Blessing in disguise

A couple of weeks ago, my studio printer decided it was too old to deal with card stock paper any more. It would jam and smash up every page I attempted to print on. That's a problem...a big problem since a lot of the items I sell on etsy and ebay are note card sets. Staples and Best Buy both told me the rollers are probably spent and I would be better off buying a new printer than trying to replace the rollers on my printer. It's about 4 or 5 years old now and since I don't have an issue printing on regular paper, it seemed silly to me to replace it. My husband has a new printer that is only about a year old and he's probably used it a handful of times since he got it for his iPad.

Well, I set it up to print wirelessly to my laptop which I was insanely proud of all in itself. And I am so glad I had to switch printers.



This blows away anything I printed card-wise on my old printer! After a couple of pansy cards with a bunch of lines through through them (almost like the print heads were dirty,) I learned that there was a setting just for card stock paper for this new printer. Well, holy smokes. After I switched it over to that...the color quality was to die for. The black and white cards had way more detail too. Man, I am so glad that my printer decided to be bitchy and not work with card stock any more...because I am beyond thrilled with what this new printer can do for my studio! :)

Progress...making progress

And I did make some substantial progress last week! As I start to work the rump of the dog...my facebook fans who were still guessing were able to see what my subject is. :) And a lot of people were able to successfully figure out the breed. Black and white border collie!

I'm still loving how this is turning out. I really enjoy working with drawings with that stark contrast with blacks, grays, and whites. This drawing lets me flex those contrast skills and the level of detail is just enough that I don't get hung up on it. On the Lars' puppy portrait, I'm finding myself getting really hung up sometimes on all of the detail that is on the reference photo. Both drawings are teaching me something on what works better for me on detail and what may not. We're always learning something in our life's work...aren't we. :)

Got the tail done...

Finally, I've gotten back to somewhat of a routine with Ocean here now. I can carve out a couple of good drawing hours in the morning while he's napping. The rest of the day is catch as catch can and evenings are spent with us keeping him occupied or me passing out on the floor from exhaustion. I'm trying to get stuff done on this and I have a feeling as he gets older, it will get easier. :)

Anyway...someone on Facebook guessed what I was working on! They got as far as a dog going over a jump (after many interesting guesses like racoon, cats, and lemurs.) **grin** But, we haven't had a guess on the breed yet and I'll make that the official guessing game now. I'm still really happy how this new drawing is turning out. I'm getting into the "flow" of this drawing when the act of drawing itself becomes easy and I just turn things over to my brain and let it go from there. I don't have to think about what I'm doing...I just do. It's feeling that has been hard for me to explain for people when they've asked me how do I do what I do. As a youngster, I would just tell them "I just draw what I see." I guess that's still a great way from me to tell people how I create these images with paper and pencil...."I just draw what I see." The way that my head works....it really is as simple as that.