If you've been reading this blog for any time You know I love to read Robert Genn's twice weekly writings. He and his daughter are both artists. Right now they are taking a helicopter trip to the peaks of a mountain and painting with a group. He writes about the excess of inspiration they find at the peak of a mountain and how you can search for better compositional elements where ever you find yourself.

I agree.

What inspires you?

I was speaking with a friend of mine about how certain things get my creative mojo going, like a walk to the cafe, a nice cuppa something hot and coffee flavored, and then a wander around the city.

Parked on Cabot Street during the Sketch Up I realized that the urban landscape inspires me as much as the natural. I need to train myself away from literal details. For instance, the Brown's of Beverly building has six windows on the left side not 3. I felt 3 worked better with my image than 6. 6 would have made that side too busy.

I love the Brown's building. In the AM it's lit up gold from the rising sun and as the sun sets the opposite side glows in the sun. It's a great building.

I hope to get a decent painting done of some of the buildings around me that give me inspiration. Maybe that will be my next chip in campaign.

When I was a kid my Dad had a big 1976 Ford F250. The thing was huge and green. When I had an ear infection (age 7) and had a really high fever my mother threw me into the passenger's seat and drove it to the doctor's office, though she couldn't reach the pedals and shifting was nearly impossible. When I got a little older my father redid the body on it and painted it with a gorgeous shade of bright metal fleck limey green.

At some point around this time my Dad bought a dump truck that did not run. It just needed a little work. He didn't pay much for it and it sat at the end of our driveway and near the bushes where our rabbits were penned. We used it as a giant rugged jungle gym. The back of the truck was a club house and it's rugged body couldn't be hurt with our shoes and hands. We spent hours and hours climbing up it. the best thing about that truck was that the roof and hood had thick metal so you could actual launch yourself over the  top of it and climb up over the top of it.

The bus that picked me up from grades K- 7 was a big old bus. A large rounded snout, dark green seats with hardly any cushioning, and a floor so grimey that anything it touched turned black. It didn't have any of these safety features new buses have, no instead, we bounced around on it's shockless carriage.

Those early interactions with those old trucks have cemented in my head that trucks should have big fat noses, big round head lights, and side mirrors you can do chin ups on. I love me some big round head lights. When I day dream of vehicles I think of trucks like these with character.

Do I forsee a series of truck drawings in my future?

@sirensidyll wrote, "What motivates you to push the comfortable boundaries you're accustomed to and treading in the choppy waters of the unknown artistically?"

It got me thinking what DOES get me trying new things artistically?

My initial answer was a new color of a favorite material, and that's true nothing makes me happier than a fresh new color of watercolor or acrylic. I test it out and mix it with old standbys seeing what fresh new colors I can get, sometimes I mix up whole jars of the color to make perfect flat washes.

Other times it's a sketchbook in a size I haven't used in awhile. Like my old standby 3.5×5.5 inches(9x14cm) that I get every spring**. Or a new tool like those Pentel Pocket Brush Pens or the E+M  lead clutch. Sometimes it's a blog post written by a friend or fresh discovery.

I realized I needed to dig a little deeper on this question, because the overwhelming first thing I do with all new materials? Search flickr's commons and find a friendly face and draw it. It's a great way to get to know a new material, find something you're comfortable with and draw it, it will tell you what that material can do.

The meat of the question was about stretching myself artistically and what triggers that stretch.

A relatively new phenomenon for me is drawing in coffee shops. I know that you all think I cut my teeth drawing in public, the truth is all through college I hated it, despised it. I enjoyed being with my classmates in class and talking to them but actively hated drawing in class. I always felt self concious about my skills, or lack of them. I thought that my friends my judge me based on my erasing lines and then redrawing them. I was not a sit out and about on campus drawing type of student, unless I knew that the spot was relatively secluded and I wouldn't be bothered- hence my many many drawings of the Stillwater River, drawn from the dock in the evenings during October, March and May*.

You might be wondering what was the catalyst for this change. It was to prove to myself I could do it. Force myself to see that no one really cared, and if they did they would look on in curiousity not judgement.

The truth is, that is exactly what I've found. No one judges me. Most people don't care and even fewer still look over my shoulder to see what I'm doing. Mostly children ask questions, "What 'cha doing? Are you an artist? I'm an artist too!"

Mostly the thing that stretches me artisticly is myself. I have something to prove to myself, and only myself. I can do it.

You can do it too.

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Last night as I lay in my bed wishing I could fall asleep I realized these little automatic drawings not only reflect my mood but improve it. I can come home after a long day, sit down with my pen, journal, and watercolors and feel much better by journaling it out via automatic drawing. Looking back I've turned to the automatic drawings at difficult times in my life. These drawings pepper my journals and sometimes fill sketchbooks with their flowing lines.

At one point  I had a lot of rules for the automatic drawings. At one point they were only done in Sharpie and in one long continuous line like colors could not touch sides; those were just a few. Eventually I felt that the rules restricted my ability to explore the subconscious and conscious themes that came up in these drawings, so I dumped the rules.

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