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I’m determined to learn how to paint on-screen. The tools are finally here for me to do it — a pressure-sensitive stylus and a tablet I can use like a piece of paper. With digital, it’s possible to get really even tones that will reproduce well, but also to play virtually with media that I wouldn’t dare use in the real world. (Hello big, messy textures and multiple levels of “undo”!)

The painting part is fine — way more controllable than watercolour, though admittedly also absent the ‘aliveness’ of it. The real challenge is that I’m accustomed to having such tight control over the lines I produce with a pen. I don’t want a big, fat, rounded digital magic marker, I want variability — which is available to a certain degree, but it’s a different feeling than I’m accustomed to. I would love to be capable of doing this:

In other news, I drove every day last week and was feeling all ready to take my practical driving test. Then I had my lesson on Monday and made a right hash of it. Every manoeuvre was awful, and the car was very jumpy under my control.

Of course, my instructor’s car is a peppy little diesel number, while our car is a petrol-powered refrigerator, so this is a bit like learning to play the clarinet and the saxophone at the same time.

After the lesson, I had to take a bus crammed with high school students to Latheron to pick up my artwork. I had no idea if I’d sold anything, and was struggling to lighten up and not get moody about everything: “I suck at driving. I just had to pay £255 for ten more lessons. My art didn’t sell. I don’t know what I’m doing.” *proceeds to eat worms*

It turned out that two of the paintings sold — I’m officially an artist! — and the two I was taking home happened to be the ones I kind of wanted for myself, at least for now.

Craig, my wonderful paramour and greatest supporter, arrived in Latheron with the car and made me drive home. The trip was smooth, fast, easy, and fun.

Dan at Strategic Coach says, “Progress, not perfection.” It’s so hard not to have impossible standards for myself. Even after fifteen years of working with the company, writing material for very successful entrepreneurs, I still feel like somehow I’m different, I’m an exception.

Over the past several months, I’ve achieved the impossible: I learned how to drive. I still have things to learn, but I’ve got to keep a sense of humour about that and not let my ideal take away my sense of progress.

I was feeling a bit lost yesterday (and wrote a letter to a new friend in that state of mind, so I probably came across as a loon), so I sat down, doodled, and talked myself through it — the best thing I could have done! Why are we not taught and encouraged to do this?

…is a regular patron of the resto-pub where I like to work.

He has a really strong Wick accent — imagine a light, bouncy Irish that has essentially no audible consonants — so the only word I can make out is that one. I’m not easily offended, especially by words, but he just makes it sound so, so filthy, and he has no compunctions about spewing it loudly in the presence of all the other patrons.

This seems to be my number one bugbear with life in public: people who intrude on my auditory boundaries (see also: mobile phone as stereo-for-everyone, one-sided phone calls, football songs…)

Transcript:

This isn’t really a concern, just a line that popped into my head. The thing I have been experiencing is lower energy, it seems, after we’ve been travelling. [And we’ve been away from home every weekend for about a month.] I keep putting it down to eating sugar. I don’t know what it is, but it makes life harder.

Craig’s been having this, too, so it’s not chronic fatigue or anything like that; maybe it’s just a consequence of going up and down the length of the country in our spare time. After a week of hiding out at home, trying to heal up, though, I’m back at the pub, and managed to get lots written for work today. There’s a constant loop of tornado videos on the news channel, so as much as I want to get back into drawing, all I can think of are Wizard of Oz references, which are tacky and hardly inspired.

I drove back almost all the way from Inverness on the weekend, and my lesson went well yesterday. One day this ordeal will be over and I’ll be able to start learning the way I learn (by doing stuff) instead of learning by taking lessons and being observed.

On the way home, I dropped off my paintings for the art show this coming weekend. Now that the work is done, I’m really looking forward to the opening! And, I must confess, my brain is casting about for the next thing””which I already have in mind. I’m glad I said no to the two recent opportunities so I can work on that.

EDIT: Craig had me take him for a post-work tour in the car, and it was positively fun. I don’t understand me.

I’m finally ready for the Latheron Art Show. This job kept getting relegated to the background, partly because I was busy, partly because I had no idea what to make: What constitutes “art”?

I bought a couple of teeny frames when I was in London, and these proved to be perfect for the kind of drawing I do.

But I didn’t buy enough.

This left me with two larger frames, and a conundrum: I don’t draw big. I just don’t. Yes, we should stretch our boundaries, and after enjoying the life drawing class’s exhibition at our library’s gallery, I do feel compelled to experiment in a class like that — but not when I have work to produce to a deadline!

I also wanted the work I’m showing to reflect what I like to do, what I’m good at, rather than try to do “proper art” (I think this must plague all comics artists). Well, I’ll give myself a 50% on that one, because, stuck for subjects and constantly coming back to “but this is an art show”, along with the oversized frames I had to work with, I caved and tried to do “serious” representational art.

The problem is, like I said in the last post, I haven’t put in the time to be any good at that.

So I did this landscape of a local scene:

…but I find it awfully muddy, ’cause I don’t know how to do washes with watercolour — which wasn’t helped by this being on Bristol board, which starts to decompose when the surface gets too wet.

I can draw, but painting is something different. I’m getting better at doing it on a small scale, but that’s still in the “colouring in” range. Actually painting across a large space magnifies all the things I don’t know. I am just doing this show for fun, but I still didn’t want to bring work that’s…

There’s some okay work in the middle, but most of the art clusters around the high and the low ends, and the low-end stuff can be really, really bad. It’s usually in oil, too. Why do people jump straight to oil, which must be the hardest material to work with? It’s like an X-ray that reveals all your technical weaknesses and reduces your effort to something that looks like the bottom of a bird-cage.

I know there’s a movement called “naive art”, which — I don’t know if it’s condescending or compassionate, but it features work by unschooled adult artists whose work usually has no sense of proportion or craft, and often looks like it was done by a child. So to give the benefit of the doubt, there’s a lot of naive art at these shows. (“Oh sweet Lord, what happened to your dog?!”)

So I didn’t want to add to that, or fall into that hole of reaching too far with media I’m not equal to.

I’d done two “my-style” things I liked, but all the other cartoony ideas that came to me just seemed like — I dunno, I couldn’t imagine what they had to do with anything or why anyone would buy them. (It’s the old Writer’s Block: imagining what other people will think or want can stop you dead in your tracks.) Like this demon bartender: fun, but it felt a little glib and “So what?”

In the end, I experimented with painting the entrance to the Camster Cairns (a nearby paleolithic burial site) and a mackerel (I find fish beautiful). I enjoyed the mackerel much more; I guess I like having a subject, rather than just filling in a lot of details.

So there we are; I’m ready! I’m to drop them off this weekend (during a one-hour window, strangely), then the show is next weekend.

Ugh, now I have to decide what to charge for these. I’m wide open to suggestions.

In related news, I’ve been asked to attend a book fair in October — the same one that made me decide I was quitting fairs — and to make more books for a local museum’s shop. On both counts, it’s wonder to be asked and I’m grateful, but I have trouble imagining that either of them will be worth it in terms of return on investment. I think I’m finished with producing commodity work.

Like I’ve been saying, I’m in a place where I don’t need the (trace amounts of) money, and saying yes to these things keeps me from exploring other stuff I’m more interested in.

I guess that’s decided then: I’ll say no. I just have this dread fear of not being a good guy, not being liked. (Canadian children are taken away to training camps to have these virtues drummed into them.)

My friend Lisa sent me a video the other day about procrastination, and how we beat ourselves up with it and because of it. The video made a good point, that procrastination is always the result of falling into a “master/slave” relationship with ourselves, which naturally makes us want to resist whatever we’re told to do.

(The speaker drew the point back to childhood, saying that this is how parenting is usually done, and rails against that. I have to admit that I fast-forwarded through much of the video and I’m not linking to it here, because I’m not into the “blame my parents” game, because he took half an hour to make the point I made in one sentence above, and because I’ve Googled the guy and he sounds a bit culty-creepy.)

An author I love is Cheri Huber; she writes deeply compassionate books about Zen that are utterly brain-bending, yet her conclusions are inescapably elegant and ring true like a Tibetan Singing Bowl. She’s really big on this idea of conditioning — changing ourselves so that we’ll be “acceptable” (which, of course, begs the question that we’re naturally unacceptable and have to be constantly changing and fixing ourselves to be worthy of love).

One of the ways we try to do this, she says, is by developing “sub-personalities”. Over the past few years, I’ve been identifying my various sub-personalities and their attendant strategies for winning. Some of them seem purely negative when they show up, but as they say in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, “all behaviour has a positive intention”.

Here’s my cast of sub-personality characters so far:

So yesterday, because of my correspondence with Lisa, I was thinking about my inner drill sergeant (far-left, middle). He’s always barking orders at me, just like yer man was saying in the video. But on taking a closer look at him, I had an insight:

He’s a soldier. What do soldiers do? They fight for your freedom.

Now, just like with real-life soldiers, I very often disapprove of their methods and completely disagree with their wars, but I can’t argue with the fundamental intention of protecting freedom. So that’s what the sergeant’s trying to do: win my freedom.

Which takes us into Havi Brooks territory: she says we should talk to our monsters rather than try to kill and destroy them, because at their hearts is a need. By talking to them, we can find out what that need is and finally satisfy it — even if just for a while.

I guess what’s next, then, is to ask what lack of freedom the sergeant is trying to protect me from. I suspect it’s about getting enslaved in an unconscious world of default choices that won’t make me happy. But his orders can become like laws: oppressive, when divorced from their original intention, imposed by force and without reason.

I can use the sergeant’s discipline to get stuff done — stuff that’s important to me. And I can get him to calm down by assuring him that we’re safe. In fact, I think “safety” is all any of the negative characters need.

Maybe this stuff is crazy, but it works for me.

My doubts weren’t because of her; she’s really lovely and sweet. It’s just that I did a gig for a friend of mine recently and it grew arms and legs and got totally out of control. The problem was I just breezed into it and didn’t use my brain or my experience.

It was a website, for Pete’s sake, I should have known better! Yes, the thing we launched was a lovely work of art, but the first thing that happens with websites is that everyone and their niece writes in to say “It’s broken! This is wrong, that’s wrong, it should be like this!” And, understandably, this is the point where the client freaks out and wants the whole thing changed to accommodate every single piece of feedback. You thought the job was done, but here comes three times as much work all over again.

This is dangerous territory with friends, because I never charge enough in the first place, and I don’t really have spare time, so very quickly I come to wish I’d never said yes. And when it’s a friend-of-a-friend, or in this case a relative stranger, why do I feel I need to provide the skills just ’cause they’re needed, and why do I feel like it wouldn’t be right to just say no and point them in the direction of another professional? “Because that person would charge them a lot of money!”

Uh huh, because that’s what this work costs.

When it comes to drawing, I know what I’m doing. When it comes to being an illustrator, I don’t have a clue. So two things occurred to me:

1. I don’t want to do gun-for-hire illustration. I want to do my own thing right now. (More on this in a moment.)
2. Even if I did want to do illustration, I don’t want to do it until I’m set up right to handle the jobs properly — which might never happen while I’ve got a permanent job.

My dad shared a great quote with me the other night:

Exactly. And it takes some experience to learn how to cost jobs for villages with potential unseen tigers.

So I said no to this drawing gig, and I tried to e-mail over as many helpful resources as I could — which is difficult, since I seem to always wander into lines of work accidentally, and thus don’t know anyone else who does them.

In this case, one of the people I pointed her to is a comic artist I’ve been a fan of since we met at a London book fair. We’ve had a few conversations on Twitter, but it’s got to the point that I feel like a rabid freaky copycat fan. He teaches comics art in Wales, though, so I figured he might be able to help her out with a student referral, or maybe might be happy for the commission himself.

So you just never know who’s looking at your stuff. Case in point: my dear pal Wendy told me last week that she’s been looking at my recent drawings as inspiration for her new website. It’s weird how we’re all looking around in circles at other people’s work, unfortunately feeling inferior much of the time.

Speaking of which:

(Ugh! Also not liking the watercolour paper much, and my brush-pens are narking me off, being either too dry or dangerously liquidy.)

I did do two drawings for the show that I’m happy with, though:

…But I have to come up with another two before the weekend, and this pressure to make “art” has me a little stumped. I’m really enjoying this sketchblogging, and exploring that is what I really want to be doing now. “Art” seems like it should be really involved, or be empty scenery instead of comics.

I’ve no idea what art is, but I do know there’s a happy click when I’m using my abilities to reflect on the world around me.

Like this:

Last weekend we saw Highland Fling, a ballet by the Matthew Bourne company, who are most famous for producing the all-male Swan Lake that featured at the end of Billy Elliot. It was light and fun and surprisingly short, but I absolutely loved seeing a piece of work that set a fantastic story (La Sylphide) in Scotland. There are so many wonderful things about this country, and sometimes it takes a stretch into the fantastic to really capture them. (Hell, I got a book out of that, and by the end of this ballet wanted to step back into that imaginary neck of the woods.)

The show came at the end of a particularly difficult week: Craig and I were in the Central Belt staying with his family, and we got to see nearly everyone we know and love down there, except we were both sick. He caught his niece’s cold, and I developed some weird lymph or nerve infection that made my face swell up, hurt, and break out in sores. Yeah, whilst being paraded in front of nearly everyone I know. So that was an exercise in swallowing my pride and soldiering on. (This is also why I have a beard in the comic strip above.)

I’m still hiding out at home this week and healing. Then we’re off again this weekend to friends’ civil partnership. I’m starting to not like travelling because it makes me sick.

And, finally in the world of news, I had to draw Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut who’s just returned from spending five months aboard the International Space Station.

This man is an absolute hero, not just because he’s a space jockey, but because he seems like a really swell guy — and talented, too, as he demonstrated in his cover version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”, performed in freaking space.

In short, Hadfield comes across as Canadian in the very best way, which is a reminder the world sorely needed — for Canadians, because that country’s been under the voodoo zombie spell of a hideous government for far too long; and for the world, because that same malign influence seems to have crept into the halls of power everywhere else, too, like it’s the 1980s all over again. But Hadfield shows us that there are still heroes doing good, brave things for good, brave reasons.