Came in to town and got yet another sketchbook (because it was little and had smooth pages that could take ink and the only one I had that size was a moleskine with rough pages)and a German Donald Duck comic for some additional source material. Evidently he’s huge here, because everywhere you go there are racks of thick Donald comics. Which I guess is ok news for me, given the circumstances.
And maybe here I should explain a little bit about my working method, which is this: When I sit down to draw, I need a few key things: a cup of coffee, some sort of music playing (that I’ve chosen), battery operated sharpener, brush to take care of eraser shreds, pencils in assorted weights, and a bunch of images. Before I can get started on a drawing, I need to wallow in a pile of pictures. I’m addicted to Dover and Taschen books that have page after page of old ads, clip art, or erotica or photos of interiors or tattoos or whatever. It’s really rare that there might be a specific thing that will go from one of the books into a drawing, but I need to start the collision of different images going in my head for one of my ideas to take shape. I need the mulch, and after a bit of mental drifting through different types of drawings Something will surface. I can’t start cold.
At home I have hundreds of different books that I can flip through to get myself going. When it came to traveling here, I had to decide which few to bring with me, and to sort of trust to the environment to provide. One thing I’ve learned is that for some reason, I can’t really do the image riffling on the screen of the computer. I have a ton of pictures that are supposedly source material with me on various flash drives, but it just doesn’t work for me. I need to print them out if I’m going to use them. So I brought about five of those packet sized Taschen books and a couple of books of Bear Sex Manga that a friend gave me, and that was it. Having been here for a couple weeks at this point I needed to add something else to the mix, so I went down to the local bookstores, to little avail. I’m kind of surprised, because Taschen seems to be pretty ubiquitous in Europe from my previous experience, and they’re cheap. It was pretty slim pickings at the places I looked,however; just a couple of very expensive coffee table books in the art section. So Donald and kin are going to have to suffice for now. Maybe I’ll make a drawing of a money vault or something
Tags: daily photo, drawing, making art, notes on practice, Sylt