Wishing Love

I despise Valentines day. Valentines day is tacky with a capital T. The one Valentines day I spent with a boyfriend sucked, too much pressure to do something and too little genuine emotion. I appreciate small gestures more than grand ones and I’d rather be surprised on a random day of the year than the one day  where peer pressure forces cuteness upon us. Also, the store displays are painful. That much pink and cute everywhere is just vomitrocious.

However, I do have many people I  love who are in all sorts of far-flung corners of the earth. Recently, many of them have been huge ballers and just doing fabulous things with their lives. So I’m giving in to the hearts and straying close-ish to the pink and dedicating a doodle to them. On this stupid holiday, I am wishing and sending love to my very not stupid very much beloved friends. Ta-da!

The Relief of Closed Doors

Usually as a rule I believe in openings and not endings. I believe in keeping doors open to whatever they may lead but this weekend I learned differently. I learned that sometimes it can be a huge relief to close a door through which no real good will come, no matter how dazzling the bad may seem. This image had been floating in my mind since.

Winter, season of marshmallow people

This winter has been absurdly cold and I have sacrificed all dignity. I used to shun down coats and obstinately stick to wearing wool coats over fleeces but this winter I’ve had to resort to measures such as down coat AND North Face AND wool sweater AND tights under wool pants AND heavy socks AND snow boots AND giant hat AND giant gloves and I’m still cold. However the trees always look pretty and svelte while I bumble by with my newly acquired marshmallow figure. Seriously, winter light adds about 30 lbs to me, and takes the same away from the trees. Sure you say it’s not the light, it’s the cold and the chlorophyl and all that….but whatever. Chlorophyl doesn’t make for a fun drawing.

On a drawing note, doing the texture on that tree was a thing and a half. It was really annoying at first to do those circley things and dot them but after a while the repetition got fun. I like the texture. If you click on it you can see it bigger but it’s not as sharp in the photo as I’d like. Man I wish I had a scanner instead of this craptastic iPhone camera…..

Student Portrait

Today was the school spelling bee and I decided to practice drawing people as I watched the kids sound, parse, and spell their ways to victory.

One of the spellers was Robert, an adorable and brilliant kindergartner. While Robert didn’t win the bee, he had a few awesome little poses that made for amazing minute line drawings and I took one and sort of ran with it until it turned out to be a portrait.

At some point I really should post the minute drawing, as cute as he is as a kid, Robert makes an even cuter kid-robot-drawing.

I don’t have too much else to say about this drawing, it was more spontaneous than anything….there really isn’t much significance about it to explain.

Leap of Faith

I used to draw as a kid, all the time. My parents’ walls were covered in my triangular people and endless armies of pink trees. If I go back to my old elementary school I can even pick out two clay tiles I once made along the library walls. Sometime in middle school though, I stopped wanting to show everyone what I could do mainly because I stopped thinking that I could do art at all.

High-school and college painting classes boosted my art-esteem but beyond the occasional greeting card, I still didn’t draw much. Actually, I hadn’t drawn at all last year. Although I’m a few weeks behind on the whole new years thing, I’ve decided I need to draw more and be less hesitant to share. My first drawing done in 2011 was the one above, a leap of faith…in this case, faith in myself. I’m taking a leap to believe that I can actually draw well enough to share with people, that it may be good enough for people to want to keep looking at it, and maybe that I’ll even stumble upon something cool in the process. And given my history with keeping blogs or resolutions, this is a leap of faith that I’ll actually stick it through with this one.

And so, I bring you the new rendition of Almost Tulip, the art blog. I’m hoping that at lease once a week I can post a drawing, done by me, and accompany that drawing with some sort of short journal/blog. Some of these will be about thoughts and musings, others about the week’s events, and I may even try my hand at drawing a comic or two!

So read if you’d like, comment if you’d like me to get better, and if I don’t keep up a drawing a week, by all means pester me till I do!