The Return of Zayo

On my birthday last month, I put on a gray wrap dress, some bright magenta-ish tights, had a ramen birthday lunch with a friend, then went on a coffee shop hop to draw people. This drawing is from a coffee shop in Echo Park called Chango - it's not a particularly good place for drawing people due to the seating arrangement (or at least where I was sitting sucked for drawing fellow patrons), but I did get this drawing after being there for awhile. The weird, disembodied heads in what is supposed to be the awning over the window are actually other people that I started drawing but had given up on (due to my crappy location/poor vantage point in the coffee shop) prior to tackling drawing these people by the window. I had tried drawing these two when they were sitting next to me, which was super awkward, and I was relieved when they moved right across from me to these stools in front of the window (did my weird, focused art vibe scare them away? Hmmm...). I would like to do more drawings like this that are not only figurative, but incorporate the surroundings of my subjects.

This is the first thing I've posted on this blog in a really, really long time. In fact, it's been over two years since my last posting. Much has changed in my life in the interim, and this blog will now reflect that.

My original posts on this blog back in the summer and fall of 2007 were a mix of pseudo-reviews, dating musings, and the occasional drawing. It wasn't long before I was unable to keep up with posting, as I got busy with work, general life stuff and, frankly, a loss of interest in maintaining a blog, so I stopped. But then, within the past few weeks, a new incentive for posting started to percolate. For the past several years, I've been doing a lot of drawing - seriously, for someone with a day job, I draw quite a bit. And sometimes, as much as I enjoy it, I start slacking. And so, I recently started thinking that, well, if I started posting some of my drawings, I'd be pressured into drawing consistently, and posting is such a fun and easy thing to do. Then last week, I was hanging out with my brother, who has an art blog of his own, and I blurted out the following:

Me: I've been thinking about posting the drawings I've been doing of people in coffeeshops on a blog...

Bro: Why don't you?

And that's how I got the idea in my head to resuscitate this very blog, which the four (okay, three) people who will read this, see before them. My posts from here on out will be mainly of my drawings from not only coffeeshops, but also sometimes from life-drawing workshops and my crazy head. And, fear not the two friends who will actually read this, the random review and strange inner monologue may pop up on occasion, too.

There will be more to come, I promise - seriously, I'm going to do my best to post at least once a week, no matter what. And if I don't, I suck, and this blog will add to the pressure on me to draw every week, which is fantastic.