Nulla Dies Sine Linea*

*"Not a day without a line drawn."
--attributed to Apelles by Pliny

Not to be outdone by the cat, who sets a high standard, I've given myself the assignment of doodling. I'm trying for Every Day. Since I did manage to make it completely through January, I thought I'd crow by posting. At which point I was confounded by technology. About halfway through, my scanner stopped scanning. Trust me, I have a doodle a day for all 31 days. If I can conquer the scanner, I'll show you the rest. In the meantime, they're all Prismacolor pencils on postcard-size (4 inches x 6 inches) paper, and scanned three-in-a-row to be, as I imagined, efficient.

^Yellow is cheery in deep winter. Yellow is also a tricky color (it's suddenly not at all yellow) and I may give myself the challenge of an all-yellow month.

^There's more a little more on the leftmost edge of the leftmost doodle. I like these, all the white space, I think there may be something in them for later.

^Have I mentioned that my grandfather built the Behemoth from scraps of things and that my mother made the house into a sacred object that Never Could Be Altered? I think I may have . . . One of the dormer walls is pieced bits of something like Masonite. Over the years the seams have been encrusted with decades of paint and the piece in the middle is a rendering of the seam lines. It made me think of some works by Richard Diebenkorn -- not the usual association I have with either my mother or, especially, my grandfather -- and I think I may work with it a bit more.

^Seed forms.

^Letter forms. The bit in the center was inspired by a trip to the Morgan Library and an exhibition of cylinder seals with cuneiform writing and other images.

^Round things.

I was going to devote February to letter forms (26 letters would nicely account for most of the month), but the Sketchbook challenge for February is "Opposites" so I may hunt up my book on notan and see what that provokes. The ideas are not mutually exclusive (notan and letter forms) but there may be something more interesting in wandering rather than deciding.