Tyrsday: Happy Bat and Presumptuous Frog

Some animals this time! And color!

This happy freetail bat is from the cover of Texas Co-Op Magazine, a great local mag for, well, customers of Texas electrical Co-ops. That's a cooperatively owned utility (or business, or what have you) if you don't know-- like owning stock in a company, we all own a part of our electric company! And if they do well during the year, we get money back from our utility bill. Wooo! We love our Co-op company!

Also, pictures of happy bats!

The Mexican freetail bat is kind of a ginormous Thing here,but apparently some people don't like bats! All I can figure is those people are poops. Look at that smiley face! That's not even artistic license, it's totally grooving! Freetails eat their weight in bugs, serve as major crop pollinators, and make adorable chirpy sounds at night. I like to watch them doing acrobatics out around our security light in the summer, picking off the bugs that would otherwise be noshing me to the bone. Go, bats!

Also, a rather smug frog. Frogs always look either smug or panicked.

Tyrsday 2: Thoughts and performers

Most of the sketches I've been doing right-handed have been from photos. I have a collection of wonderful magazines like National Geographic, Smithsonian, Scientific American- all with excellent and inspiring photos. And while it would of course be utterly tack to try and steal use of the photos for gain, I don't think something like this:

is going to be taking food out of a photographer's mouth any time soon.

These two were taken from an article on Mexico; photos of a luchador wrapping his muscles and a musician waiting to play. I don't think either of these proud performers would care that a weak-wrist artist in Texas was inspired by their angles, but: Thanks, guys! You've been a big help!

It's been a long time since I did this much sketching-from-reference, actually, and that's a failing on my part. There's a danger in the sort of illustrative/stylized work I do of forgetting the basics. It's like spending so much time on a trampoline that you can't stand on solid ground. So it's good to reconnect. More than that, though, I feel like all this right-handed practice (believe me, I'm only showing a tiny sliver of it here) is teaching my brain forms in a way I haven't grasped before. I can feel the way I think about drawing changing.

Mind you, all of this awesome new learning is actually making my work in the moment kind of horrible. But that's a topic for another day...

Tyrsday: I Am Not Left Handed

No, it's true! Yes, I draw and write left-handed. But that's not my default state! I was born ambidextrous, and trained away from it by years of school teachers and parental types insisting I just choose one, already, and stop changing hands in the middle of the page all the time.

That I chose to focus on the hand that would guarantee tool failure 90 percent of the time illustrates why even smart children should not be allowed to make life altering decisions. But I digress.

I never did narrow my handedness down on anything besides school-related work, and given my various health issues that's saved my bacon more than once. But even if I didn't regularly have body parts drop out of commicsion,  it seems a horrible waste to have one hand that never gets to do fine work- and also it seems like begging fate to come along and disarm me so that I have to spend my remaining days lamenting my lost dexterity (sinisterity?). So this year my resolution is to get my right hand back up to snuff! I've been writing longhand, and if the handwriting isn't perfect yet I can't say it's really worse than my usual lefty doctor-prescription scrawl. But the art, now....

That's gonna take a while.
So come around Tuesdays to share the hilarity of my attempt at self improvement, won't you?


(Tyr, of course, was a Norse God of Getting His Hand Bitten Off By A Giant Wolf Who Was Also Sort of His Stepbrother. And you think your family reunions are awkward.)