Michelle, my belle, sont les monts qui vont trés bien ensemble, trés bien ensemble.

It has been a good long time since I've last posted. This has nothing to do with anything besides my own laziness, as I still have class (hello Spring Semester!) and thus still have a good 6 hours a week to not pay attention to what my professor in training has to say about Weber and Marx.

Though I have been taking many notes, so the whole thing balances out in my mind.
These are all done using my favorite pen: Precise V5. Yes I have a favorite pen. It is expensive and often sold out of Michigan Book and Supply, but its just so wonderful, so its worth all the money and waiting for new shipments.

And why is this? Well, its just so inky. It's the best for any sort of comic book scribbling, line filling in, and random doodles all over your hands in class. All of these and more this pen and I have done together.
Most of these, I gotta say, aren't favorites. I think that taking a break from some serious drawing has really cramped my style. Or at least made it more difficult for me to sketch out the images that pop into my head at any given time. Most of class time now is given to daydreaming rather than drawing, so I'm actually forcing my self to sketch things half the time.
Which is alarming to say the least. When I was in High School I took a CR course on Creative Writing that was taught by a graduate student at UofM. I remember she was talking about her favorite contemporary poet one day and shared that he forces himself to write for somewhere around 3 hours each day, like homework, because he's terrified that one day he'll wake up and discover that he's lost all his talent.

And then she read a poem of his that included a line about him flying over the Atlantic ocean with his hard cock in his hand.

Which made me remember the animated movie "The Snowman" which involved a scene where a little boy and a Snowman are flying over an ocean.

Picturing a snowman with an erection in midflight is something that is pretty distracting, so I didn't hold onto much more of the lesson. I can't remember the poet's name, for example, but I do hold onto that idea: that talent can ebb away just like that, if you're not diligent.

And really all talent is is taking a skill and working at it for hours and hours until you're a little better than the people who haven't logged that kind of time. The book "Blink" outlines that concept pretty wonderfully.

Its a thought I routinely come back to as both a source of comfort and anxiety. If I haven't drawn for a while, I'm terrified that I'll come to the day where I no longer can. But on the flip side, by looking at any given skill as a simple matter of hours logged, its very easy to convince yourself that the only thing in the way of you and any talent is you and your inability to commit the required amount of time.

Funny thing about Spring and Summer. You always feel like you'll have more time than you actually end up with. Between the two jobs and school and other commitments, I find that my free time involves more naps than anything else. Naps and motionless staring at interesting spots on the wall. I haven't really sat down and drawn in months. Almost a year really since I undertook a project of my own.

Hopefully all this will change soon.

Hopefully my ability to draw will not vanish after weeks of nothing but lackluster doodles.

We'll I guess you'll see whether things improve or not. I hope for both our sakes they do.

And hey there readers, thanks for tuning in. You look good, damn good. I'm sorry I haven't kept in touch in a while.