I found a Gap ad in a 90s Vanity Fair magazine; the background was completely white, perfect for doodling a background on it. I also highlighted the woman's freckles and lips with a bronze Sharpie.
For me, it's the process of creating - not really the end result. Once something is done, it's done and you move on to the next process. Life is the ultimate process after all. We don't hang around and admire the dead body once it has finished what it needed to do...On the other hand, the end result of someone's process can be felt through what they have left behind. I hope this is what will eventually happen with the art I create.
This is old (2007). I used to work at the ad agency that had the Harley-Davidson account for a number of years. I always carry around a Moleskine sketchbook and take meeting notes on one side while doodling on the page next to it. This doodle ended up being used extensively in the Harley-Davidson "Dark Custom" campaign as well as on a line of Dark Custom Motorclothes.
It say's "FUCK YEAH" in it and they never noticed. :)
I feel like my drawings got a lot more dimensional and interesting once I was able to achieve variable line width. I love loading different colors into the pen and going HAM on paper that totally can't handle it. My sketchbooks crackle when I turn the pages. They buckle and heave and are exhausted from their tribulations.
I spotted a huge line drawing on YouTube. I was curious about how it feels to draw just lines over and over again. The one on the web was four times as big as this one (on A3 paper). Half way through I started to nod off. Next morning I thought the green
“Just as the permanent foundation of the ground provides the springboard for voyages into outer space, so it is with the more mysterious flights of imagination.”
— Roland Penrose.
A simple ink sketch of a bird at rest. Sometimes the quiet moments—watching, pausing, waiting—are the deepest teachers. This drawing is part of my exploration of what I call the Quiet Practices—small ways of living from the inside out.
If you’d like to see more of my reflections, I share them here: https://forming20.com/
Jury Duty, June 2013
Fifty of us sat in that room, each one staring at a phone or scribbling in a notebook, killing time. The lawyers asked their questions, picking us off one by one like a slow game of dodgeball. I wasn’t chosen, so I drew instead—earbuds, slouched shoulders, the hum of waiting caught in a few quick lines.
Sometimes wisdom comes in a joke,
and sometimes laughter carries truth.
Brian spoke like a sage,
Mike answered like a friend,
and together they held the room.
We draw to remember.
Not only the lines of faces,
but the presence of goodness,
the gift of voices that echo
long after the chairs are empty.
A horizon of chalk—black sky heavy with silence, gold earth glowing with embered breath.
Between them, a thin line of turquoise, the pause where one world ends and another begins.
It is not sky, nor sea, nor sand alone. It is the threshold—a doorway, where silence teaches and light remembers.
Stand here long enough, and you may hear it breathe.
inking and seeing for better being — https://forming20.com/
Against the weight of a storm-dark sky, tender stems lean forward—some bending, some breaking, some still reaching.
They hold their fire at the tips, waiting to bloom, waiting to burn, waiting to belong to light.
Perhaps this is all of us:
stretching through shadows,
searching for the thin, golden line that divides earth from eternity.
This is no landscape you could ever stand in.
No observational drawing, no safe horizon line.
This chalk experiment is a dream unfolding in color: a golden field lit from within, a scarlet seam of fire at its edge, and a storm-heavy sky pressing down with ancient weight.
It feels like a place between worlds—where the conscious and unconscious meet, where memory and imagination blur. Some might see a battlefield, others a meadow after rain, and still others a veil between life and death. That is the beauty: the painting does not tell you what it is; it invites you to confess what you see.
Psychologists say we project ourselves onto images like these. So—what do you notice first? The light? The darkness? The burning red?
Perhaps that is not about the drawing at all, but about you.
