Randomness

Here's another sketch page just to move the pencil around and try to catch some drawing rhythm. I took a good week around Christmas off and away from any sort of creative outlet. Needed to recharge. But, as usual, when I had to get back to it, I was rusty. That's all it takes sometimes - five, six, seven days. Anyways, this helped me a little bit get back into the saddle.

Throwin' a bone.

Ugh, what a holiday season it was for me. I say "ugh" not as in it sucked but as in it was just a whole heck of a lot of work. Including non-freelance job projects, I had creative work going on right up until when i went to bed at 3:00 am Christmas eve!

Here's my laundry list of projects that I started and finished in the uncomfortably snug span of hours between Thanksgiving and Christmas:

*One D&D cover (and a none-too-easy one at that)

*Three Magic:The Gathering card paintings

*Five fairly intensive black-n-white pieces for an undisclosed M:tG project

*Scanned and laid out a book of my daughter's artwork (through Blurb.com) as a present for my wife

*Illustrated and designed a custom beer label

*Made an exotic tent-fort for my daughter for Christmas (with help from my wife's parents)

Somewhere in that mess I was able to go to a couple parties, drive to Cleveland to see Chris Cornell in concert, and get a few hours of sleep. Christmas day came along and I found I had no looming deadlines and nothing of immediate concern - what a joy to just be with my family and eat and not frazzle myself with the thought that "I need to get a certain amount of this or that done by the time I go to bed later than I should."

So goes the life of a freelancer, eh? It's all good though. All the projects were fun and worth it. I just wish there were like two more weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas is all!

So, as you can now see, squeezing in a draw-blog post was pretty far down my list of priorities for the past four or five weeks. Things have settled down now - but I find that I have a tremendous lack of anything worthwhile to post right now. No new sketchbook doodles and no preliminary drawings worth sharing. I had to go back dig up this (2.5 year old?) piece - a sketch I liked because of how snaky the girl's pose is and her accidentally cute profile. The painting turned out to be a mess though. So, here's a bone I'm throwing out until something better comes along.

Speaking of something better, I'm eyeing another guess-the-album-cover contest on the horizon. Aw yeah.