I always worry when I post an intentionally badly drawn picture that people are going to take it seriously – Natasha made a comment the other day about my hockey players that made me a little anxious. It reminded me that maybe it’d be nice to do some polished personal projects now and then.

It’s not a “New Year’s Resolution”, officially, but now that we’re set up in the apartment and I have a bunch of free time over the Christmas holidays I’m getting back into the swing of drawing every day. With the move and everything, I haven’t really spent a lot of time concentrating on being an artist. It’s nice to get back to it, but I’m feeling a bit out of shape. I draw all the time at work, but it’s usually technical doodles, storyboards, little layout boxes and logo thumbnails, so generally I do a lot of sketchy amorphous blobs covered in technical notes, nothing really “finished”.

The real challenge is finding the patience to keep at a little drawing for an hour or two, while stuff is going on all around me. I don’t get a lot of downtime where I can sit and work, and what time I do get is often frittered away surfing. Bad habit! I’m hoping to take some courses at the Ottawa School of Art this upcoming semester, so I can delineate that time as “art time”.

Here’s a little doodle guy to show you that I’ve started, anyhow. Astutely nerdy people may recognize him from the “Ninja Turtle” comic universe, a suit of survival armour for some little buggy alien that caught my eye when I was a teenager. I always thought he’d make a cool action figure. There’s lots of things going wrong with the picture (mostly due to impatience), but I figure if I post it and look back on it in a few months, hopefully I’ll show some improvement!