I wish I could take a peek in his sketchbooks =( I bet they are AMAZING!

http://www.moleskinerie.com/2008/10/picasso-sketchb.html

Check out my first entry at skine.art!

http://www.skineart.com/art/here-in-birmingham-al-this-witless-gen/

I’m nowhere NEAR as talented as the other artists featured on skine.art, so for them to even accept my drawing was an enormous deal to me!

I am exhausted. I worked until 9:30 last night and I can barely keep my eyes open as I sit here at my desk at work. It’s pouring rain outside, the sun is nowhere to be found, and my husband is still snuggled up all warm and cozy under the covers. It’s making me a little bitter.

As I sat and looked at my two moleskine entries over the past few days, one thing I’ve come to realize is how rusty I am. Sure, I teach art lessons and I paint occasionally, but what happened to the joie de vivre I had when I was younger, when all I wanted to do was sit and draw? I would literally draw for hours and hours at a time without stopping or taking a breath of fresh air.

I distinctly remember when my first renaissance occured in the 7th grade. I loved to draw and color throughout my whole life, but I feel like I literally woke up one day with a fire in my heart and electricity in my hands to create something meaningful. I remember chalking it up to puberty at first, thinking that maybe it had something to do with my crazy hormones, until I saw a TV show on the air one day.

It’s silly, it’s random, and I absolutely refused to admit it to anyone until recently… But Sailor Moon triggered my creative rebirth. I sat through about 3 episodes before I started drawing what I saw, but cartoons have never really done it for me… After I hit the internet to research Sailor Moon a little more, I discovered something that completely inspired my little junior higher’s heart… Sailor Moon manga.

If you’re unfamiliar (or live under a rock), manga is sort of an umbrella term for japanese comic books. They usually have a very deep, well developed story line and there is usually some form of mythology and/or magic involved. Why did Sailor Moon manga appeal to me so much?

Primarily, because the artist used very simple lines, minimal coloring, and hardly any value and still managed to produce goregous work. It makes me wonder about my heavy handedness!

Be sure to click on this one so you can see it full-sized. The artist seemed to have this innate ability to evoke the desired mood with her pictures without overworking the color. She seemed to do a lot of simple color washes, very little value, and pretty simple lines and her manga has always been breathtaking to me.

The biggest thing to me that has affected my art until even today is the eyes. Their eyes are so expressive! Soft and wistful, clear and bright. 10 years later, eyes are still my primary focal point when I draw my favorite subject- people.

Google-searching Sailor Moon like I did today has brought back a lot of my first memories as a committed artist, and no doubt it will probably affect my work during the rest of the week.

Needless to say, I’ve moved on from cartoons and manga, but you never forget your first love!

I have a new obsession… Moleskine. They’re cleverly marketed stationary- ‘infobooks’ (tabbed notebooks), ruled, squared, and plain notebooks, sketchbooks, LBB’s and DIY city guides. The story behind this line can be found here. Basically, the grandfather of the modern moleskine was produced by a french stationary boutique and was utilized by Hemingway, Picasso, and Chatwin. The french boutique was bought out a few times, and here we are today.

I’m typically not one for fancy, schmancy sketchbooks, and I usually favor loose-leaf paper and 5-for-a-dollar college-ruled notebooks to hard back and spiral bound sketchbooks, but I immediately gravitated to not just the moleskine, but the art culture that seems to have developed around it. I didn’t really understand why my generation’s artists, who are usually against anything mass-produced and sort of gimmicky because of the principal of the matter itself, are flocking to them, but after I began feeling myself gravitate towards them I decided that it was worth a try.

Yesterday morning, I was sent out of the office on an errand almost as soon as I walked into the door, and I decided that yesterday was the day I would finally buy one. After I ran my errand, I swung a few doors down into the Books a Million parking lot, and managed to scrape in within 10 minutes of their being open. The whole place was empty, save for a few old ladies knitting and sipping coffee in the cafe and a college kid towards the back in a blue apron tidying a waterfall holding various Twilight paraphenalia (*gag*, btw). Over the past week, I had done a lot of research on moleskine, where the best prices were (you can find them as cheap as $9.60 here), et cetera, so I knew that I could bee line it to the journal section problem-free.

That posed my next problem! Which one to buy? There was a whole section of shelving devoted to the beautiful leather bound books, clearly differentiated by their brightly colored dust jacket… thing. I could have a 3×5 ruled, plain, or squared notebook, a sketchbook, a cashier’s book, a diary, or a ‘japanese’ accordion-style book (favored by the moly exchange peeps); or in 5.5×8 I could have all of the same as well as a DIY City Guide -which would be pretty sweet except for the fact that the somewhat-small concrete jungle that I call home hasn’t earned its own City Guide yet. After hem-hawing for about an hour, flipping through the pages, smelling the paper, testing the flexibility of the covers, I finally settled with a 5.5×8 sketchbook.

From the moment I took my moly into my hands, I felt an instant chemistry. I felt the need to fill the pages with something beautiful. I finally understood what the artists-turned-bloggers have been buzzing about really for the past three years. It’s more than a loose leaf sheet of computer paper or a page out of a spiral bound college ruled notebook, it commands the best of me. I couldn’t or wouldn’t dare pollute its pages with half-arsed sketches! I’ve committed to drawing hopefully every day whatever it is in the world that piques my curiosity and inspiration. I’m not inspired every day, but even if I do it 3 times a week, hopefully the more often I do it, the more things will catch my interest.

So, without further adieu, here is my first moley entry, taken with my camera on my cell:

Yep, Joe Plumber himself.

As I said in my description, we all know that I’m not psychic. When I completed this, around 4:45pm yesterday, the debate hadn’t even begun yet so I had no way of knowing that Joe Plumber would become a political tool for our dear presidential hopefuls that night. In all actuality, it’s a picture of the slack-jawed yoke that hit my mom last month. For legal reasons I can’t go into the details, but you can imagine that it all happened from stupidity on his part. I took a few pictures with my camera at home later that evening, I shall post ASAP.

Un-finished Joseph H. Plumber, MD

Which ones do you use? Which ones have you used that you hate? Do tell!

I’ve used prismacolors in the past and loved them, but I’m looking for something that’s a little more fluid and transparent.

TIA!