EnchantedCeiling is one year old today! I’ve added a couple new things to the site, and I am planning a couple more. Go say happy birthday with a new post!

I have been thinking about drawing more than I have been drawing lately. But I have been thinking about it in more than one sense: I have been intending to draw more– the expected sense of the phrase; and I have been thinking about the process and activity of drawing as a concept.

Danny Gregory’s Everyday Matters blog is like a daily spur to the drawing hand. He has a lot of advice and ideas for getting you drawing everyday, and his advice is usually pretty good. It is not spot-on, but it is enough to get the creative juices flowing. He treats his sketchbook as a camera, and by extension his blog is like a photo blog. Different from a daily comic about himself, Mr. Gregory is documenting things he sees by doing an actual observational drawing.

At first, I was a little put-off by the daily inspirational posts. I mean, who does this guy think he is, telling us how or what to draw? But then I remembered that I am voluntarily reading this guys posts, and really, I am going to take at least one of his suggestions to heart. It is not like he thinks he can fix everything– he is just giving the rest of us the same nudge he gives himself in order to keep himself drawing every day. And now that I think of it, my little brother and I used to do this all the time. We would sit down with a pile of blank paper and ask, “What should I draw?” Sometimes we’d get an answer and just go, and other times we needed more than one suggestion. Sometimes we would to give each other a squiggle to start from, and then we’d just build on it.

I plan on starting to do a daily self-portrait. Probably starting on Tuesday. If you can guess why I picked Tuesday, you can bake me a cake.

As I have poked around through his site some more, I realized I already knew about this guy. His book, also titled “Everyday Matters,” is a collecction of work from his daily journals that he started after his wife was hit by a subway train and became paralyzed. I don’t remember where I first heard about it, but it was in my Amazon wishlist for quite a while. I had forgotten about what the book was, so I deleted it from my wishlist before the holidays when I was sending my list to my family, but now it is definitely back in there.

Also, a quick note about the Book of Leviathan: I am not yet done reading it, but this guy is hilarious. Totally my kind of humor with the puns and wordplay, as well as some really clever running gags. Highly recommended.

I know I just changed the look of the site, but I thought I would add some traditional art to the site. The frogs are done in acrylic on board, and they usually hang in my bathroom over the clawfoot tub. They were inspired by this photograph of a frog that I met in Maine this past summer.

If you click on him, he will give you a really big version that you can use as a desktop. Enjoy.

(P.S. If you look closely, you can see he has a leech between his right front toes!)