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Mousie and Chicken has all my themed Inktober 2018 drawings (there were a few days when I sketched something else), plus a few extras added to make it a better book. When I started Inktober, I wanted to do small unrelated drawings based on the basic 2018 Inktober prompts, so that I could do them quickly and without stress. By drawing three I clearly had a story, and from then I was sunk: My little Mousie was off on an adventure. I used a really simple set of tools: a basic mechanical pencil, a Pigma Graphic 3 chisel-tip felt pen for solid black areas, a white Gelly Roll pen for details on black (and for mistakes), and my new favorite drawing pen: the Pentel Arts Hybrid Technica. .

In a perfect world I’d still have time for art, but having to work for a living eats up the rest of the time. Winter is time to work on and refine new material, to practice, and to play music more introspectively. That little ‘fifteen minutes of practice a day’ rule is great in theory, but starts to get quite cumbersome if you’re trying to practice more than two things (after all, there’s practice preparation and transition to do, too, so the fifteen minutes is never just fifteen minutes, and all the fifteen minuteses really start to add up). I’ve attempted to do a little bit of everything, tracking my art, music, and writing time per day down to the minute.

While everyone would have loved cutely illustrated building elevations, that was out of project budget, so I just drew roof-lines (and picked a sun direction for cast shadows). Studies in New York have shown that ‘Heads-up’ maps — maps which are oriented to align with the direction the reader is facing — are easier to use for most people. Because the SPSCC campus isn’t laid out on clear east-west north-south lines, a heads-up approach would have required at least eight different angles — some of them quite odd, as the kiosk angles were chosen for maximum visibility from SPSCC’s walkways, which are oriented 30 degrees off of north-south in the east campus and 25 degrees off in the west campus.

The snow pea starts never grew at all, but they were the first thing in the garden to produce. After all, I’d spent $3 on snow pea starts and now had two whole pods to show for it, which meant that for the low low cost of $1.50 per pod, I could break even! And to get $1.50 for a single pea pod, I’d have to sell to the high-end hipster market — and have excellent packaging. At that point, I figured the pea season was surely over, but then in one last, productive gasp, my pea plants produced a whole thirteen pods — at the same time!