As I sit here typing, I am confronted with a pile of my daughter's artwork. Yes I have the very first piece of artwork she did: it was a painting using cool whip dyed red. The color has long since faded but the memory has not. Now I am faced with deciding which ones of her work are "important" enough to keep and which ones to throw out. I may consider...

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Drama. I've had enough of it while driving as of late. One day this week I was driving to work early in the morning. It had rained overnight and was still lightly raining when I left. I was making good time in spite of it. I was just about to turn 6am when suddenly I heard a noise, as if I got a nail stuck in the tire. As I listened more carefully it sounded like something was stuck on the tire, hitting the bumper again and again as the wheel turned. Naturally, I pulled over to see what was the matter. I was concerned about pulling over because earlier in the week someone was hit by a car just after they pulled over. I prayed, got out of the car and watched traffic carefully as trucks and cars whizzed by, kicking up a spray of dirty mist. I saw something hanging off of the tire, only to discover that it was...

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The end of this week was a little stressful. I had to get my adenoids removed under anesthesia and I have never had any kind of surgery before.  As the date approached I tried to have a positive attitude but I couldn't help but wonder, "What was going to happen to me when I got anesthetized?" I had always wondered what it would be like but nothing really prepared me for it until it happened. I was laying there on the operating table in a very sterile, very cold room. They administered some of the anesthesia through an IV and as it entered my body it felt so, so cold. At first nothing was happening but I could feel it traveling through my body. Suddenly...

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I'm 95% done with my drawing; I just have to add the final touches to it and then I can make a value sketch. I'm pretty certain already how the piece will look even without the value sketch, but I will still do it just to be sure. I'd rather not have any surprises later on when I'm working on the finished piece.

Part of the image involves a knot. I haven't drawn a knot in fabric for quite a while, so I was concerned with how it was going to look. I knotted a piece of fabric for reference and began to draw. At first it was hard to keep from drawing on autopilot. My brain said, "Oh, ok. I have a general idea of what knots should look like, so instead of drawing what I see I'll draw a knot from memory." I could tell this was starting to happen so I...

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I'm about 50% through my drawing, and it is coming along fine. As I work on it I think about what people's reaction to it may be, and I wonder if it has been done before. I haven't seen anything that looks like what I'm doing so I expect it to have the desired effect when I'm done. As I work on it I can tell it will be a gripping image once it's done. In order to completely finish the drawing I'm going to need another reference picture, or set up the shot I need and draw it. That shouldn't take me too long to do but...

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I wasn't feeling so well this week - tummy troubles. My wife thinks it was probably a stomach virus. It really didn't affect my appetite very much, but it was annoying. It still hasn't completely gone away. But it hasn't stopped me from getting half of my drawing finished. So far it is coming along as I had planned and I'm happy with the progress.

I was driving to work on the interstate in the early morning this week. It was a rather uneventful commute up to that point; I was toggling the radio station between NPR's Morning Edition, the classical music station and the Gospel show on the Black station as I usually do. The sun was not up yet but it was twilight. Traffic was flowing smoothly and I expected to arrive at my usual time. A black car was driving rather fast about 20-30 car lengths in front of me when suddenly a baby deer darted out across the road in front of him! The car swerved violently to miss hitting the deer but as it swerved it went into a wild spin into...???

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4/19/08 - I made the enlargement of the reference picture I needed and have begun the drawing. I make the initial drawing onto tracing paper, darken the back of the tracing paper with pencil, and then trace the drawing onto scratchboard. This process allows me to edit and tweak the piece as needed before it is applied to the scratchboard for the finished work.

I knew that working on this piece would require a lot of repetitive work, and I'm not just drawing each "item" as a duplicate; I decided to render each "item" as an individual object, so that each one will be slightly different. You will understand why that is important later on. I can tell this is going to be a highly emotional piece to create, and my goal is to channel all of that emotion into it.

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4/11/08 - I'm lagging a bit behind with this art project. I need to get a reference picture enlarged but have not found a large format printer in the area. I may wind up enlarging it on the computer, printing it out in pieces and then putting those pieces back together. It's more work but at least it's free and in this economy every little bit helps. I will say that this piece is based on the American Flag but I have a little dilemma: if I reduce the number of stripes will it still "read" as a flag? If I use the correct number of stripes it could overstate my point, which may not necessarily be a bad thing, but isn't what I had originally planned. Hopefully this dilemma will not create a block for me because I really want to get the work done.

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