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Sometimes a piece of artwork is held off because I won’t decide whether to draw it or felt it. Sometimes ranch jobs are stalled that way as well. A weird way of procrastinating and one I’m well practiced at.

For a little while now I have felt this repeated nudge that said to do both a drawing and a felting of the same piece and I repeatedly told it: that’s nuts, I hardly have time to do one and drawings take so long. 

Then one morning, after needle felting on the piece shared in the last post, I found myself digging into my color pencil sets. I pulled out the rough drawing of the Sarplaninac dog I was felting and transferred it to black paper and began to draw. I didn’t stay at it for very long before slipping back to the felting but I had started, the nudge was awakened. A few minutes at a time, stretched over the course of several days it morphed onto the page.

When it was done I was so utterly satisfied, and for the first time in a long while, it had nothing to do about the result.  The result didn’t matter, the accomplishment of a process did. The heeding of the nudge did.

Oddly enough, when I’m in the pickle of deciding whether to felt or to draw a particular piece, it is all still one idea. In my mind the felting or drawing is the same piece, the same dog in this case, and even somehow the same outcome. So it’s striking how different the three versions are.