it is because I wrote the date on the page! (What an auspicious day!) It only took me, uh, four years before I took my professor's advice to start dating my sketchbooks... even if I still only note the dates the book were started and finished.

My sketchbook etiquette overall is far improved. Last night I did an inventory: 17 sketchbooks completed in this modern era. I thought it would be more, but then I realized I had drawn on the front and back of pages for the first dozen books. (Revisionist history: I am now working on skethcbook #30!) This is an artist no-no - it's very hard to scan pages when they have the impressions of the next page on them. When I was still developing my style, this was helpful. It was like a slash and burn effort, obliterating my early work as I moved forward. Now, it would just be sloppy. It's still best to scan pages fresh, as graphite is a smudgy thing. This is such an uninteresting paragraph to anyone but me, but I made you read it anyway. Sucker.

Aaaannnnnddd... since I'm covering sketchbook pages, I would like to revisit one I posted for the heck of it a while back. Mostly I want to put proper labels in the post so someone could do a character search on this blog and find the image. Hey, I was on fire that day! Let the people know my awesomeness!



The mission of the day this page was created was to go Charlie Brown on my characters: BIG HONKING HEADS! My character proportions are already wildly inconsistent, so no one would know I did it on purpose. Now, if you're looking at the sketches and thinking, "their heads don't look so huge to me," that's the POINT! It ups the cute factor if done right. It's creepy as fuck if done wrong. Lord, I hope these kids are cute. The parents, I admit, are bit much, but it was fun to experiment.