Catastrophies and Blessings
I've finally got into the drawing zone, and seem fingers crossed to be able to combine it with the Marathon regime, so now I am doing both ludicrous amounts of exercise and ludirous amounts of drawing. The bad news is if you are a friend reading this, you probably won't hear from me till the flipside of my exhibition. The good news is, my masochism is relearning that you can draw so much you litterally can't grip a pen anymore!
But I had a minor catastrophe last night, got home from work, couldn't find the Major Tom's gig I was supposed to go to and resolved to stay in and draw all night. I had refilled my fine tip 1mm marker that morning which has been doing most of the heavy lifting, and I'm using these 'graffiti' inks that are 'buff' proof in 'paint markers, that come stock in 2mm tips but I had bought a pack of 2 x 1mm tips to sub in, which is the finest line I can get with uniformity of ink and especially blackness. I can't stand non-uniform blackness in my inking utensils.
Anyway, for some reason I have been getting progressively worse at refilling the pens, and yesterday morning was the extreme of which, rather than the exception to that rule. As far as I can figure, I had overfilled the pen and this had caused a bunch of ink to leak out of the valve and dry into crappy bits that were small enough to be sucked up by my fine tips but gunky enough to block the flow of ink once in there.
So my fineliner stopped working.
I panicked.
Then I was all like 'calm down tohm, you can use the spare one...' then I turned around and realised I'd made the foolish mistake of cleaning my studio. I had no idea where I'd put the spare tip, now everything was clustered into neat arrangements rather than a spatial constellation that is easy to memorise.
I began turning my room upside down, going through bags of old markers looking for the tiny ziplock bag with the tinier spare nibs in it. To no avail, I became so desperate I picked up an innoucuous bag that has been sitting in the room since Janice moved a bunch of my shit into it, it seemed to be filled with random crap. In this innoucuous bag was another innocuous bag, which seemed familiar, and then I opened it up and it was in turn filled with heaps of tissue paper, which seemed almost too familiar, that I hastily but tenderly unwrapped to discover the object not of my desire, but that I thought I had forever lost and was cursed to a life of misery and isolation because of which, I'm not going to go public on what the item is, but let me say, even though it is a purely symbolic object, it made my fucking night, it made the past 4 years all much much better.
I found the spare tips in a cupboard. But foolishly I took my one precious spare tip and put it in the pen that had gunked up the last one, and it gunked up too. That's when I figured out what had broken the first one.
So after a few hours of trying to cleanse them to no avail, I just did as much pencilwork as I could.
But I had a minor catastrophe last night, got home from work, couldn't find the Major Tom's gig I was supposed to go to and resolved to stay in and draw all night. I had refilled my fine tip 1mm marker that morning which has been doing most of the heavy lifting, and I'm using these 'graffiti' inks that are 'buff' proof in 'paint markers, that come stock in 2mm tips but I had bought a pack of 2 x 1mm tips to sub in, which is the finest line I can get with uniformity of ink and especially blackness. I can't stand non-uniform blackness in my inking utensils.
Anyway, for some reason I have been getting progressively worse at refilling the pens, and yesterday morning was the extreme of which, rather than the exception to that rule. As far as I can figure, I had overfilled the pen and this had caused a bunch of ink to leak out of the valve and dry into crappy bits that were small enough to be sucked up by my fine tips but gunky enough to block the flow of ink once in there.
So my fineliner stopped working.
I panicked.
Then I was all like 'calm down tohm, you can use the spare one...' then I turned around and realised I'd made the foolish mistake of cleaning my studio. I had no idea where I'd put the spare tip, now everything was clustered into neat arrangements rather than a spatial constellation that is easy to memorise.
I began turning my room upside down, going through bags of old markers looking for the tiny ziplock bag with the tinier spare nibs in it. To no avail, I became so desperate I picked up an innoucuous bag that has been sitting in the room since Janice moved a bunch of my shit into it, it seemed to be filled with random crap. In this innoucuous bag was another innocuous bag, which seemed familiar, and then I opened it up and it was in turn filled with heaps of tissue paper, which seemed almost too familiar, that I hastily but tenderly unwrapped to discover the object not of my desire, but that I thought I had forever lost and was cursed to a life of misery and isolation because of which, I'm not going to go public on what the item is, but let me say, even though it is a purely symbolic object, it made my fucking night, it made the past 4 years all much much better.
I found the spare tips in a cupboard. But foolishly I took my one precious spare tip and put it in the pen that had gunked up the last one, and it gunked up too. That's when I figured out what had broken the first one.
So after a few hours of trying to cleanse them to no avail, I just did as much pencilwork as I could.
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