2021

What a strange trip 2020 has been.

I found myself stuck in a commission. That has never happened before.

Maybe the isolation of 2020s plague got to me. Or the medical scare. Or the general state of weirdness our culture is in.

I started the commission. Stopped.
Started it again. Stopped.

Maybe I’m just getting old.
I started it yet again. Stopped again.
I was depressed and wasn’t sure what was happening.

Somewhere in there I ate an aweful lot of Oreos and received some of the most bizarre Amazon packages.

As a kid I would illustrate the situations I wanted. I called it “making things real.” I made a world where I was mystifyingly beautiful and there were winged horses and unicorns. And a cow. The cow wasn’t magic though. She was just a cow.

As an adult, I still “make things real.”

Bridge buns are brought to life [for me] and I fall in love with every one I draw.
EVERY.ONE.
They “speak” to me and I talk to them.

But there I was: stuck. Like a truck in mud: the wheels spinning but I wasn’t going anywhere.
This bun wasn’t talking to me. Stubborn boy.

One afternoon while chasing around the hot mess that is Snow – she stole one of my pencils – I realized something …

This was the *first* pencil-in-hand project that I was doing without Lance. My muse. My companion. My critic.

He would snuggle under my drawing board in and stay for as long as I did. I’d take a break and he’d look the project over, judge it, judge me, judge my existance as a whole … the way rabbits do.

I brought the hot mess that is Snow back in studio. She bit all the tips off my color pencils. She slid my rough sketches and models across the floor. She flopped a foot away from me.

Then… I drew.

Everyone – meet Thor.