My latest obsession is portraits on the pieces of broken skateboards I find at the skatepark, and linocut prints. The first few, well, they’re pretty messy. I have been making piles of prints and then sending them out as postcards, though, and having fun with it. I put up a few more fanzines, too. If that sounds interesting to you, check them out in my new Etsy store: Naked Tyro.
The old ones were supposed to be comfy but apparently I can’t wear heels, no matter how comfy they’re theoretically meant to be. So the old ones are on the way to the Derby Legends booth and hopefully I’ll be able to wear the new ones longer than 10 minutes without wanting to chop my feet off!
I self-censor myself out of fun a lot. So when I decided to start carrying around a drawing book – and using it – I had to fight my deadly impostor syndrome that insisted that I was being super pretentious. I also had to get used to people seeing what I was doing and being curious, which is maybe even worse. But – I did. And actually letting people see in my book helped me be a lot less precious about what I put in it, too, though I would have expected the opposite. Somehow letting people flip through it made me care (a little) LESS that they might judge what is in there.
So this whole gallery of drawings is from my drawing book, which means there are a lot of drawings I would consider crappy – so what. Drawing books – and I usually have a few going at any given time – are where I painfully force myself to learn how to do better. And there isn’t any room for improvement if you only do what you know how to do, so I feel like I have to embrace the suck. A friend recently convinced me that anyone interested in my drawing book would want to see the bad ones, too, so a lot of the finished (bad) ones are included. The first drawing is oooold – based on the content, I’d guess 2003ish. But most of the rest were done in 2015-2016, when I found this mostly-empty book and started carrying it around with me. There isn’t any unifying theme, but it’s probably obvious that I spent most of this year trying to learn how to get better portrait likenesses, and how to shade with pen & ink (with sometimes dubious results). I still have a lot of work to do on both goals, but I feel good about the progress.
As an aside, I really had no idea how frequently I draw my own feet until I went backwards through this book. It’s a little embarrassing. But then again, they are almost always available when I feel like drawing. And in my defense, I did break my foot in November of 2015 and then spend a whole bunch of time on my back staring at it wish it didn’t hurt. ALSO, while I’m making up lame excuses – in case you’re wondering if I’m bad at photography or color-correction – most of the pages that look dirty are actually dirty. I’m messy on my best day, and I do a lot of drawing outside and while eating. C’est la vie!
Check them out: http://www.nakedtyro.com/galleries/drawings/
June 2014. SoCal Derby was in town for the Golden Bowl. We were a last-minute booty call because the Bay Area Derby Girls couldn’t get anyone higher ranked to play. We’d just had a team breakfast and were gearing up for our first game of three – our #38 ranked team was taking on #12, #8 and #2, respectively. We were scared but exhilarated. Breakfast was not sitting great, however.
Walking back to the hotel, I saw a manila envelope leaning against what appeared to be a closed storefront – maybe abandoned. The envelope said, “MAKE FREE ART” on the front. I picked it up and turned it over – on the back, in small sharpied letters, “shoot film.” My teammates were shocked – they were like, “That’s someone’s mail!” But it just didn’t feel like it. I looked around harder – somehow I could imagine someone planting this mysterious envelope and then watching from a building across the busy urban street. I didn’t see anyone. One of my teammates took a few steps away from me.
I turned it over and over and over, and then finally decided: this isn’t someone else’s mail. This is for me.
Inside, a note:
That didn’t just make my day. It still inspires me. Guess where my tiny paintings are going to end up?
