Finishing up the Tiger Zine

It's not so much that I procrastinate. It's more like I get distracted and side-tracked, like a cat that hears a faint rustle in the bushes and must go investigate, forgetting about its intended destination. 

So although I started gathering information and writing articles many months ago for what I have chosen to call my annual zine, meant to be a compendium of informative tidbits I have collected in the process of researching and making the Useful Calendar each year; and even though by April I had completed a few longish articles about research-heavy topics like worldwide efforts to save wild tigers from extinction — because 2022 is the year of the tiger — sometime in May, it just stalled. 

This happens in part because I often sabotage my own efforts by gathering too much information and then feeling overwhelmed by it all. A case of TLDR only for the one doing the writing — too long, didn't finish! When mid-August came around, I was seriously considering abandoning the project, but then I thought about how much time and effort I had already put into it, including creating new artwork just for this zine, and I asked myself, What will it take for me to finish this? 

Well, I decided that I would not write those few articles that I had originally intended to include but had not yet written, even though I had gathered the information and found the subjects worthy and fascinating. I told myself there will always be another zine, I can always find a place for that topic if it's really important to me to write it. 

Then I looked at the draft document and realized that it was exactly 24 pages with just a few small gaps that needed filling either with new artwork or a short snippet of text. Well, any multiple of 4 pages can be made into a booklet, so suddenly the completion of my tiger zine was within reach. I was finally energized to finish it. I did two illustrations for the section on the evolution of cats (above) and a third of catnip (which I have growing in my yard), wrote a very short piece about tigers and catnip (yes, they like it), and selected a poetry excerpt for the last page, which goes nicely with an illustration I already had. Done, and done! 

I'll debut it during the LoLa Art Crawl, September 17–18, and then make it available in my Etsy shop and possibly at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, if they want it (they usually do want my zines, but last year's annual zine didn't sell very well, so I have no expectations regarding this one). 

It's kind of funny, too, how I can't seem to motivate myself to adopt a daily drawing practice, but when I need an illustration (or two or three) in order to finish a zine, I can sit down and really focus on getting them done without being led astray by distractions. I do enjoy it when I'm in the midst of creating the illustration, and I often say to myself, I should do this more often. 

I guess I just need to make more zines.

Sketching Tigers for the 2022 Useful Calendar

Quick sketches with a brush pen help me
loosen up and get a feel for drawing
tigers without overthinking it.

Ever since the LoLa art crawl ended (Sep. 18–19), I have mainly been focused on finishing my 2022 Useful Calendar. It's the Year of the Tiger — beginning Feb. 1, 2022 — and so that is the animal that I will feature on this calendar. Tigers and cats, that is, because I did a whole year of dog illustrations a few years back for the year of the dog, so it only seems right for the upcoming calendar to be all about the cats.

A lot of the work I do in preparation for making my calendar is research, which I commence in the spring and pick away at through the summer — updating all the floating holidays from various faith traditions, and the US holidays that land on a weekend, and new holidays, like Juneteenth in the US, which I've always included, but now that it's an official US holiday, the Monday rule applies, and so the federal observance will be on June 20 next year, because June 19 is a Sunday. 

For many religions, the ones I didn't grow up observing — Baha'i, Buddhism, Hindu, Islam, Judaism, Orthodox Christian — I feel that I need to check a few different sources, because any one source could be wrong. So it actually takes a bit of time, even though I only include the major holidays of these religions; there are many I leave out because only followers of those religions need to know, and they're not counting on me to tell them. But the impetus behind the Useful Calendar is to help people be considerate of one another's cultural and religious traditions when planning events that might affect them.

It's the same reason I always include the date of the Super Bowl — not for football fans, but for the rest of us, who may need to plan around it. 

My sketchbook page is in the middle of the two sources I was
copying and studying, including one with text I can't translate!

But the part I always leave for last are the illustrations. I have been collecting images of tigers and cats on a Pinterest board, and doing light research about these magnificent animals, and a wee bit of sketching, and examining studies of tiger anatomy and interesting facts about them, and really appreciating all the artists on Deviant Art who share their studies, instruction, and photographs on any subject you could want to draw!

But here it is early October and I don't have one finished illustration yet! So it's time to shift from sketching mode to get-serious mode. That includes finding images that photographers give permission to use, such as this German photographer (featured below) who goes by the business name Fotostyle Schindler and asks only that people credit him and provide a link to his Facebook page.

For the next few weeks, tigers and cats are going to be the focus of my attention, at least when I'm at home in my studio. I may even pay a visit to the Minnesota Zoo to see a real live tiger.