Random Quadrupeds source drawing, created 2004-02-14
This post looks at the original source drawings that served as inspiration for my Random Quadrupeds series. In my previous posts (Part 1, Part 2) about this series I wrote primarily about the process and the finished pieces. It was only in hindsight, while looking for a specific file for another purpose, that I remembered the origin story of the concept, as compared to the motivation for the series.
It’s now approximately eighteen months since I originally began this project, and some of the details are hazy because so much has happened since then. But at its essence, the origin is not a whole lot different from process I had normally used when conceiving of a new body of work.
The first “Egg person” from a sub-series of Random Quadrupeds
This piece is about two things: first, the egg creatures that emerged from my Random Quadrupeds daily art project in late 2021, and second, a breakthrough that has led to a major change in my digital art practice. There’s also a hint of the origin story of my Chonky Bug People series.
First, let’s talk about my creative process and the parameters around Random Quadrupeds. As with most of my artwork, each piece begins with freeform drawing. Then I interpret and respond to the marks on the page/screen to refine the rough marks into something a bit more cohesive. With most of my serial work I set some basic parameters about the piece, and it was no different with Random Quadrupeds. Although I didn’t formalize them, I had these relatively flexible guidelines in the back of my mind:
If you’re looking at this site in 2023 or later, just keep scrolling to see the most recent posts about my art. Or you can load the Art Category Page.
A gun is pretty useless if your opponent can bend reality or is really good at yoga (animated code rain version) from Chonky Bug People series.
You can safely ignore much of the rest of the site as it’s out of date, neglected from around 2012 to 2021 when I had retired from art practice. I was also too occupied with other things to have much interest in blogging.
Beast with 3 heads, aka “bald Cerberus” from Random Quadrupeds series
In late 2021 returned to making art after having considered myself retired from artistic practice since 2012. I wanted to start with something with fairly low friction that could be sustainable. I decided to do something in the vein of Incidentals (series 1, series 2) since the art style was quirky and simple. I had been looking through scans of my sketchbooks and found a bunch of cute creatures, most of which were four-legged. I selected a handful of these sketches to work up, and “random quadrupeds” was born.
In fact, if there were rumours, they were that the site is dead. Assessing the degree of their exaggeration is an exercise left to the reader. Buuuuuut… 14 months between posts, 3 months before that, 5 years before that, and so on. Less like multiple revivals and more like a zombie blog.
The most recent rationalization/excuse:
Last year I struggled to resolve some technical issues on the site. With the tech somewhat broken, I didn’t feel comfortable attempting to drum up traffic for the site, and therefore didn’t post anything. (For those curious about what was broken, I couldn’t get the secure (SSL/TLS) version of the site working, but have now resolved it.)
It didn’t help that I was caught up in various art activities interspersed with Lia having a few major health crises, punctuated by several catastrophic events in crypto.
Needless to say, with the combination of compassion/caregiver fatigue, chaos of the crypto space, and a general malaise induced by the threat of COVID-19, my mental state was very poor.
Taken together, 2022 started with optimism but by the second half of the year was pretty much a write-off for me.
Despite all the headwinds, I did manage to have a fairly productive year, which I will review in greater detail in (a) future post(s). Here are some illustrated highlights.
Completed a daily drawing practice (except for October), filling ~7 sketchbooks with over 700 pen-and-ink line drawings.
