The first pic was a few hours after I'd started working. The lower left hand corner is where my focus is presently.

This is at the end of the night. Just finished. I know it doesn't look like much, but that's at least 6 hours of slow layering. I use a straight edge across the page and work long strips about 2 inches at a time, and then I have to go back and blend them together. Otherwise the lines start to go all over the place. It's funny how little things become big problems, like how the motion of your arm is naturally an arc. I've had to train mine to go in a straight line, and it's very difficult sometimes. After awhile you get in the zone, and the movement is like second nature. It's almost like playing an instrument. The muscle memory in my arm remembers how to make the pen go straight, and I just focus on that movement. Over...and over.... and over.

This is the one I've been working on most the past few months. It's a couple of hours a day for the most part, but every little nook and cranny has to be handled individually. No long strokes like in the drawing above. That's partly why I started the other one. This one is taking so long that I had to get working on a different drawing so I could finish one soon. This might be a drawing that I work on for a year or more. The work is so intricate and finely detailed. The picture doesn't come close to doing it justice. Even the spaces that look black have a lot of fine detail in them.


I was thinking, as I stood on a chair above my work table, about where that table came from. And then I thought about this blog, and another blog that I named. It's funny how people touch your life in ways that you might not think about as much later on. My drafting table is a big reminder of another person, but it's only once in awhile that it really strikes me how I wouldn't be doing this stuff right now if not for them. Who knows when I would have actually bought a drafting table myself. The fact that I named that person's blog--maybe they don't remember that as vividly. But it's still there, and it always will be. It's the little things that make me happy.