Scribbles

Twenty hours a week I work in a library but I can't simply shut my brain off. Sometimes when I have a free moment I will grab a p-slip (a 3x5 slip of paper to jot notes on) and scratch out a quick shorthand sketch.

I am always drawing but I have never considered the sketches and scribbles to be of much value. But it's these scribble notes that provide the seeds for my art as well as help me solve issues within compositions. Many of them are not much more than visual shorthand but some become involved studies.

Knowing that these mini pics are often an important starting point, I realized it was valuable to keep a visual record of them. To that end, I will now occasionally include these sketches to inform about the entire process.

These tiny papers allow me to sketch with total abandon. There is no fear of committing to a huge new clean sheet of paper. The p-slips are meant to be discarded when the note has served its purpose. By that time I usually have the composition and a basic blocking down.
In this case....

Saturn's moon Daphnis perturbing the edges of the Keeler Gap.

Notes about direction and sizes - a little blurry.

The Saturnian moon Daphnis inhabits a special place within the ring system. Toward the outer edge of the rings is a 42 kilometer gap and this 8 kilometer moon is the master of it. So much so that it created ripples on the edges of the ring system. The ripples create awesome mountains-sized warps. My imagination, being the way it is, I wondered what it would look like to be just above the ring plane. A place we can't send space probes just yet.

So now I am exploring angles and perspectives. It is these things that keep me drawing.