The Secret Life of Plants, detail.

The secret life of plants, detail, a photo by megan_n_smith_99 on Flickr.

This is a little sneak peak of the last pen and ink drawing I finished. I need to scan it. I started another one but am also working on some other projects, and actually i have a sinus infection and am not up for working on much of anything.

But here is a quote for you:

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

--Chuck Close