Well, this one is much more recent. I would guess very late 2024 or early 2025. This was drawn on my iPad mini, which is my primary digital device that I draw on these days. It would have been drawn shortly after I had acquired it and was still just exploring some of the possibilities of the Procreate app. The image that’s faded into the background is just a drawing without – I would imagine – source material. Well maybe there was a source material – I don’t know, but yeah they’re probably was. I’d have to look back at the file and see.

The image in the forefront was certainly drawn from a photograph – and one that I’m sure I found on Instagram. A lot of times I’ll comb through Instagram for an interesting face or interesting outfit or interesting something. One of the areas that I’ve explored through drawing from those photographs is how to draw clothes because, of course, when I was first drawing and as I’ve continued drawing, I guess I primarily have always drawn the nude – whether from life, source images, or imagination. And so, when you’re drawing the nude, there are a lot of things that you can do that you can’t really do with clothes – anatomical reference points and whatnot. So I never really learned to draw clothed figures – particularly contemporarily clothed figures – until these past few years. I’ve started playing around with it a little bit more and so that’s one benefit of some of these drawings. Also just simply developing the surface, developing the line, learning how to use the digital materials and the digital tools. Those are the sorts of things that are really being explored in this drawing and the other ones from this group – that sort of explains why the collection is called Ways and Means – I’m exploring method probably more than I am, a message. I guess that’s the way to say that.