I know what I know would not fill a thimble.
Exhausted, wrung like a sponge, and worn through. I can't wait for the Paint & Pixel Festival next Saturday - are you planning a trip there too? I'm mooching a car ride off of the endlessly generous Cherry Ogata of the Boston Comics Roundtable with fellow members Kyle Anderson, Ron LeBrasseur, and E.J. Barnes too. Maybe we'll see you there.
The ridiculously gorgeous office complex that hosts my workplace was an unexpected bit of luck - on top of all the other luck I've had landing my temp job - because I get to lounge through my lunch hour in the plaza while enjoying this view:
U jelus? 8]
Emily Caroll's magnificent dream journals got me thinking.... I like the way she refers to a dream journal as place to "mine" ideas and images from your subconscious and draw out into the waking world. A way to get more in touch with your own mind, and to stretch the location and characters and colors that your conscious mind so quickly limits itself to. And it all belongs to you, so there's no "wrong" way to put it down on paper...in fact, you could possibly draw the same dream multiple times and still uncover new images and connections. Subconscious is a slippery beast. That's why I also like her limitation of her dreams down to only a few panels because by limiting your choice of materials, you are forced to make sense of your absurd narrative through the most visceral moments.
My own dreams are very infrequent but they are usually quite vivid and stay with me for a while. But every time I've tried to keep a written dream journal I quit in frustration about the...uh...second sentence in. Sorry laughing_anima. Emily Carroll (and David B. and July Doucet and Lucy Knisely and so many others) says the answer was in my heart aaaaall along - COMICS!! Of course. Drawing dreams are excellent building practice, because they are tiny stories complete in their incompleteness because you always wake up before they properly end. It's up to your conscious mind to make as little or as much sense out of them as you like. So here are my first tries, which I hope do not shame Miss Carroll overly much:
I found the process of drawing this last particular dream very cathartic, and while I do not have anywhere near the same discipline right now as Emily Carroll does (I mean, just look at those goddamned things she drew, inked, AND colored in like a month?! on top of everything else she does!! what a lady!), I plan on continuing these.
Click to viewThat about sums it up.
What have you been dreaming lately?