Checking In

It's been a few days

I went off for four days to help with the booth at Geek’d Con in Shreveport, LA and had a good time. Exhausting, I’m out of practice with being on my feet all day! Still, good company as there was a team of three of us from Raconteur Press. We met some cool people, saw a lot of fantastic cosplay - always half the fun of working a con - and sold a bunch of books. Yay!

Always a thrill to set up the tall cover banners and see my art at that scale.

Speaking of art, I kept on track with the physical daily drawing exercises, with some difficulty. You can see how it went…

Digital sketch and beginning the inking process - this was late Sunday as the crowd slowed and we waited until booth tear-down.

There are days I do feel like I have lost it. Right now it’s more the setting a habit, than getting back my muscle memories of how to draw. The results aren’t really something I would share except… maybe one of you is struggling to get back into the skill you love. See, you can do this, and I encourage you to be bad at it, until you get better.

Finger-drawing on my phone with Pocket Procreate. I mean… I was using Toast as a reference? Then I fell asleep right after finishing this. Well. Stopping drawing anyway.

Now that I am home again, it’s the usual whirl of reassuring the cats and my husband I love them, I missed them, and I’m not going anywhere soon. Also, laundry, dishes, and all the sundry chores like the cat boxes that wait on my presence. I remain grateful my husband is able to be alone this long, and understand his limitations. That’s life. It takes wild turns on you. Control what you can - like making time to draw every day, in my case, and let what you can’t affect pass you by.

Grass orchids are a classic beginners sumi-e exercise. Seemed like a good place to start, with some dancing dragonflies. The paper is a scrap of thin cardboard once used in the packing of an acid carboy arriving at my lab - I collected these and have made art on them over the years, I’m down to the last sheet or two, I think. End of an era.

And the end of a day. I’ll try to get back to a routine starting tomorrow.