It's encouraging to see myself making new and different mistakes as I sit here drawing crappy chinese dragons over and over and over. Well, to be precise it's nice to look at an otherwise crappy drawing and be able to see (in amongst all the new mistakes) the things I got right this time that I got wrong last time. At the moment I'm using Hokusai's illustrations of dragons as a model, and you really don't appreciate how good he was at what he did until you try to reproduce it yourself. But it's like that with everything. I'm sure I'll never really understand how good Hendrix was if I never pick up a guitar. Feh. Generally, I need to work harder and more consistently. Drawing is fairly exhausting, but that's probably only because I lack stamina. So I'd better get on with developing some then.

Bought an Alphonse Mucha book today. It's becoming more and more clear to me that if I really want to produce a beautiful image of something, I need to be able to draw it, because this essentially allows you to create whatever object it is you intend to depict to order, with the constituent elements precisely arranged to convey the effect intended. Only in this way can you ensure sufficient purity of intent in the final work for it not to seem somehow subtly aborted or misbegotten (all of my work to date is seems aborted or misbegotten to me, by the way, and it bothers me). Anyway, all of this might seem obvious but given the number of alternative sources of imagery in use today (cameras, stock sources, pop culture, other peoples' websites, wherever) and the overwhelming arguments of convenience in favour of using them, it's less obvious than it might be. But if you don't want to be beholden to your source material's limitations (and if you want to avoid debts to that material's originator) then you really need to be able to create your own from scratch.

Getting better at drawing spines. Hokusai's dragons feature spines like those of lobsters. Getting the effect right depend firstly on keeping the spines coherent - they need to point away from their source in the same way, they need to have the same character in any given region, and their size needs to develop evenly across the body surface. Secondly, care needs to be taken to keep their density relatively low; if the spines are too dense, they begin to acquire a quill-like appearance that lack the appropriate bristly vigor. The same caveats tend to apply to hair; even disordered hair is best rendered either as an even, coherent arrangement with a few stray strands, or as an evenly disordered mass. Half measures tend only to look unsatisfactory, however accurate the approach might be in principle.

Notes on the use of Copic Markers:

- Bleedproof paper permits considerably more control for line work, but is rather unforgiving for anything else. Applied colour is almost unavoidably blotchy. Another disadvantage is the tendency for the marker to pick up pencil lead, which stains the nib and leaves smears in the colour. Copic Sketch markers are useful for line work; Brush Multiliners are about equally useful. The former are usually OK on normal paper (particularly for a certain faintly libidinous effect in calligraphy), the latter usually bleed too quickly for their finer points to be effective.

- Colourless blender is very difficult to use. A particular problem is the fact that colours look different (paler and slightly blotchier) when drawn across a surface that's been wet with blender as opposed to dry paper. It's correspondingly possible to use blender to bleach out a coloured area, but this leaves a dark-coloured ring around the area bleached and on balance there aren't many useful applications for this effect. The only thing I've been able to consistently use blender for is to induce bleeding around the edges of things.