I started working on coloring old drawings because I didn't have any emotional investment in them so I could work quickly and not sweat it if they were terrible.

I am realizing now just how brilliant a lot of those old pieces are. Don't get me wrong, they aren't high art that will some day hang in the Louvre or anything like that but there is a freedom to them that I find interesting.

The bookworm, for instance, I believe started as a self-portrait and collided with a drawing of an elfy boot and I just merged them together. Either by itself was kind of uninteresting but together they became something fascinating and weird. I let my pencil just explore curve and line.

In another drawing I intend to work up in a few days, there's a vixen with weirdly long proportions talking to a cowboy on a pony. Because I was inept, the pony was floating off the ground beside the vixen. Rather than redrawing it, I put platform shoes on the pony. Again not what I had intended to make but it many ways it ends up a better drawing for its weirdness. ^_^

As I've gotten a little more competent at rendering, I've lost some of that accidental weirdness or perhaps what Bob Ross would have called 'happy little accidents', but I have tried to keep pieces of them so I can use them deliberately and hopefully to better effect or as a positive way to remember what not to do in the future.

It actually seems like the moment I lose hope of a drawing being a 'good' drawing is the moment that drawing usually starts getting better. The fantasy that it will match the picture in my mind has died. The thing that is on the page now has its own reality and it has no constraints. It is free to become whatever it wants and I am free to explore. For that, I hope never to stop making bad drawings.