Journal Batch #4

 4-27-24

Today I prayed to God. I prayed for help with my art projects. I prayed to help me worship and honor Him through my art. I prayed to God that I can complete these projects. I am afraid I am repeating what I have done in the past. I am dreaming about my art. I am writing down notes, and sketching ideas. I am not completing anything. Then a calm came over me. Baby steps. I am doing a little at a time. Over the next few months to a year, I will see results. I just need to keep moving forward. I need to be patient. 

A New Beginning 

4-28-24

I have to be up at 5 a.m. to cover someone at work who is sick. It is now 11:56 p.m. All I can think about as I lay here in bed, eyes wide open, is my comic book. Ideas are flooding into my mind, when I should really be sleeping. So here is what’s in my head: Today I drew up five sheets of character poses (40 poses in all). I will scan those in, mirror or flip the images, creating 80 poses. Then I will print, on Bristol, all 10 sheets for each character. I will pencil in the characters over the poses (roughly 100 pages). Then I will ink all of the pages with a brush. Then scan them all in. This should give me the practice I need to tackle the actual pages of my comics. Next step is to set up all the pages with text then plunk the characters in (in Comic Life this gives me the option to resize and or crop characters) and print. This can go in two different directions. I could leave that as is and draw backgrounds where needed to finish the pages, or I could use the print to trace and ink the whole page together. The first option sounds better.

5-9-24

Prince’s Work Ethic video on YouTube. 6 Lessons on how the be a creative machine. Lesson 1 work fast. Lesson 2 become a finisher. Lesson 3 abandon perfectionism. Lesson 4 make art everyday. Lesson 5 sleep. Lesson 6 develop vault mentality.

Basquiat’s work ethic. 1 Source Material. 2 Steal Like An Artist. 3 Have A Message. 4 Speed. 5 Study, Memorize and Internalize. 

Taylor Swift: Build Your Army, Stand For Something Bigger Than Yourself and Make More Art.

Jack Kerouac’s 30 Rules for Good Writing

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Stop preparing and polishing. Throw me in.

5-13-24

Lord, I would rather kneel before you in shame and beg forgiveness, rather than feel good about myself and walk away from you. Was the thorn in Paul’s flesh (look up verse) lust?

I mark surfaces.

5-14-24

True religion confronts earth with heaven and brings eternity to bear upon time. The message of Christ, though he speaks from God, must also, as the Quakers used to say, “speak to the condition” of his healers; otherwise he will speak a language known only to himself. His message must be not only timeless but timely. He must speak to his own generation.

-A.W. Tozer

This quote needs to be applied to my comic book. This is deep.