So it's been almost 10 days, and while I'm substantially better I'm a long way from well. The fever is generally abated, the coughing is a little more fluid, less painful, there's some shortness of breath that suggests panic, but it's disappearing, overall I'm generally feeling exhausted with waking patches, and when asleep I'm never quite resting, and when awake I'm never quite alert, always a bit of a fog over everything, but well enough to get things done.
These things, these are the abundant illustrations I need to try and sell my kids books. 1 at least, the most current project, I seem to have finally overcome my prejudices against my inability to draw with a "good enough" attitude - when, off the cuff, I'm drawing illustrations to clarify text or rhymes it sometimes comes to pass that I get an illustration that I kinda-rather like. But upon attempting to redraw it I'm faced with error after error, crumpled ball of failed paper after crumpled ball...
...So I've come up with new strategy. You're going to laugh, I don't blame you, it's ridiculous enough - not the technique, rather the decades it's taken me to embrace it.
That is, I do a faint outline of the drawing first in pencil. Get the layout, the figures, the background just right, draw, erase, draw, erase, draw ... until finally I'm ready to ink it, wherein I fill in the drawing, retracing the lines, adding crosshatching ...
Every artist in the world probably does this, or something similar, but to me it's all new. I'm thinking that - just like when I'm hastily jotting notes, I should be able to off-the-cuff doodle an ink masterpiece, and while it works for notes it never works for the final illustration. This pencil - drawing first technique, though, it's working fine - I don't need print-ready illustrations, just good enough to convince a publisher to take a chance on it, find someone of talent to illustrate in in the general direction I'm heading, and for the first time in a long time I'm madly off in the right direction. The drawings, like my health, they're not well or good, but they're an awful lot better...