plogg: The Dial-Up Drawings

Beach Girl

I had dial-up internet until 2009. That meant speeds of 40 or 50 kilobits per second...if I was lucky. Waiting for a page to load took forever. It was tedious and aggravating. I had piles of notepads with white paper, 5 1/4" x 8", thick stock. I always kept one between the keyboard and the screen, to make notes or doodle, always with a ball point pen. In the last few months of 2008 I started drawing something more than a scribble, using one of my Staedtler felt tip pens. It was better than staring at the screen, waiting.

It was a good exercise, because the drawings were extemporaneous and, as I was using a pen rather than a pencil, I couldn't do any erasing; if I made a mistake, all I could do was curse myself, or work around it. Not that it mattered: they were just doodles that no one would ever see. Till now. Here's a few of the better ones from those last few months of dial-up. One and a half inches of the paper in those pads is taken up by the company logo, so the illustrations are actually 5" x 6 1/2" or less. Arranged in alphabetical order.