One Week, Two Hands, 4,000 Miles

This week's theme, Phileas Fogg Snacks made me wonder, does moustaches make snacks sell better ?

This week's theme was Phileas Fogg Snacks - a very obscure brand of snack food based on "Around the World in 80 Days" that are made in the UK. It got me thinking about snacks and how I do and don't snack. I used to snack on things that were really delicious, but not necessarily healthy for me. When I decided I wanted to lose weight about 2 years ago I realized (with the help of Weight Watchers) that I needed to change my relationship to eating, and especially snack food, entirely. Out with the high fat, sugar and carbs, in with fruit, yogurt and nuts. Now I'm 20 pounds lighter, but I still have treats from "before" occasionally. However, they are just that: treats.

This week's theme was the album "God Bless America Again" by Loretta Lynn. I decided just to focus on the singer herself, who is one of my favorite country music singers. I remember driving across the US on one of my epic roadtrips in my early 20s listening to Loretta Lynn as we drove across the plains and into the badlands of South Dakota. I also wanted to try to draw a bouffant hairdo, which is seeing a resurgence of popularity that started with Amy Winehouse and continued with Adele and hasn't seemed to slowdown since. This is taken from an early publicity shot of Loretta Lynn, probably long before she made the album which was this week's theme. Also, drawing noses has never been my strong suit.

Country music doesn't travel so well over the atlantic ocean, so the first time I heard about Loretta Lynn was when Jack White decided to produce her come back. So here is a drawing of both of them.

I'm a bit late this week so it's a quicky. I'm a bit disapointed, I would have liked to find something better for the famous dogcow but well moof !

This is a drawing of most every Mac (or Apple!) computer I've used on a consistent basis, starting with the McIntosh Classic featuring this week's theme... Dogcow. I've always been a Mac/Apple user, starting with learning to type with Paws the orange typing cat on my school's Apple iie's to my first laptop, an iBook clamshell I got for high school graduation in 2000 right up to my (now outdated) iPhone 4 which is practically glued to my hand and all the apps that enable me to keep in touch with people all over the world, like... Michel!

I kind of misread the theme this week as the muscles concerned by the wiki article are more related to vital organs than motion muscles. But well talking about muscles the first idea that came to me was track cycling, cause I'm pretty obsessed about it these days. I keep watching videos of sprint and keirin competitions. I'm very impressed by how effective are the muscles in that sports, how the cyclist push them to their limit for few seconds.  I don't like the idea of people building their muscles only because it will make them look good. I think that the most beautiful muscles are the one that are effective and related to a task.

I was a little late with my drawing this week because I went up to Woodstock, NY for the weekend and spent the better part of Friday evening in a hot tub, staring up at the full moon, framed by spindly, bare tree branches. How does that relate to muscular layers? Well, I read this article in the New York Times which discusses a theory that our organs are tied to the moon and that's one of the reason that winter is so difficult. I suffer from fairly strong Seasonal Affective Disorder and winter is really hard for me. I guess I can blame the moon for disturbing the muscular layer around my organs for that.

So in a way this ancestor could have been a Song who knew a song :p

The theme this week was the Culture of the Song Dynasty and I decided to really run with it. A popular style for landscape painting at that time was to feature rivers and mountains. This is the updated, NYC version, taken from a photo I took of the New York Harbor days after Hurricane Sandy, with New York and Jersey City in the background. In NYC skyscrapers are as close as we get to mountains.

This week's theme Postpone Indefinitely 

I took a bit of a conceptual leap with this theme and made it fit to what I wanted to draw. This is view of the rooftops of Paris from my friend Leila's apartment in the 11eme. It's drawn from a photo I took during my trip there last summer. The drawing itself feels like a drawing 101 exercise in perspective and I think I may have failed. Also, I failed at scanning it very well, but I will work harder on this in the future. On a conceptual side, I've wanted, planned and hoped to move to Paris for the past 7 years. It has been postponed indefinitely because my life in NYC has intervened. I'm thinking next year might be the year I do it though...

I'm a little scared of posting this drawing of "me." I feel like it exposes all my drawing weaknesses, like shaky lines and odd perspective. I'm not sure it represents "me," but it's a place to start.

I don't know what I was thinking about when I told that this week's theme was "me" cause I never know what to do when people ask me to represent myself. So here is "me" with this white noise occupying my brain when I try  to find some brilliant idea to represent myself.

This project started as a mutual new year's resolution shared via twitter: to draw more. So simple. And yet, how to implement this idea in a way that we will actually do it and stick with it?  Especially when we live almost 4,000 miles (and six times zones) apart? In a flurry of tweets we decided to work on the project together to hold each other accountable and share it publicly to keep the pressure on to actually do it. Every week in 2013 we will each create (and post!) a drawing on the same theme, which we will randomly select from Wikipedia. So, one drawing a week, made by our two drawing hands, 4,000 miles apart. Or 1W2H4M. We hope you'll follow along!