I know this drawing doesn’t 100% make sense. It’s far from perfect. However, there was some early color added and that looks something like the next image. I was thinking about a drawing I had done a while ago, said drawing is very similar to this painting. While drawing the original image, the thoughts going through my head were about being sedentary and stagnant. So still that mosses and fungi and lichen can and do grow. I’ve been slacking for so long and I felt them growing on my brain. I’ve been stagnant too long. I need to get back to it or else go off the deep end. Too many excuses, and far from enough action. Here’s what the painting looks like now, with color.

This work is still far from done. This is just some preliminary color. I might work on something else and let this dry completely before I go back with more paint. The underdrawing was done with wet charcoal and I had a time controlling the color because of this. I could have done it another way but chose the wet charcoal anyway. As a kind of experiment. Really my first time working with the wet charcoal. I inherited some quite a while ago from a friend who was moving away and getting rid of a ton of supplies. I may have even used some paint from that same encounter. Really unsure of that though, I have no idea what came from where anymore. It’s not that it’s such an abundance of supplies, but an underwhelming frequency of working with or even looking at the paint box.

There it is. The sketch. The ink drawing. Straight outta the sketchbook. Could have done so much better. But, that’s what came out when I was done. So it goes. It’s not awful. It’s a good start. A good core of an idea, a notion. Nothing spectacular though. Again, thinking about stagnation. I once had someone tell me I was really good at creating quiet, still images. An image where nothing happens. That was in high school and I still haven’t gotten over it. I’ve made more active, loud, chaotic images since then. I’ve made it a point to. But, I have fallen into the old ways and I need to move forward from that again. I feel like my images are quiet and still again. I desperately need to liven them up. And I will. More will come, with great activity and fanfare. As for now, enjoy these short process videos. The first was a frame every five seconds and the second is a frame per ten seconds. They are mercifully short even though they encapsulate quite a bit of work. I like to do these timelapse videos for myself if only to see that it takes time and work to develop an image. Now that time is greatly distorted and compressed here, but it’s still servers as reminder that all things take time. At some point I did the math on how much real world time went into each compression, but I have lost that math since and don’t care to do it again.

Submitted for consideration, two short videos, a work in progress painting, and a study ink drawing. Any thoughts? I’ll open up to comments, compliments, and complaints on instagram @jerpir Let me know there. Until next post!