Stone Soup: What Goes Into the Pot

Here are a few months of sketchbooks which make up the raw ingredients for the annual calendar

I love to make a calendar each year. I can send them as gifts, keep in touch with clients, and pick a charity to send half of the proceeds. This year, I looked to my sketchbooks.

The images are the result of mixing and matching, finding patterns and scenes that create something evocative, suggest a narrative or a sensation.

Two of these characters showed up in the calendar; Recognize them out of context?

Splicing, Selecting, Mixing

Working in ink and marker on paper allowed more white space to come through than in paintings or when I collage my work together in real (non-digital) space. And combining pieces digitally allowed more hands off collage so that pieces weren't ruined by scissors as I tried new combinations, adjusted colors, cropped out entire sections. I could also work with a greater number of options in the digital format. Working so quickly allow you to consider why certain pieces aren't working while enjoying aspects of them for novelty or future exploration:

Within a few days, I had made 15 new pieces, although they were built on the back of months of drawing and discovery. I could pull together the growth and searching from the previous year into a final moment as a gift to bring in a new year and close the previous one.