The Delusional Delights of Doomz

Whassap y’all – I hope the long weekend was productive and that y’all weren’t relaxing TOO much! It’s just after Labour Day, and we all know what that means – it’s GO TIME! Back to school for some of us, the last cottage weekend for others, but for me , I took the name of the holiday rather literally and busted my ass on trying to get a lot out of the way.

This involved things such as:

• scanning in a ton of half-completed, likely-never-to-be-finished sketches
• uploading a number of photos that have just been sitting around doing nothing
• using FreeMind to develop a mind map of all the random ideas that I often seem to have floating around
• sketching like a fiend so that I could get rid of a ton of reference material that I seem to carry with me EVERYWHERE

And then Damn Terry Dam went and said, “Reference material is always a good thing to carry”.

Okay, yes, I totally agree with this statement, but what I think Terry didn’t realize is who exactly he’s talking to. When it comes to getting a job done, I tend to get a little OCD at times and really go over the top.

A couple of years ago, I’d put the word out to a few communities that I was part of online that I was looking for that I was looking for donations of old magazines so I could slice pages out of them for reference material. This was gonna be on TOP of the magazines I was already getting rid of for the same reason! I figured I’d just be able to draw things out one page at a time to improve my skill and the range of things I’d know how to draw.

Great plan, but I severely underestimated the response I’d receive from my peers!

This is the box that holds all the reference material I gathered from that exercise:

The Big Ol' Box of Reference Materials

So as you can see, it’s quite a bit. In fact, I had problems even managing to squeeze it all in said box. So I’ve got my work cut out for me as I’ve now gotten to a point where I’m actually attempting to go through the box and USE the reference. My method goes a little bit like this:

1. Grab handful of sheets from box
2. Stuff in whatever knapsack I’m carrying with me that day
3. Pull a sheet out on the subway/at the girlfriend’s/during lunch
4. Sketch like a madman
5. Recycle reference page
6. Return to step 3 until all sheets are gone
7. Then, return to step 1

Eventually, I will get through this box, and at that point, I’m hoping that my work will be far more awesome. But until then, I’ll follow Damn Terry Dam’s advice.

–case p.