Stamps

My poor, beat-up Moleskine’s been getting neglected a lot lately, which is probably not a huge loss to western civilization, but it’s still a pretty lame state of affairs for someone pretending to be an art person. Like, way back in 20th century college, we used to get shamed by Authority Figures on a regular basis if we weren’t always, always scribbling junk in notebooks and whatever. Not that any of those scratchy doodles ever amounted to much…I mean, that one drawing I did for a 90-story monument to the Apollo-Soyuz mission, well, it never got built. Which is a shame, ’cause I really bad wanted to be in the mega-building business. Instead, it completely looks like I wasted millions of kid-hours fooling around with Tonka trucks and tottering stacks of Britannicas. Meanwhile, what I should’ve been doing was, I should’ve been studying Algebra every single day since about age two, ’cause if I could test out of it now, then my spring semester would be 100% math free, which is how every semester oughta be. Anyway, all I have to report at the moment is, I’m working on various end-of-the-year type of projects, including a mystery project that sort of looks like a mess, but will eventually look slightly like art. Or so I hope, in a sort of forlorn way. Just have to carve about 8000 more rubber stamps, then we’ll see.

Rubbery Stamps

Okay, Internets, all I’ve got for ya today’s a dumb random sketchbook drawing, which contains way more pixels than meanings, and also a PDF style flyer I’m supposed to use kinda soon to show some folks how to make rubber stamps, which I guess isn’t really a big enough subject to require a whole sheet of instructions and illustrations. But that’s the assignment, so I’m doing it, or, I mean, I did do it earlier today, instead of doing the fourteen other things I also need to do, like research thick description and cryptography and problem boxes and ritual patterns, and design some sort of ring for jewelry class, and read thirty classic American short stories, and figure out where to maybe take a craft class next summer, if such a thing’s even possible, if I ever even graduate (week to week, I never know for sure this is actually gonna happen). Anyway, there are seventy-nine jillion websites with way better rubber stamp info than I’ve stuck in my PDF, but I was slightly proud of my extra-neat border. I never do neat borders.

Rat Snake

Okay, again with the snakes.

Yesterday, my wife and I watched a glossy black snake sort of take a shortcut through our backyard. We figured out pretty quick it wasn’t a dangerous type of critter, but, still, it was kind of amazingly huge. Or, well, all right, not exactly humongous like a python or something, but nevertheless a whole bunch larger than the usual garter snakes and whatnot we sometimes see lurking around and about. Anyway, there’s really nothing much more to this story, just wanted to draw it real quick, ’cause it was a lot of excitement for us both to have all at once in a fairly quiet-type of neighborhood like ours. I need to mention, though, that my wife is much, much braver than me, despite how it accidentally looks in my sketch, and it’s usually my own personal inclination to get a stomach full of quivery feelings whenever I’m within half a mile of any sort of natural phenomena. Thank goodness for Google and how it can answer questions super-fast about whether or not a particular animal is poisonous…I mean, ’cause of how I grew up totally inside of cities, I can’t really give even the most harmless creature the benefit of the doubt, which is shameful thing, but there it is.

So, that’s all I know for now. There are what sound like interesting conversations happening on the back porch, and it’s way past time for me to quit work for the day. And, yeah, the other drawing isn’t anything in particular. There was an article on Wired about the impossible science of Iron Man, and it was in a lot of ways a fun read, but also 1000% beside the point, ’cause we all know it’s impossible, all the cool junk that iron suit can do, but we also 1000% don’t care, on account of the inner-kid part of our brains that’s just flabbergasted to see it flying around on the big screen. Right? Anyhow, I have one more page in my moleskine and I’ve gotta think about how best to spend it. So, until then….

Birds in the Yard

Today I’m doing miscellaneous organizational things, so I don’t have time for random thoughts, which is lucky as hell for you and me both. I mean, I did think of twenty things I wanted to ramble on about, but they’ll all have to get written later. Maybe. In the meantime, I found some more completely ancient sketches in a couple of old sketchbooks I used to take to the Day Job. I can’t remember that there was any plan for these things, just sorta tried to scribble out some junk between phones ringing and people shouting and copiers breaking totally down.

Meanwhile, there are tons of birds in the fresh-cut yard, all of ‘em enjoying easy access to worms and, I guess, bugs of various kinds. Finches and sparrows will now and then touch down and steal prey from the much more numerous starlings and robins, which I suppose is sorta like how my so-called art career needs to work. Like, completely forget about joining the flock of big birds, and instead be content kinda darting in and out of the market to grab only weird little random jobs. Or something. Anyway, I very much need to get to work.