Maybe I don't have enough deadlines or something. But I just spent my time dreaming about a word that I wrote on one of the Caricatures that I posted yesterday.

First, I was thinking that it would have been better if I predrew the letters bfore inking. It's always a toss of the coin during party-work - to predraw or not to predraw. So here I tried it again:

Eh. A hodgepodge. Would it be better if I decided ahead of time whether twould be AnglesAnglesAngles or gloppy curves?

That took too much thinking to be done in a Party situation. Oh well, Party Art is immediate. Fast and in the moment. The Artist has to let people really see her - unedited and raw.

But there are other options. Curly writing, of course, but that isn't usually wanted on Boy's Pictures. Calligraphy. I think that one of the first considerations should be Spacing. The Graffiti stuff I just posted above is tight. Perhaps I could use expanded simple letters sometimes:

Or not playing with Spacing at all. Not squashed together, and not expanded out. How about Speed and Bravado:

It's all good. Then I got to designing something that Looks like the meaning of the word? With Line-Quality:

That doesn't look like the meaning of the word. But I feel finished - Don't feel like working on it any more. Just now.

Okay. Okay. I couldn't focus on my work (I really should go vacuum the car). But I couldn't just post the lovely writing that I used to study. Not without also posting the Graffiti Calligraphy that I'm just as likely to use on my Caricatures these days.

So I wrote a word with my Bubbly Graffiti:

And I wrote a word with my "Down and Dirty Graffiti", which I designed from studying the unedited Real Stuff:

I usually presign my papers before I go to a party. Since people pay me by the hour, I try to do as much as possible before I'm 'on their clock'. So in my free time, I'll presign my papers, I'll put them into the mats, things like that.

They'll frequently be cartoony signatures. Quick happy playful things. But I just mentioned Pictorial Calligraphy in this blog this morning. And I came across this little scrap of paper when I opened my desk drawer this evening. It's a practice paper I made when I was seriously studying Chauncery Cursive several years ago:

Remembering. Old dreams of Fine Art. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

So when I started presigning papers for this week's gigs (I'll be drawing M&M people for the M&M Company on Tuesday, and I have two parties on Saturday - a 13-year-old Birthday and a Graduation, and I'm expecting the deposit to arrive for a 10-year-old's Birthday for Friday.... That's about 200 papers. When you sign them all at once like this, you really see how presigning saves the customer from paying extra. It only looks like a partial second to sign a paper. But when you do all 200 of them at once takes a really countable chunk of time.)

So Like I say, I figured I'd best to presign a whole lotta papers. Chauncery Cursive seemed too precise to jump right into just now. But I do Curly Writing in my day-to-day world. That's a lot like Pictorial Calligraphy.....

Here's some of the Signatures I made. Each one is like a piece of Artwork. They're not my 'real official signature', but they 'claim' my Pictures:

Yesterday I was driving through Canarsie on my way to Park Slope. Took a break next to a vacant lot that had this wall around it. I was inspired by the real graffiti there:

I tried to make sense out of it - Just what did this kid do? I decided that he squashed the drunken-styled letters together, and added 'graffiti-stuff'. I wish I had some photos of the big graffiti productions here to show you. I tried to turn this graffiti study into a production-type image:

Good - especially the Wesley one. But it was too tedious to help me represent this attitude (when appropriate) at Caricature Parties. So I went back to the original reference, copied it, and tried to apply That:

Maybe I'm just making up stories, but I wonder if Grafitti might be 'ghetto'-art. Crowded conditions, not enough supplies so they had to squash their letters together on the paper....