Back to ink

I’ve had a bit of a break from drawing over the past few months. Summer happened, so travelling, festivals, concerts, skateboarding, BBQs and all the other things that make it difficult to find a quiet moment to sit down with a piece of paper.

Drawing always pulls me back eventually, though.

I love details. I’m not particularly good at drawing them, but I love getting lost in them. A 0.1 mm liner is probably a little too much for me, but 0.2 mm feels just right. I can sit there and keep adding tiny lines for what feels like forever.

I have two fairly different ways of drawing.

One of them is my ink stuff. It’s usually more emotional. I draw real things, like people, animals, objects, and somehow mix them with a memory, a feeling or something that’s been on my mind. I don’t really plan where the drawing is going. I just start adding things that feel right at the moment.

The other one is much more of a mess. I use POSCA markers and draw these colourful skate-street-comic-like things, usually mixing random ideas and things I like with complete nonsense. One of my favourite examples is a slice of pizza covered in green slime instead of cheese, with cigarette butts sticking out of it like pepperoni, while flies circle around it.

So yeah. Pretty different moods.

The ink drawings usually come from a different place, though. Music is a huge part of that.

It’s not really background music when I’m drawing. It’s more like fuel. Some lyrics are things I recognise in myself, and sometimes I recognise other people in them. Evergreen Terrace, Counterparts and Propagandhi tend to push me towards the ink side of things.

What I’m listening to also changes what ends up in the drawing. Not necessarily the style itself, but what I put into it. A different song, a different memory, something that happened recently. It all gets mixed together somehow.

That’s more or less what happened today.

I had some negative stuff in my head that I needed to get out somehow, so I started drawing a crow.

I don’t have a finished picture of what it should look like. I never really do. I just keep drawing, adding whatever comes to mind, and seeing where it goes. Sometimes something from my life finds its way into it, sometimes it’s the music, sometimes it’s just a random shape that makes me think of something else.

I don’t really like setting a goal for a drawing. It makes the whole thing more interesting when I don’t know where it’s going.

That’s probably also why I keep coming back to skateboarding. Drawing and skating are obviously completely different things, but they give me the same kind of freedom. When I’m doing either one, I’m actually doing that one thing. My brain isn’t trying to think about 6789 other things at the same time.

I just draw. Or skate.

And I don’t think a drawing can ever really be finished anyway. There’s always something else you could add.

I guess that’s part of the fun.

We’ll see what the crow turns into.

If you’d like to see the finished drawing, send me an email at mac.quack@hotmail.com.