Birds, niches, the crazy, Russians, my daughter, and carronades

1) WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE, NOTHING MATTERS AND I LIKE TO DRAW, not to be hysterical.  But from that baseline, what artwork to create?

2) Birds are awesome, they’ve got intricate, detailed feathers and stuff.  What subject hasn’t been drawn about ten gajillion times? I landed on birds, especially the humbler birds, especially sparrows.  Seahorses would also be cool (and octopi!) but not as cool as birds. Here are other great subjects not as cool as birds:

Fantasy characters and superheros: There’s an ocean of artists doing those, heck drawing any other thing = instant niche.  Fantasy subjects art quality has been cranked up to an amazing level. Too much competition, I coward. Also my favorite pen and ink artists all end up doing Star Wars or Game of Thrones stuff because it sells, sells, sells and since I apparently hate success and money I don’t.

People = What do we need more people for? we’ve got zillions and zillions.  They’re everywhere going places and doing stuff with VERY GREAT SELF IMPORTANT ENERGY, spouting trite platitudes,  demanding things, reproducing, making me uncomfortable for no good reason, fuhgeddabodit. People are only interesting to me when you peel back a couple layers of defenses and get down to the good stuff, the crazy unique energy that every one of us has and hides… and that New Englanders hide in particular.  Say anything out of the ordinary and New Englanders start digging escape tunnels, they run off to mow their lawn. I like Russians. Pour some vodka into one and be nice to them and suddenly you’re their BEST FRIEND FOREVER AND EVER, let’s break out the crazy! But Ty, you say, if you find people so onerous, what about you, you deplorable hypocrite? Well, says Ty, I’m not doing self portraits, either.

Sexy ladies (speaking of Russians): I likes me a good titillation as much as the next guy but I’d like people to pay attention to the art and message, plz. If they’re in for the sexy they’re not in it for the art… plus I’ve got a ten year old daughter and I’d rather her not have to think of her ‘ol Dads’ sex drive when she looks at my art, or worse, to think being sexy is super-important to get attention.  She’s going to do great in this world and she doesn’t need that shit.

Zombies/horror stuff:  Pen and ink artists are all about horror but let the sun shine, baby, lighten up, jeez.  I gotta live in this head, evil isn’t welcome up in here.

3) I really do have a message to get across, some realworld philosophy that has helped me along..  Why do it with art and freakin birds? Because logic sucks. We rationalize, we debate, we come up with talking points, we try to take the news cycle.  It’s all rows and rows of mental cannonades and grenadiers defending the core lizard brain. You see something, you feel about it and then out comes the insults, meh.

Okay that’s it more later

Here are the roses from ‘Beauty can save the world’ vectorized

Betrayed by warm grey

It’s blind o’clock in the morning , icy howling wind in the black night outside is threatening to knock a tree over a power line and set up that Christmas Miracle, as in it would be a miracle if I found our generator and that generator actually started.  The great chia state of New Hampshire is blanketed with trees about to down power lines and freeze our pipes, ugh. My agent says make your blogs sexy, what to I do with weener shrinking pipe freezing wind storms? I don’t have an agent.

I’m up and working on the artwork; it’s not going that well, at this point it has layers and layers of watercolor, ink, acrylic, markers and my tears.  I used these Blick 30% warm grey markers to color big chunks of the artwork, refusing to admit they’ve got pink hew. My sig other said “Why’d you make it pink?” so I said “It’s not pink it’s warm grey!” and then my 10 yr old walked in and said “Why’d you make it pink?” so I yelled “Warm Grey!” and she said “Sure, like that pink scarf you wear everywhere” so I dropped her off at the orphanage.

So my very subtle color with the watercolors and acrylic came to exactly bo diddly; I hooked the scanner up to the laptop but the scanner refused to work.  So I aimed lights at the the artwork, took about eight good photos with my iPad and after a photoshop photomerge it looked like this:

Photomerge of a 18” wide by 24” tall drawing. Over the next few weeks I’ll vectorize a bit at a time on the iPad every morning until it’s done, then prepress and screenprint it…. and in Illustrator and photoshop I’ll hammer out the many, many problems. This original will probably go in a drawer until Armageddon.

Look at the subtly cool and warm greys, the light blue I put in the sky and swishy bits, the delicate shading.

So I greyscaled all that out and am ready to trace on the iPad, probably on the plane to California for Christmas, I’m the only person ever too look forward to plane rides…