A Shaggy Pony

"Technicolor Shetland"
pen
small leather sketchbook

I honestly did not feel like doing anything today.  Eat healthy after a week of relying on take-out because of my busy schedule?  Irresistible sugar cookies at work.  (But I ate the salad I made this morning, too, and resisted ordering a sandwich from Jimmy John's).

This feeling of wanting to obtain and/or conserve energy as much as possible during the holiday madness also extended to my desire to maintain my blog schedule.  With the aid of a couple of cups of tea, I scraped the dregs of my creative impulse into this drawing of probably a Shetland pony.  My inspiration was a particularly fat and fuzzy Shetland seen while driving around in the area of Columbia, NJ, for my family's annual Christmas Bird Count.  I got the picture from this blog: Misanthropology 101.

Anyway, I started drawing the pony, got as far as the contours and face, and stopped for a couple of hours to Reddit for a while.  Like I said, my motivation was not quite there.  It took the second cup of (now caffeinated) tea for me to leave the drawing where it stands.  Simulating fur can be tedious, but it also is sort of like playing in a Zen garden.  Stroke of the pen, stroke of the pen, stroke of the pen.  Mark, mark, mark.  Slowly the animal comes into being.  I was playing with some of the filters on my HTC1 and liked the look of this bluish saturated one, so I left it as is.