Old Office Art

I used to do repetitive work for pay. Office-type work in a building with cubes. I was surrounded by staplers, locked shred bins, clinging cash registers, and disorderly queues served by staff who didn’t care. When I had downtime I would take the humble office tools I found myself surrounded by and stave off boredom by creating art. I would use cheap plastic pens and office supplies to create art on discarded scraps of paper. I would arrange the office supplies on the scrap paper, trace a part of their outline with the pen, and then move them to another location and retrace to create images like a duck.

I have kept these creations for the past 9 years. They have been folded flat at the bottom of a box that has moved with me from almost-Canada to nearly-Mexico. My packrat nature would not allow me to part with these artworks. I recently found them while cleaning out my basement and they were perfectly preserved between other things I should have discarded long ago. Instead of throwing them away I decided to do make them better.

Now that I have a different set of circumstances and skills¹ I decided to update those old pen drawings using krita, gimp, and inkscape. This new work has finally made these drawings useful after sitting for idle so long. My only goal 9 years ago was to keep boredom at bay. I very much hope that these artworks lift your spirits as they have lifted mine.

The duck artwork was originally created on the back of a scrap piece of paper turned landscape. I used scissors for the rounded outline elements² and a black pen for tracing. Digital FLOSS tools¹ were used to augment these original drawings.

You can see my art for sale here. I plan to add additional works as they are completed.