Thursday, September 20, 2018

Aitkin Age column and Throwback Thursday

Drew this in 2004, a symbolic rendition of a Sunfish, which goes with my column:
My latest column for the Aitkin Independent Age tells some fish stories:

As corruption and contention fill or are revealed to have filled church, state, and entertainment with global degeneracy, let us cherish what is local, familial, and wholesome. Like fishing! Let’s tell fish stories.
I’m not a very serious fisherwoman but I go at least a couple times every year. Crappies and sunfish are the target, destined for frying. Once I was fishing off my grandparents’ dock on Cedar. I swung my rod back for a cast and let fly. The line felt heavier and thus flew further than normal. With a splash in the water out in front of the dock appeared a blaze orange baseball cap. I looked back; I had hooked the hat right off my grandfather’s head! Everyone was laughing as I reeled it in and he nonchalantly plopped it back on, still wet.
I’ve only been ice fishing twice; the latter time we caught nothing, the other time was back in the ’90s, in my grandfather’s home-built fish house plated with dented sheet metal and heated by wood stove. That time we encouraged the fish by – but I’ll get to that. Have you ever talked about ice fishing with people who have never been in the north? Amazingly, some of them don’t believe such an activity could exist.
Read the rest here.

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

The Bears and Bovodar

Bovodar and the Bears by Jack Mikkelson is fantasy adventure book chock full of amazing, quaint things that I loved. Animals both fearsome and cute but without any dumb quasi-mystical cant about them being superior to humans, lush descriptions of food and environments, a fantasy land that resembles the American landscape, heroic masculinity, fighting, chases, escapes, torture ... and bears! Lots of bears!

Speaking of, lots of bears is something I've been drawing lately. I wonder why that might be...


Saturday, September 8, 2018

An inkshed moment


I'm testing out a new tool: a waterbrush filled with India ink. I've used a waterbrush for years, but only with...water. Even though it says on the package you can fill it with ink, doing so never occurred to me until I saw this Instagram account.

I tried it out on a sketch of Vivian James that I had lying around: (plus Faber-Castell brushpens for color accents)


Verdict: this may be the solution to all of my problems.

Well, to a major problem of mine: drawing too slow. My process had been: sketch in pencil, do a preliminary inking with thin lines, erase the pencil, color, then go back and thicken the ink lines. This enables me to change to: sketch in pencil, ink, erase pencil, color. Much faster!

I'm not able to be really precise with it (yet) so some things involving fine detail will have to stick to the old method, but for lots of things (particularly animals and nature, of which I'll be drawing a lot soon... exciting announcement to come) it will be great.