Sleep well David Bowie, and thanks for all the inspiration! Saw this comment on one of Iggy Pop’s music videos via YouTube and had to create something based around it, spelling mistakes and all...
It's not quite September yet, but I finished my bullet journal sketch for next month a few minutes ago. "Come Down in Time" by Elton John, the second song on the first side of 'Tumbleweed Connection.' I'm not sure what to expect with the starting of school, with senior year as a whole, and what the end of 2020 or 2021 will bring. It feels like I'm hearing all this static and incomprehensible noise, but I open my eyes and see nothing else there, simply a dark open space.
This is the 3rd of the 3 glow-in-the-dark space satellite poster series. This concept sketch was done on a digital tablet with pencil setting. Will try to up the finished version tomorrow.
A great deal of upheaval in my personal life, including making steps to better my mental health as well as reflecting on changes in my work life (potentially) and also my living situation, have dominated my headspace as of late.
Long story short, Buddha reminding us all to still any madness in life got me to work here as did the obvious itch to get some drawing done!
A motif I having been enjoying in my sketchbooks lately but this time experimenting with positive and negative space. Watercolor and Posca pen in 8.25x11.75 Moleskine sketchbook.
I am an art teacher with a master’s degree—trained by brilliant professors who believed that art could do more than decorate walls. I offer safe spaces for teenagers to grow—nourishing soil where their imaginations can take root.
And yet… I am assigned to hallway duty.
This is compulsory education, after all.
So I sit—posted like a sentinel—watching young lives stream past.
“Get to class,” I say with a smile and a nudge.
The system wants attendance; I’m hungry for presence.
Armed not with a whistle or clipboard, but with a pen—
my scribble’s soft insurgency.
The hallway stretches out like a geometric hymn.
Columns and corners chant structure.
Teenagers swirl past—half-formed galaxies of limbs and laughter—
their orbits chaotic, their gravity pulling time forward.
I begin to draw.
Not their tardiness, but their motion.
A shoulder. A blur of sneakers.
A tilted head chasing freedom.
Feet flickering like seconds.
Each mark a pulse.
Each smudge a breath.
My paper becomes a seismograph of seeing—
trembling gently through the mundane.
This isn’t about making art for a frame or a feed.
It’s about refusing to leak away in the fluorescent hum of obligation.
It’s a quiet mutiny against the clock.
I do this on long car rides, too (passenger side, mind you).
Letting the lines grow wild, jagged, and unapologetic.
Not for polish—
but for presence.
This is how I remember I’m still alive.
Still growing.
Still watching.
Still choosing to see.
Because sometimes mental health looks like
a piece of scrap paper,
a moving pen,
and the simple, sacred act of
marking time with wonder.
"Spaced-Out" (0.18 technical pen on 120mm x 35mm card) and "Medusa" (HB pencil on 125mm x 42mm card). Another two simple images drawn on pieces of off-cut card that make great bookmarks.
"He'd forgotten how to keep his head from popping off in outer space. Why was he here again?" ~ A blackout poem from a recycled page of Dealing with Blue, a young adult romance.
