Upcoming Meeting - Getting It Together

A meeting has been scheduled for April 10th. The creation team will assemble and review where we are and decide where we are going. It's been a couple seasons since we've done this. In the interim, I've been chipping away at my self-assigned drawing challenge - all revisions. Now what needs doing before this meeting convenes is to supply digital files of my new work to Chad (our graphic designer) so he can have his go at constructing the book, as an InDesign file.
This will be a major step towards completing the book. So far, our earlier iterations were done before all the drawings were complete and therefore it was just a taste of what Chad can do with my drawings, or, I put the book together and it lacked any of the design work from Chad – this was the naively designed update shared at the last meeting.
During the last meeting we were contemplating hacking the story and pictures back until we had a shorter more suscinct story. We finally decided against it and I'm excited to be making the needed changes and to see this book come closer to the final vision we've held for so long.

Here is an example of the kind of revisions I'm doing.  

Bottom image is the revision.

This is our hero and his assistant heading off after the mystery.

Pain and Healing

I have multiple things that keep me from this work of being an artist and illustrator. Some are psychological/behavioral along the lines of procrastination. Some are responsibilities and life, such as being a father and helping my partner take care of her ailing mother and being the father of a toddler. Also, having a day job (BIG ONE). A really problematic one has been something a lot of artists deal with and that is muscular-skeletal pains in the arm, hand, neck or back. Drawing or painting can be hard on the all the parts of the body involved in sitting for long periods hunched over a table while focused on making careful marks on paper or canvas. For me it is pain in the back, neck, trapezius part of shoulder, and thumb. That is accompanied by numbness in the arm and hand. The pain often gets so intense it is absolutely prohibitive to working on my art.

After suffering with increasing levels of ouch for several years, I got myself to my general doctor to discuss this pain and see what could be done. After getting an x-ray of my neck at a subsequent appointment, it was determined that I have degenerative arthritis. This was disheartening but not surprising. Armed with this fact, I have booked physical therapy sessions which will focus on alleviating some of this pain and strain though massage and whatever other means.  These begin next Monday and if my insurance can cover enough of the cost this will be ongoing.

Another tack I am taking to alleviate the symptoms I'm experiencing is meditation. I have increased mindful meditation to almost every day for 40mins. This it making a real difference in my baseline bodily tension that I carry around with me and has lowered my general levels of pain from an average of 4-6 to a 3-4. These numbers are based mainly of how I feel while at my dayjob which can be the most challenging time to stay relaxed. A good deal of the pain I experience is, I believe, the result of a unwieldy amount of anxiety and PTSD-based tension I carry in my body.

I am hopeful that I can feel better and do more drawing in the near future. Reversing some of this debilitating pain has become a real priority and I'm doing what I can to take care of my self.

Photo of latest drawing pre-coloring