Greetings, everyone. It is my favorite kind of weather outside today: rain, hopefully becoming a thunderstorm. Spring is my least favorite season, but with all the rain, I can’t help but like it a little bit. The sights and scents that accompany rainstorms are quite invigorating and I have become a little more inspired. I have decided to go over a bunch of my older sketches and introduce a series of technical refinements with an extremely fine point pencil in the preparation for doing the color and inkwork. Doing linework on drawing is almost therapeutic for me, and when I can listen to music while I work on lining, it is one of my few happy places, where prison does not exist.
I am still looking for a way to bring my art to the market, though. It is difficult enough to try not to feel like skulking about like a common criminal just to artistically express myself. One of my friends has already taken a hit by learning to become an artist – his book, “Figure Drawing, for All it’s Worth,” was confiscated and he was given a vague ultimatum as people often are in prison: “Either we write you a disiplinary report for this pornographic material, or you let us destroy it and we don’t write you up.” Andrew Loomis’ book on drawing the classical way was published in the 1940’s – it is any wonder that us inmates manage to be creative with everything we do at some point twisted into some form of vulgarity and used to punish us solely for attempting to do so. A couple of years ago I was placed on a “correctional management plan” – a special disciplinary hotlist much like the “habitual rapist” or drug monitoring for addicts – simply for sketches offantasy art, people in armor with fireballs and swords, characters I was designing for a friend’s novel series. I only hope this place will treat me a little better.
-Chris
