Short bitty lines versus long fast sweepy lines...

I’m trying to distinguish my good habits from my bad ones.

I liked to think that I had shaken off insidious art school doctrines but sometimes I wonder.

In the past year or so I have tended to draw in quite a staccato bitty way. I always want to get tons of ‘touch’ and jiggling life into drawings and paintings. But lately I’ve been more wary of translating that desire too literally.

This is a detail of a minotaur's eye from a recent painting. Click on it to see a bigger version.

I think I was quite influenced at a crucial point by George Herriman’s scratchier lines in late twenties era Krazy Kat… although it might not be transparently obvious. I have a lot of diagonal non-obvious sort of influences. Perhaps I would benefit from a bit more outrageous plagiarism.

Here’s a lamo biro doodle done one saturday morning. It’s all on quite a small bitty scale. Click to see the whole thing.

And here's a quite bitty drawing of WWE wrestler Bobby Lashley:

But lately, a combination of factors has made me really question the way I draw, while at the same time I’m feeling newly excited about drawing. But I don’t really care about what I did before, I think getting it right now. I’m being called upon to do more work for deadlines, and I’ve actually been quite grateful for an excuse to find strategies for speeding up my painting process. It’s actually been a good exercise in figuring out exactly what I want my work to be like… what I want to put across… and being able to some degree to negotiate all this stuff in words with other human beings in a friendly and chirpy way.



Some more self portraiture there, plus Triple H with ear problems, a fetal buff boyman and a mink.

I'm also seized with a desire to create iconic cute images for the fast paced bingey consumption of the MySpace generation. More on that soon, I expect.