Creative Insomnia

I can make myself sit down and come up with a story or image. I have been trained to do it and can, but those ideas usually feel forced and the projects fizzle out. The best ideas...the ones that live and breath on their own...seem to just come to me, and usually at inopportune times.

I have learned to always have a notebook and pen with me when out and about, especially when on any sort of road trek or a musical performance of any kind. It could be one line, a character name, or a picture in my head. Last night presented me with the most common way my ideas make their visitations...just as I'm trying to fall asleep. My body was weary and I knew that my alarm would be going off in a mere 7 hours. But as soon as I closed my eyes, an image popped into my mind. A scrawny girl with a pageboy haircut and a girly dress lugging a cat carrier hauling something very mysterious. I got up and got a drink. An opening line popped into my head, and I could see a first page. Oh crap. I headed to the shelf and grabbed the clipboard and frantically scribbled and jotted.
Phew...creativity reigned and contained on paper. I'd work on hatching the idea in the morning.

Yeah right. As I lay awake for several more hours, more and more images and lines danced in my head. I'd do the math and realize, "if I go to sleep now, I can still get 4 1/2 hours", but then a facial expression of the pageboy haircut girl would draw itself out clearly behind my eyes.
Eventually I did drift off, but every bird chirp or snore that roused me, that girl would jump up and down and whistle "woohoo over here!". She just wouldn't leave me alone.

When the alarm did go off, I should have been to sleepy to move, but instead I dashed off to the shower and throughout my shampoo, I tried to think of a good name for the girl. I finally decided she doesn't need one...at least for now. I tip-toed downstairs so as not to wake kids yet, and curled up on the couch with a drawing board in hand. All the lines from my insomnia fest came tumbling out. I felt such a wave of relief to have freed them!

Half the time, an insomnia creativty burst that seems brilliant at 3am turns out to smell worse than boiled cabbage in the daylight. Maybe more than half the time. And then I'm grumpy --wasted time, lousy idea, and I'm cranky when I don't get enough sleep. But today, I find myself eager to get my obligations out of the way so I can get back to sketching and hashing things out.

You just can't pass up the opportunity when you feel energized.

I'll end with my new favorite quote --gathered from an interview with Tomie DePaola. "The creative process is a monster, and you have to feed it or it will eat you." And how.

IF: Hierarchy

The Empress Tarot

IF: Subtract

This week's Illustration Friday word is "Subtract". For a long time, Friday has been weigh-in day, and it's all about those numbers going down. Subtraction, pure and simple. This is an image I did for a greeting card. And it's also a reason I'll never own a talking scale. They're creepy, and who wants a voice announcing their weight first thing in the morning?

Illustration Friday: Intricate

I started with something completely different. Something completely, well, intricate. But I decided on this one where the intricacies were implied.

Virtual gallery opening (must supply your own wine and cheese for full effect)

Finally, the new site is live. I still have a few sections to add to, but the majority is up now and ready for me to get some promo stuff printed up and get pimping for work. :0)

www.apricusdesigns.com

It was a big learning experience, but I decided that rather than piecing it together haphazardly, it was a good time to tackle the 800+ page Dreamweaver manual and learn what I was actually doing. I did learn a lot, but also learned that I didn't learn a lot. Ha! What I mean is that I found there are certain things that one should be able to do that either are not answered in the manual, or are answered in the manual in such a way that one would need to find a rosetta stone of sorts to translate. Much help was found by googling, but even still, there are things that leave me scratching my head. The pursuit continues! Stay tuned...

Under construction

I finally settled on a design for the website redesign. Instead of too serious and grown up or too whimsical and child-like, I met somewhere in the middle and went with a simple layout. Now just to execute it! :0) Stay tuned...

The hardest part was deciding what image to use on the front page, but after putting the finishing touches on my fly girl for the FLiEs site and mailer, I realized I had fallen in love with this quirky girl (A self portrait? Not sure. You decide.) and she will be the perfect thing to match the feel I want for the new site. She's got enough detail to show my style, but enough whimsy to show that I want to make kids laugh. I hope.

from linework to finished piece

After completing a third of the Flea and the Louse image in Photoshop, I decided it was too flat feeling, and I wanted to go back to colored pencil. I printed the image onto white drawing paper...despite the fact that I much prefer working on colored paper to show more of the paper's tooth.

Pretty happy with how it turned out, and it has raised my braveness level for working on white. Heaven help me if this book ever gets bought, though, because I'll have no clue what colors I used to make everything and will have to do it all over anyway. I like the zoom in on the poor bugs in distress and may use that portion on promo mailers before long. Laurent Linn said (in something I read recently) that promo cards should show action, and make you want to know what's going on. Sweet animals or children just posing get tossed in the bin straight away. Hopefully these fellows will show enough angst to intrigue.