Drawing a Bigger Breath

 For Christmas I received a really cool sketchbook from my sister, except, in my eyes, it seemed more like a 'blank book.' What's the difference? Rather than being just a repository for random, unrelated sketches, it felt like an actual book, bound and everything, just waiting for its pages to be filled in. It was similar to previous blank books, which were like journals with unlined pages, that I used to fill with my comics when I first rediscovered my vocation and love of cartooning, only this one was bigger!

There is something about a big blank book, with all its empty pages pregnant with potential, that makes me begin to salivate. It always has. I have a big blank book from when I was a boy that I began filling in with creatures of my imagination. I didn't get too far in that one, but I still remember the absolute thrill and excitement of so many empty pages to fill in. 

It's different from drawing a comic on a plain, individual piece of paper. Though the quality may be better in that case, because there are logistics to drawing in a book, such as the changing height from the table top depending on how deep into the book the current page is, and having to constantly and clunkily shift the entire book around to get at the correct drawing angle, but there's something about watching the natural progression of pages building on each other, feeding each other with a desire or expectation for what is to follow, until you realize something you couldn't have even imagined at the beginning suddenly exists where nothing had before. Talk about a sense of accomplishment!

Anyway, since I began my original Drawing Breath comics in a smaller blank book, I'm calling this one Drawing A Bigger Breath. Here are the first three pages of many more to come.