Etsy Banners

Spent the last couple of hours working on a new Etsy banner. The first version was just a sort of temporary deal I slapped together out of leftover parts from other projects. Which, you know, I got tired of looking at it super-fast, so replacing that old junky banner soon as possible’s been on my short list a while. So, dealing with this bit of housekeeping business today, I thought maybe I could remember how to letter by hand, ’cause I at least used to know how to do that, at least a little. But, the result was kind of way too bold and every letter was way too normal. I did, though, like the weird pyramid eye, which is not (to me) a secret symbol of the some ancient nerd conspiracy, but is instead a symbol for the hypnotic power of everyone else’s cool art on Etsy. I mean, looking at all of it keeps me away from work more than I like to admit. Anyway, then I thought, okay, maybe I should go a whole other direction…although I didn’t necessarily intend to end up in the direction of the color scheme from a Shins record cover. So I changed course again real quick (while keeping the new lettering from the blue version). And, well, I guess I ended up back at the gray version ’cause I like gray, and ’cause I suddenly thought, “oh yeah, the dollar bill eye is a Mesmer eye, so I’ve gotta show people getting hypnotized.” And that’s the end of that story, such as it is.

Meanwhile, the last picture’s of a pile of stuff I’m planning to paint on today, tomorrow, and Monday. Plus I have to draw some more…always have to do that, otherwise I completely forget how it’s done.

Moonbase

Okay, this was supposed to be a drawing called “Megabase Lunatron,” but now it’s a drawing called “Moon Crystal.” What happened was, the crystal was going to be a crooked-style Fullerine dome, but then I couldn’t crowd in all the dumb little rovers and space workers and moon trucks I’d planned on drawing, so I drew it like it was a couple of folks out for a sort of outing. With, of course, their space dog and a future kind of digital camera, which will be bulkier than the modern kind. Again, I was going for a crummy chipboard look, like this thing was a linocut, cut with the dullest possible gouges and then printed with cheap sticky ink on the back of a newsprint pad. I guess, in fact, I could just do it that way instead of on the computer…but, whatever, maybe later, if and when there’s actual extra time laying about. Thing is, lino doesn’t feel as natural anymore as a Wacom tablet, so I’d have to relearn some muscle memory or something. Not that drawing’s ever natural. Anyhow, gotta go and take a break from the internets.

Airport

So, I guess, in addition to triangles, wrinkles, and hats, I like drawing airports. Plus, I think I remember I saw a woodcut a while back of some whole other subject that was printed in heavy black ink on dirty gray chipboard. So I guess I was thinking of how that looked, and thinking I could maybe steal the look for a Flash sketchbook thing. Plus, you know, the busy-ness of Richard Scarry books was always a fun and mind-expanding thing. Anyway, that’s all for now, gotta go back to work.

Paletero

We saw a paletero on a street in the Coronado District when we were in Phoenix a few weeks ago. I should’ve sketched him there and then, even though, of course, I wouldn’t have been able to get down an actual likeness, ’cause of my amateur drawing status. But, anyway, I wish I’d at least made more than a mental note about him, ’cause the mental note’s saying he had on a leather hat, and I doubt that’s accurate, on account of it was finally hot again in Phoenix after a few cooler-than-normal days. Still, I think I do remember that his hat was a sort of porkpie shape.

And, well, I guess that’s all I know at the moment. Except, I’m including the rough just for the heck of it. The whole thing was drawn in Flash, which, for whatever reason, is easier for me to draw in than the software I suppose I’m supposed to use. Probably oughta draw on paper more, but I like being able to move the parts around until they’re just the right amount of messed-up.

Jagged Little Pixel

I’m trying to stick really hard to a schedule where, on Mondays, I hit the ground running, which, actually, I wish I could hit the ground at least galloping on Sundays, just to get a head start. But, you know, one miracle at a time.

Anyway, so, here it is 4:29 PM, and I’m about 1/10th of the way down the apparently notional chore list I’m always daydreaming about someday getting completely done. Although, as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem says (or, at least, how it says when I bend it sideways in a possibly felonious way), there’s almost certainly no such thing as a finishable list.

For example: I had to just go look up the text entity for an umlaut for a lower-case ‘o’. So, that got added to the list, even if it got scratched back off pretty quick. The point being (although it’s a minute little point): it never ends.

Which I suppose, in the long run, is not the worst ever thing.

Anyhow, more portable sketches, ’cause my new old-fashioned sketchbook is just too blank and intimidating, while my dumb old PDA, which does not keep track of my appointments, contacts, or notes, is at least a fun little gadget to mess around with in-between actual work-like activities. These particular things were done on The Pad from VisualIT, which is an extremely basic drawing program, which I like ’cause it never gets in your way when all you wanna do is just doodle. The creators of The Pad, by the way, are obviously not responsible for how I may, from time to time, utterly misuse their product.

Squaresville

Apparently, there are about as many people selling art on Etsy as there are people living inside the city limits of the city where my wife and I live in now. Which is not so much a huge number, but it’s not a small one, either. I mean, I guess if you imagine every person on our street and on the other streets in our neighborhood has a storefront, and then multiply that number by some other large and scary number, and then add in all the people at all the stores and gas stations and restaurants in town, plus all the bajillions of people who are always, always roaming about on the various roads, then you might be able to arrive at some sort of vague visual idea of just how many people we’re talking about. Of course, you’d probably have to also include everyone on every paddleboat and picnic table at the lake, and every person in every movie audience, and everyone at the art museum, and every golfer on every fairway of every golf course from one end of the city parks system to the other, and every single student and teacher in summer school or Hebrew school or Sunday school. Not to mention, you’d have to count all the people who are riding in buses or waiting for buses, and all the people going about their lives in every hospital, factory, and warehouse, and all the many people hidden away here and there who usually don’t get counted. And, well, you know, it’s a pretty big crowd’s what I’m saying.

Which is fine, of course. It’s even a kind of amazing and good thing, that the planet’s that full of artists, despite how civilization’s not always 100% in favor of keeping artists around.

Besides, it’s a good reminder to think about the relative bigness of the Etsy community, since it reminds a person (namely, me, I guess) how the sweet delicious solipsism that wafts off the Internet like brain-shrinking glue fumes is really an enormous illusion. It’s good to remember that humbleness is way more rational than not being humble.

Speaking of which, here are some square little PDA sketches from the last couple of days. They’re not worth much, except that occasionally I’ll see something I like a bit in this or that odd corner. Such as a certain crackly line or an accidental pattern or a weird shape of eye or ear.

Caribou

So, I was a grubbing about in a box of old art, looking for stuff to maybe sell (you know, instead of using my time the wiser way, which would mean actually working on new drawings and boxes and whatever), and, anyway, I happened upon a couple of pieces that I’d completely forgotten about, which I thought I’d post here to kind of remind myself how I used to draw lines, which is a way I wish I still drew ‘em, which is to say a little more messy and random and completely contrary to the idea of “rendering”, whatever that is. Although, of course, the caribou drawing is pretty imperfect, on account of how the negative space is completely negative, instead of having Smurfs or Nixon heads or Mercury astronauts floating about in it, like it oughta have. But, that’s the thing with being a slow learner, I’ll learn how to integrate spaces eventually. Like, possibly in twenty more years of doodling. And, well, the pseudo-funk-style retro head drawing, who knows what I was doing, since I barely remember doing it. Probably it was just a lot of fun to fill the background with weird tangles of aimless cross-hatching. Even though, yeah, I know “fun” is not supposed to be one of the top ten reasons why anything art-like exists. Anyhow, back to work. Or, at least, back to work after we take my Dad to a local fish place for Father’s Day (I lived away from my family for a long, long time, and I’ve lately been discovering that my folks are actually pretty cool.) Maybe next time I’ll finally have new stuff to staple to the phone pole on my corner of the internet.

Vaguely Art-like Objects

Here are a few more old boxes from around the house. These are the ones I’m keeping, unless someday I decide not to keep ‘em. I mean, I can always make new ones, I suppose…except that, very, very soon I really need to actually draw something, even if it’s just rocketships and robots or whatever. You know, all the usual dumb boy junk. Anyway, today I uploaded a few more boxes and other odds and ends to Etsy, so look at ‘em while they’re visible.

Boxes & Shadowboxes

People sometimes want to know (like, about once every 9 years they ask me), what’s the deal with all the boxes you’re always making and then piling up all over the place? Well, it’s actually super incredibly simple: I just like making ‘em, ’cause of how they’re fun to make, although I admit I’ll probably have to make dozens and hundreds more before they start looking at least halfway how I want ‘em to look. Which is usually how art goes for me, when it goes. Anyhow, lately I’ve been posting these things on Etsy, just for the heck of it, which is partly why I’m behind on drawing new stuff…the other part of the reason being I’ve sort of been distracted by looking at other people’s art, which is a good thing to be distracted by, but also a time-suck, and so I decided today to cut it out and get back to work. Even though, okay, I need to mention, that guy who did that one SoyJoy commercial…wow, his work kicks my butt how cool it is. Except, of course, now I can’t re-find the link in order to share it. Blurg!

But, yeah, the boxes: if they’re ever inspired by anything, it’s not usually by anything much. I mean, you know those ultra-fancy heirloom-style boxes that really elite craft-folk make? The kind you see in museum shops and galleries and whatever (there are currently, for example, some nice tea ceremony boxes in the Phoenix Museum of Art’s onsite store). The kind with ten kinds of exotic woods all bent and polished together into various odd amorphous forms? Well, you know, much as I respect that high-art stuff, that’s not what I’m doing with my so-called work. Instead, I’m inspired by really primitive, junky, sort of accidental un-design. Stuff made with totally mundane materials and used in pretty mundane settings. Like the things I see in random pictures from random books that sort of stick with me a while. Like, if you take a look at page 87 in London Style (Jane Edwards, Taschen Books, ISBN 3-8228-1398-2), there’s this really great homemade cubbyhole/shelf thing hanging on an office wall. And, if you look at pictures all through African Style (Angelika Taschen, Taschen Books, ISBN 3-8228-3917-5), you’ll see all these cool shapes and patterns that are the shapes and patterns I want my boxes to at least echo, a little. And then if you image-search “peruvian retablos” and “nichos“, you’ll see all these boxes with triangle bits sticking up out of ‘em, which seems to me like the very best idea for a simple hanger.

Anyway, obviously, just about any kid or grandmother in Peru or Mexico or Burkina Faso can do this boxy art stuff way, way better than I can do it. I think it’s worth working on, though, as long as it remains a large amount of fun to bang scrap wood together into various little objects. I figure maybe if I do it enough, these objects of mine might eventually start resembling the way more ambitious pictures of boxes I keep imagining in my head.

So…even if they’re really simple and not exactly flashy, here are a few pictures of the boxes in my studio, to show how I’m using the ones I don’t plan on selling.

Pyramid Box

Here’s what I’d planned to do today:

Memorize a map of India, memorize the titles and current locations of every work of art Joseph Cornell ever made, learn 100 Spanish verbs, learn the whole entire history of Pakistan and also Brazil, pin down once and for all the names and the powers of the Greek and Roman gods, learn yet more about soukous, learn how to make a tiny radio, figure out the meanings of various lyrics, cut and print 10 woodcuts, draw an avant-garde comic about a spaceman with blue skin and black eyes, draw another comic about a girl who loves carnivals, make several little books, look up info about Yayoi Kusama and fridge magnet art and the ecology of the Sonoran desert, and read every word John McPhee ever wrote about anything.

Of course, I totally ran out of time for half this stuff.

Instead, I mostly just studied various less interesting things and “thought” about drawing and posted a new box to Etsy. Which, the box, if you wanna see it, is pictured down below. And that’s all for now. I have like 30 more boxes, drawings, paintings and whatever I need to post, although it’ll probably be tomorrow before I can get to it. After that, I have to really get productive, ’cause there’s never any such thing as enough work.