I’m in a state of artist’s block at the moment. I was going to say that I’m suffering from artist’s block, but I’m not actually suffering. One positive of my employment situation is that while I’m not rich from my three days in the ‘real world’ I can live on the money it brings in. And live a life that I’m very content with for where I’m at right now. Plus the way I work in my arty life doesn’t have any great expenses. So if I’m suffering block I’ve come to a point where it doesn’t bother me – it just is what it is. Even though I’m not making money (and still want to), it’s not costing me money either. I work for myself and my own deadlines because I can’t come up with this stuff to a tight deadline and I enjoy what I create more when it comes in its own time.

But while my art business is treading water I don’t want to get to a stage where I’ve left it too long; don’t want to stray too far from where I’ve been over the last year and bit. So I’m going to work on a couple of projects and hope that I find a bit of the spark that was snubbed a few months ago by various things. One is something from over a year ago that I won’t talk about here because if it comes off I’ll use it as a surprise for someone. The other is more recent – Bird Man Stan. Young Stanley introduced himself to me the other week while I was sitting having a coffee in the Shoebox Cafe on Elizabeth Street in Hobart. Stan likes birds (who would have guessed), but that’s all I know about him at the moment.

I haven’t done any work in progress blogging for a while so I thought I might try it again now and see where my friend ends up. Here he is in all his raw black and white state just as he showed himself in my sketchbook – all ink, no graphite. I’ve scanned him in and opened him in Photoshop. So far I’ve erased three black dots in the background, but apart from that I think I’ll leave the lines as they are. There’s just one other tweak I’ll need to do that might not be apparent at this magnification. Up near the bird’s head there’s a tiny gap in the line work. I like to do my first colour round in Illustrator using the Live Paint feature which is pretty much the way it sounds. I isolate an area of the line work and drop the colour into it. If there’s any gaps the colour will ‘leak’ out into the adjacent area. In this case if I was to drop some orange into the bird’s body I’d end up with an orange bird on an orange background – not quite what I’m after. Once I’ve done this little fix I’ll drop Stan and his mate into Illustrator and do my first round of colour. A lot of my illustrations have flat blocks of colour, but for this one I’ll be using multiple shades in each segment to achieve the shading effect I’m after.

Will keep you posted as it comes to life.