"One Room"

… besides losing it in general (“of all the things I’ve lost I miss my mind the most”).
And this doesn’t even include showing the kitchen area, closet or the sleeping loft (that’s where the other insane cat is). Actually I’m still toying with the concept of making this into a triptych over the winter… now THAT would be nuts. At least I stopped before putting titles on all the books, DVDs and CDs.

Way too much more information below the fold... 

Here's a condensed time-lapse process post of a piece I drew almost three months ago, which just ran in yesterday's paper. Most everything was drawn from memory: a composite compost-heap of all the cabins I’ve inhabited up here over the years. Pretty much true to life representation, as visitors can attest to the general state of affairs behind this disheveled, cluttered environment. I've been told being in one of my cabins is like being inside my brain, what with the random explosion of ephemera and cascading miscellany - a cozy kinda crazy. The ulterior (interior?) joke is on my personal habit of constantly somehow misplacing pencils while working – it’s been known to happen that I’ll get completely bent out of shape and frustrated to the point of ranting aloud, and all the while there’ll be one stuck behind my damn ear… talk about developing severe permafrost-tunnel-vision with cartoon-blinders on. So there’s any number of them scattered throughout this panel, along with a red-herring set of keys in an equally obvious location.

And a disclaimer in that I don’t have either a flat-screen nor a lap-top, and neither is the room this clean: honestly I purposefully restrained the excessive clutter just to allow for a handful of spots for visual breathing room. No, really. That, and there are dozens of beavers edited away as well. Like sharks and zombies, you don't ever need to actually see them to know that they're there.
Just recently had a conversation about the merits of utilizing/renting long-term storage, something I’ve never used and have always been repelled by. It’s from more of a practical standpoint with regards to personal sprawl, but there’s another facet of the cabin lifestyle where there’s immeasurable security in being able to instantly survey everything one owns. Not that it matters one damn bit in this instance.

The scan of the pencil sketch is a good example of keeping a grip on the underlying, basic geometric layout for at least a nominal nod to linear perspective. That was crucial along with successive overlapping and some foreshortening to maintain the illusion of depth. Even though I used for the most part only two dip-pen nibs (a thick and a medium point) and one Micron for the ultra-fine details, there really isn’t much obvious line weight, so a lot had to be done as far as compensating with value to demarcate different areas and objects from the fore/mid/back-ground planes by adding touches of gradient, cutting shadows and using contrast. Say, this is suspiciously starting to sound like one of my broken-record (scratched CD?) lectures.

One thing I was immensely pleased with was getting away with only one minor ink-blotch (from being careless with a ruler before it was finished drying), that, and the bonus blessing in the 9x12” finished piece barely fitting on the scanner for one shot. Not being the sort of artist (or person for that matter) overly concerned with meticulous attention to detail, working in shifts of only a couple/few hours before breaking away to sketch and draw other concurrent projects helped ward off burn-out, which even though it’s a single panel, can still fry the brain into drooling monkey-phase. No lie when I tell students to pace themselves: taking frequent breaks helps keep it fresh and alive, as opposed to flogging the dead horse of homework until you’ve totally lost interest, motivation and sanity. But there is a point of diminishing returns where it’s time to give it up - for this panel it was around the 12-hour mark when I threw my mouse up and went to bed (like some cats I know) (actually they hurk up voles instead). Plus it begs the question whether or not even half the details will translate into print: the original image size is 300dpi, an emailed JPEG about 10” high, but that’ll get knocked down to 6” (if I’m lucky). A lot of the subtleties are lost in newsprint – but it’s always a minor glint of interest for me to open up the Sunday paper and see what the final version winds up actually looking like. A bonus in that a print of this particular panel is also currently adorning the gallery walls for the UAF art department's annual faculty show. Since it's matted and in a nice frame it therefore qualifies as Fine Art. As in Fine with me.

And it brought up one of my overlooked favoritest moments in a drawing like this - erasing. Man do I ever love that stage: it’s a little elbow work that reveals and rewards the aforementioned attention to detail, when all the lines intersect instead of overlap, no breaks in the lines, everything neat (well, within reason) and self-contained so there’s virtually no lengthy digital cleanup or tweaking. I've always admired some of my peers who are obsessively fastidious in creating pages that are flawlessly exectued and require no additional cleanup.
Even if as far as the big picture is concerned that’s only the half-way mark, since the scanning, cleanup and conversion, plus shading, will take another significant investment in time and effort (relative to cartooning). There was actually minimal Photoshopping, mostly just a few random objects and a final pass of tonal massage after importation from Freehand. There was several edits as far as the trivia scattered around, mostly flip-flopping back and forth on selecting an appropriate TV image. Choosing between a pool of screen-grabs of stills from personal favorite movie moments was daunting - the runner-up was a great shot of all the animals looking on as Marge & Homer were having sex in their cabin, but at the last minute I settled for a nice pose from Chaplin, whose films I've been studying a lot as of late.

Once again I am reminded of how awesome of an opportunity it is with this weekly feature to have such freedom and flexibility to shift gears not only with regards to content but to form: wildly contrasting compositions, panel sizes and attendant detail will all reflect the needs of each piece, instead of trying to shoehorn it into the constraints of, say, formulaic syndication. So all this was long way to go for a gag, but spending that sort of time on creating anything artistic is largely irrelevant and even more pointless to ponder than producing the piece itself. To say nothing of another truly epic post deconstructing a damn cartoon in depth.
One more final note: this panel was spurred in part by an email I got weeks ago that really helped balance out the overall educational scales and canceled out all of of the unfortunate and unnecessary bullshit one occasionally has to put up with as an art teacher. One of my perennial assignments for the first critique in beginning drawing is of an interior composition, and even though it’s ostensibly an exercise in linear perspective, one of the meta-reasons is to focus attention on observational skills, and by doing so, hopefully establish a slightly more meaningful connection with where you are at, wherever that may be. A former student had written to me of how they’d been moving a completely insane amount of times as of late, and the only consistent reminder of a time of relative comfort and security was the drawing that they had done for that particular assignment, which was dutifully displayed at each successive location before the next upheaval, as a sort of a therapeutic lodestone. I always maintain that I’ll never expect anything more from students than what I can produce myself, so this panel (and posting) is a sort of homage to that. And furthermore, as I recently experienced myself with the Maine series of thematic postings here over the past summer, sketching is quite often an indelible method of linking, and inking, the power of recall, as one is oftentimes much more immersed with observation of aspects that the average person would miss out on in the surrounding crescendo of crap constantly competing for our time and attention. 

And besides, really, what’s more stupid: taking the time to patiently, painstakingly document the trivial ephemera of one's own existence… or not even noticing it anymore? Is an unexamined mess is not worth living in? Those are the kind of bemusing Big Questions behind the particular expression illustrated above, besides where the hell is my pencil?

Prime real-estate: almost a big as Dear Abby, and twice as serious.