Sketchbook (Patreon)

Dude, I finished my whole sketchbook in SIX MONTHS.

Normally I takes me over a year and that’s mostly filling it up with lists and writing and I always leave a handful of the pages blank at the end before I start the next one. But this one?

Yeah, I still wrote down a bunch of lists and thoughts in it, but SO MUCH DRAWING too.

I’m drawing every day??? And filling up full pages of sketches at a time???

And I just today I filled up the very last page.

This is a record I haven’t hit in like twenty years.

Throughout high school and college, I couldn’t stop drawing. My basement is full of bins of my old sketchbooks- oh! And if you watch the documentary Stripped, an enormous stack of my sketchbooks is used for one shot and I even get a credit at the end for it.

(Still in progress! It’s Maidens MistyCurls and GoldenWaves, the part-time mermaids from Lady LovelyLocks)

Once drawing actually became my full time work in my mid-20s, though, it started feeling like… work. And who wants to do work when you’re not supposed to be working? So, I stopped drawing outside of work-work. That was well over a decade ago.

(La Fiancé Hesitant by Auguste Toulmouche as reimaged with Lady LovelyLocks characters)

Listen, I know this sounds ridiculous, but Lady LovelyLocks is what brought me out of my artistic dormancy.

It started in Space Camp in 2019, I just began drawing her all over my notes during my classes. My theory is that my brain was like “I NEED SOMETHING SAFE AND COMFORTING TO LATCH ON TO” so it dug back into the part of my subconscious where my childhood pleasures live and it was like “HEY WHAT’S THIS SPARKLY SWIRLY PRINCESS ART? THIS IS RIDICULOUS AND PRETTY, LET’S GO WITH THIS.”

Studying and copying the commercial 80s product art of Lady LovelyLocks by Maria Gamiere has been such a pleasure. Just, an active pleasure. My mind is bubbling over with ideas for fanart and stories and costumes and scenarios… I dunno, I’m just having a lot of fun.

Anyway, anyway. It’s fun to draw.