Night Creatures

Here are some more recent journal spreads. I've started to go towards darker scenes with thicker, more dense areas of dark pencil. They create such a nice mood. I love to go for a sort of serene night time scene, glistening with stars. The perfect mysterious time.

Pages with a lot of empty white space don't really excite me in this journal, especially with the transparency. As soon as I add those dark zones, the transparent layering starts to look much cooler and have much more depth.

I still keep feeling like I should use both sides of each page, really commit to playing with the transparency more, but it's always weird when you must effectively destroy the previous image to do that. Although, my frog-stamping moment really felt right, felt like it added the perfect texture to the other side - so maybe I should try more stamping.

I have completely used up one mechanical pencil lead while working in this journal. I discovered that a mechanical pencil feels amazing in here, super smooth and sharp. But tragically, I don't currently have any refills, so I've had to return to the traditional pencil. It's amazing how fast a pencil dulls when you're filling in large spaces.

The variation in lines works perfectly well for those big segments of pencil, where all merge together, but it's just so satisfying to use the sharp, perfect, never-dull lead of a mechanical pencil.

Nevermind, I'm here to wear out as many pencils as possible. I cackle and the pencils quiver. 

Mysterious Frog

I made a little frog character - a mysterious gentleman - and stamped him upon a journal page. Is he not distinguished? Is he not gorgeous?

I made him with the PRIXEL stamp kit, which was very kindly sent to me by the PRIXEL man maybe around a year ago. I feel now that I have this kit in my life, I should probably make use of it. I haven't stamped much up until this point, but now that we have this little fella in our midst, I'm very happy. It's a joyful world in which this frog man resides.

He's made of many colourful little parts, when it comes to the stamp, which is really a beautiful object, a temporary creature of its own. It's pretty fun to assemble your own shape with all these little rubber pieces, and now I'm thinking about how he must be disassembled, how he's only with us for a short time. How he must be washed.

There's a nice slow routine to making a stamp, diligently stamping it on some paper, then cleaning it off and letting it dry before, finally, returning its components to their box. A time-consuming, pleasant thing to do. 

Now the frog will be reconstituted - into who knows what. As it should be. 

Fluffoids

I think I'm going to set myself a strict daily goal of completing ONE journal page a day for a while, because I keep neglecting my onion skin journal for other things, and I now simply passionately wish to fill it up and finish it. Here are some recent spreads.

Sometimes I get a little crazy and wacky and turn this thing sideways to draw something in landscape. I don't know what it is about a horizontal canvas, but it just feels good and right. We're abandoning vertical. We despise and shun vertical.

Well, not really, not truthfully. I think a lot of it is just the endless allure of something different. I'll do one sort of thing for a while and then think... wait a minute. What if I did the opposite of this? Wow. Sounds amazing. The simple pleasure of novelty and change is eternally welcome.

I have been, as you can see, incorporating some collage elements in here once again, but in really lazy, small ways. I pasted in a handful of wrappers from individually-wrapped teabags. I tore an envelope into pieces and stuck those down. I love rubbish.

I have also been trying to be loose with it, just really drawing whatever, but I keep finding wobbly drawings that take up the whole space and use a lot of vast dark pencil the most appealing. I like the high-contrast and the intriguing, soft shapes of various fluffy animal bodies (fluffoids, if you will). More of the same, I tell myself.

As always, more dogs emerge, and they must sniff the flowers and plunge themselves into serene night skies. 

Late Night Wigglers

I always think the number one good thing to do for artistic joy is to find a way to lose your inhibitions, to not be precious with your decisions. And it's tough because it inevitably creeps back up, that guarded need to do things right, to make the mark you see in your beautiful, perfect mind. But I've always surprised myself in the best ways when I let loose and draw foolishly and hurriedly. I rarely do warm-ups, but they're always good.

So here are some gorgeous Wigglypaint drawings I made last night. It was just before bed, but I wanted to make a little drawing. I needed to. So I made this:

And for some reason, I haven't really tried colouring a flat background like this in Wigglypaint before. It looks elevated and alive. This is a beautiful, bright night. And the bunnies dance. Wow. 

I played with the shapes a little bit more than usual too. Like for this simple dog, I decided to use the thicker, blobbier pen. It sort of gives the dog a sense of calm simplicity. It feels somehow more primordial to see LARGER pulsing blobs. I can feel what it must've been like to be the hottest amoeba in the swamp. Mmm.

Another thing I really love is drawing slightly more realistic facial expressions. I have, truthfully, taken a lot of repulsive pictures of myself to aid in this practice. And that's just an extra nugget of fun you get with reference photos that you take yourself - enjoying the really ugly ones. I will not be showing you any today, but perhaps another time. 

And here is my simple favourite of the night, the dog leaving behind its pristine poo. Lovely. 

Hands

Hands are the enemy of all artists. This is a known fact, and a terrible truth that I tend to ignore, because hands can be circles or blobs of any kind, in many cases. The suggestion of a hand, for me, is usually enough.

But still, I feel that crunch within me, that sense that really, it's all for nothing if I can't master the hand. I need, then, to practice drawing hands. I need to become a hand understander. I must do this.

So today I made a few hand sketches, looking at my own dear hands, and I willed myself to BE the hand. I can do this. I am the hand.

They are oddly complicated structures - they need to be just right, otherwise they turn into a repulsive mass (and we have all witnessed the tragic failure of AI image generation software in its attempts to craft human hands - very sad stuff).

But you know what, these are pretty good. I'm on my way to hand enlightenment. And I'm not showing you the hands I destroyed along the way. 

Fighting with my Journal

I think I have now, finally, gotten used to the transparency of my onion skin journal. I have reached an understanding. Sometimes it concerns me, the building obscurity that eventually happens for some pages - drawings rendered more or less invisible by their page-neighbours - but I've come to mostly accept it. It takes a strong mind to embrace the terrors of a see-through journal. And I am that strong mind.

For a while I drew on both sides of every page, but I started to feel like that was causing too much chaos - especially with the way that pencil transfers from page to page with any pressure from the other side of a drawing. I thought, yeah, lets give these pages some more space. One half step further away so that the transparency doesn't get bombarded. It was a broadly good decision, because really, those undersides of each page left alone look pretty nice, and I realised that the best drawings to make, for layering purposes, were ones that incorporated a high contrast between blocks of pencil and blank space.

I'm also trying not to be too precious with this journal. Because its made with this delicate paper, and has its pretty ouroboros design on the front, it announces itself as a special item. I must refute this and declare it filth in order to lose all inhibition and fully enter into the realm of the journal. The task must always be: to ruin the book.

I drew a particularly horrid bird, and what really makes it lovable to me is that I hate it. Aww. I adore my hateable creature.

Eww...

This is exactly what it's all about. Draw a hideous creature. Accept it into your heart. Never look back. New page new unpleasant image. If this goal is met, you are winning.

I really loosened up after drawing as many dogs as I could fit into a page. This was the moment I was unleashed. I became myself through these twelve dogs (Jesus' disciples btw).

After this, I remembered collage existed, and I realised that I needed to paste a chopsticks wrapper in here to really feel complete. There's something really compelling to me about collaging in here, but just sparingly, just occasionally. So you never know when a collage is coming. 

And then it's back to more creatures. More creatures.

More creatures. 

Irresistable Animals

I bring you more gorgeous Wigglypaint drawings. Behold, her:

Yes, that's right. Another beautiful dog, frolicking. This is the truest symbol of pure pleasure and comfort my mind can imagine. This is it. Undeniably, this is the creature of unbridled joy. Nothing can stop such a free and easy and wiggly type of being.

This is the simplicity on offer. This is the perfect world that could exist, if all ideals were possible.

It was accidental, but of course very predictable, that I ended up drawing essentially three versions of the same drawing here. Although, sure, one is of a cat, and the cat is clearly receiving an incredible kiss, but you know, basically I became creatively bankrupt at this moment - or gave into the overwhelming power of my motif, if you prefer.

There it is. The unstoppable love between animal and human. Nice. 

A World of Creatures

Here I am, working diligently on my onion skin journal once more, that dastardly see-through journal. I've gotten into really filling the page - I think a lot of darkness, in beautiful blocks of pencil, really compliments the transparency of each one. The pencil marks themselves have this wonderful softness, but the sections of completely filled-in pencil background give a nice murky feel to the drawing. The contrast is really nice without being as intrusive to the other pages as it might be in another medium.

What is this?

What I like a lot, also, is sort of letting the journal contain a certain sort of world. There's something of a continuum here. The weird creatures are lurking. For some reason, it makes me think of all the forest-dwelling things in Over the Garden Wall. I think they would be at home in here.

Oh, that's what it is.

I've always thought that I needed to do backgrounds more, but I've never really committed to that. Instead, I love carving out a dark void that sits behind a simple foreground - a small mound for a character to sit on, or a cluster of large daisies. There's something nicely suggestive there, a glimpse into a natural world. The vast darkness gives the image depth without really containing anything, and the foreground provides a sliver of place.

Beautiful woman.

There's also something approaching sinisterness about the pairing up of two mysterious creatures. I suppose twosomes are, in some way, a running visual theme across my drawings, but something about these duos in particular makes me think: wow... what are they up to?

No doubt, they are up to no good. 

This Hurts My Eyes

In my search for fun, unique, and satisfying online drawing tools, I stumbled on Rob Manuel's ZX81 Draw by serendipitous accident, and in a secret way. What happened was: I saw him posting drawings he was making with this tool on Bluesky and asked him if he was doing that in-browser, and then he kindly sent me a secret link, because the thing isn't intended for public use, at the time of writing.

Rob's frightening image of a dog.

So, lucky me, I have secured for myself a glorious new tool. And the great thing about this one is that it can very quickly strain my eyes. Yay!

I'm not familiar with the ZX81, a British home computer model released in 1981, but as you can see, it has a particular display aesthetic, comprised of some interesting black and white glyphs that can rapidly create a sickening kind of magic eye puzzle texture, if arranged optimally, that boggles the senses.

You're seeing the gorgeous art it's capable of here, and I don't think it's too bad just looking at these images, but drawing them made me feel genuinely nauseous, so I think this tool may be one to use in short stretches.

Fortunately, I am a fighter. I am strong, and I can endure such computer-based illnesses if it means drawing beautiful images that anyone on Earth would surely be delighted to see. And you know what else is great about these pictures? They're like, six measly kilobytes. I love that for them.

Exploring Wigglypaint

Wigglypaint is a cute little art tool that runs in-browser and allows you to make adorable animated drawings, like so:

Who is this?

I've seen it floating around the internet for a while, notably used by veryluckyclover, who makes endless charming, tiny drawings that I enjoy, and there's something so irresistable and distinctive about the look. Those lovely wobbly lines delight me.

I've long been a fan of 'boiling' - Roobarb and Custard was such a great stylistic influence, along with many 1970s-1990s animated series that incorporated similar styles and were everywhere when I was growing up, and so it's really satisfying to make these wiggling gifs without having to draw individual frames. They just wiggle naturally. Good.

I've also been really admiring Svdpony's Flipnote Studio 3D drawings, which have some lovely dithering and incorporation of small elements of animation, and seeing these reminded me how much I love Flipnote Studio 3D - although drawing on a 3DS cramps my hand pretty quickly.

So I thought, hmm, I should locate some more interesting drawings tools like this. Wigglypaint seems popular - I've seen a good amount of reels and shorts and TikToks about it - but what else is out there? What other strange and beautiful art tools await?

I like Wigglypaint quite a bit - the default colour palettes are nice, the small gifs it exports are perfect, and I love its bouncy noises. It is a bit restrictive - those exports are very small, but I like the ways it limits you. It is, unfortunately, horrible to use on an iPad or phone. Strangely, the easiest thing for me to do is use my trackpad, which does feel warped and wrong to say - but using it feels good and right.

What can I say? Wigglypaint rocks. More wiggly paintings incoming.