Bike Freeway

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    Two things about this one:

     #1) I got a new bike recently. I LOVE it, and I ride it everywhere, so I'm kind of bike obsessed at the moment. It shows up in my drawings. 

     #2) It has been scaldingly hot out recently. Triple digits, which always plays havoc with the "brown" part of my black-and-brown ink. It partially dries out while I'm working with it, then I add water and it gets a little less like gooey tar. This happens several times. 

     But on the drawing too, it lays there kind of gooey and "never quite dry". And a smart boy would remember to stick a piece of blotter paper between the sheets before he closed his Moleskine book and clamped it shut with a bunch of spring clips*. But in this case I didn't, and the gooey ink kind of blobbed onto the opposite page, especially where it was folded over against some white Cel Vinyl. 

     Oops.

     But fortunately for you and I, I made my big book-folding mess AFTER I had scanned this piece. So it still looks okay here. 

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    *I clamp my book shut with clips for the sake of the pieces that I paste in. They are usually kind of wrinkly from the watercolor washes, and my Moleskine too is kind of round and wavy after a few months of wear and tear. So nothing really wants to lie down in it. But, if you clamp a bunch of spring clips around the edge (three on each side, one on the top, and one on the bottom), it really forces every bit of the wrinkly wash drawing down upon the paper of the Moleskine. Then when the paste dries after ten minutes or so, one can remove the spring clips. 

     JUST REMEMBER TO PUT SOME BLOTTER PAPER BETWEEN YOUR MOST RECENT DRAWINGS SO THAT SOME OF THE GOOEY INK DOESN'T BOND TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PAGE!   …like I just did.