Consecutive days: 1

Click the sketchbook pages to enlarge.

Reagan claims it's a good thing to have a familiar default character, something to fall back on when I don't want to draw anything else in particular. He mentions a couple other reasons, but you'll have to talk to him about those. The thing I fall back on these days is mbear. Mbear is the default character that I draw to try out something new or attempt a new pose.

Head of a bear and tail of a monkey, mbear is more avatar than ego. The body is neither here nor there, and not specifically intended to be human, but human is the most useful and comfortable form to draw. He's not the most developed character in my head, but an old favorite, combining my affection for bears (and interest in their ancient cultural importance) with a story I read long ago about how Fox (I think) tricked Bear out of his tail. This bear, however, was smart enough to keep his tail.

Mbear, usually the quiet and solitary type, doesn't usually have a mouth. I haven't figured out how to work the jaw. On an earlier page, for some reason, mbear needed to say something, so I put a mouth on the side of his muzzle. That led to the exchange seen at the top of the first page.



Save for drunken stick figures above, and some jackal-doodles below, and the scattering of mbears, only a few of the other sketches are fully unreferenced.



The bulk of humans with their faces in these pages are from the oh-so familiar Great Italian Films.

I've got 48.5 pages of sketchbook to go, and 12 days to fill them.