Pen and Ink Drawings 2015 (Patreon)

When I was working on my psychological stretchy face portraits, I had a friend who would come over and make art with me sometimes. He asked what I was using for the black lines, I told him sharpie. he told me I should try it with pit pens. I ordered some. and they became my favorite medium. Small, portable, powerful. The pen became a magic want to me. It felt like scratching a portal into another dimension. 

I had two jobs at this point. During the day I was a sales associate at Michaels, at night I was a janitor at Angel Stadium. Between jobs there was an awkward hour long window. It wasn't enough time to really do anything, but it wasn't a short enough time to where I wanted to drive to work. Those windows are horrible for painting but excellent for drawing. I'd go to this coffee shop and listen to music and draw my heart out.

This was when I first started doing automatic drawing, although I didn't know it by that name. All I knew was that I had about an hour before I had to go clean toilets. I wouldn't think about what I was drawing. I would just vomit out my feelings onto the page as quickly as I could. I liked that with a pen it felt like the image would emerge whereas painting felt more clunky to me.

This was around the time when I realized that making art made life better.

At a certain point I discovered blocking out the background with a big black marker and using white gel pen to go back over the highlights. I learned this from Mark Riddick, who is known for his illustrations for death metal album covers.