Inking! Woodworking!

Above: it's tea time once more, and it's time to reminisce about England.

Below: since I haven't had to draw a sailing ship in a while, I figured it was time to add back something equally infuriating to draw, so now there's a horse. Horses live at an inconvenient intersection between being familiar enough that it's easy to see when they look wrong, but not so commonplace that I get much practice drawing them.

Alexandra's excited, though.

Meanwhile, I am excited because I just made and put together this little piece of plywood furniture.

I love my Ikea-brand "Alex" (the white chest of drawers), but what I really wanted for day-to-day drawing was something like an animator's desk, with stereo shelves to keep work-in-progress handy (as below).

I had a hard time finding what I wanted online (and certainly not for cheap), so I figured I'd just build my own. With some helpful input from Make It Then Tell Everybody's Dan Berry, I picked out the nicest plywood I could find at Home Depot, cut it to size, rounded the corners using a jigsaw and a sander, then assembled it all using dowels (and a "dowel jig"). Still to do: fill all the plywood holes with wood filler and paint the thing, maybe a nice whitewash stain so it doesn't look so incongruous with all the other white furniture.

It is already coming in super-handy, and was well worth the effort.

- - - -

I wanted to get to 33% complete on Chapter Two Inks by the end of the month. The good news is: I did it!

The bad news is that I got there via super easy cheater pages like the one on the right, below…

… and I have two more pages of increasingly-intricate decorative work like this coming up, which (i'll be honest with you) will probably take a week all by itself.

Wish me luck! My hand is already cramping up, just thinking about it.

Crampily yours,

TC