A Happy Friday Office Special.

Please forgive me, but it's been ages since I've drawn a horse. I used to draw them constantly once upon a time, in fact they were pretty much all that I drew on the most part until I hit my fantasy phase and drew nothing but warrior-chicks, dragons, badly proportioned heroes, and the occasional centaur. Now I'm into my Potteresque Regency forest creatures. Today I wanted to harken back to my Five Oaks Farm days and draw a goat or something, but then I started sketching the rear thighs and legs of this horse and it grew from there.

Inked in with the large graphic pen (it's like an inkbrush); I need to get used to it, I like having more control with the fine pen, but I wanted to experiment a bit today. It came out okay, I guess. I erased the pencil of course.

Some coloured pencils to give the critters some dimension.... I cannot say I'm an accomplished colourist. In fact, I sort of suck at it, I always have. I never mastered the neat single angle or lineless colouring as others have; in fact, every time I pick up coloured pencils I am torn back to a moment in the fourth grade when we were all at our desks in class. Mrs. Banks handed out ditto sheets (that's ancient English for 'photocopies') of a line map of Europe.

We were instructed to colour in the different countries. We all did so compliantly; the classroom silent except for the collective sound of coloured pencils being scribbled... The teacher was at this time making the circuit of the class, and paused at my desk. She reached down, slid my paper out from under my art pencil and held it up for the class to see. My colouring was as it always is, a riot of scribbled coloured blotches tangled within the borders of each European country, the lines of colour changing directions at random. In my mind it was fine because I had stayed within the lines on the most part.

"Stephanie obviously doesn't care how neat her schoolwork is," Mrs Banks declared, "try to make your work neater than Stephanie's."


There's nothing like a little public humiliation to give a child that special incentive to try harder, isn't there? See? I still haven't learned. No neat all-one-angle colouring for me, even today, thirty years later. Maybe it's all in secret defiance to Mrs. Banks.