AAAAHHHH sorry Dreaming In Color, I totally sucked at blogging over the tail end of winter/early spring. Holy crap, life has been so exhausting and busy and involved. School’s been going great; after my initial total terror about going back to school (because of the money involved), I have no doubt that I’m doing the right thing for my life and career. It’s so good thinking that the end of this road for me is a license to practice where I’ll get to help people by helping them to create their feelings on a canvas, just like I’ve always done for myself.
But between schoolwork, playing video games instead of creating, and questionable employment for the upcoming schoolyear, I’ve just known that I need to blog and it’s built up and built up and just not happened.
But finally! The last day of the school year was yesterday. I’ve got a week off before I teach Super Stories, my graphic novels course, for the second year in a row. It’s my first weekday home without some stress-related reason, and I already feel so refreshed and ready to stretch my creative wings again.
I tried to pull together most of my drawings of late, and I’ll admit it looks a bit sorrier than it honestly felt. I haven’t been doing as much digital art as usual but I still feel like I’ve been making an adequate amount of traditional doodlies.
Here’s the second annual birthday card I drew for my tall clever boyfriend Ryan. It’s literally the first time I feel like I have successfully combined ink drips with a real drawing, so I’m
really proud of it for that reason. And ughhh that watercolor shading!
I was shocked by how ~*~**~*pretty*~*~*~*~~* this watercolor painting turned out. The cape was a deliciously pleasant surprise considering how poorly it started off. And the yellow swirl is surprisingly delicate and visible. The only thing I wish I could have fixed is that in the sketch it did look like her lips were pursed. Now she looks so indifferent.
I did this sketch a million years ago but it still gets me all squeaky. It pays an homage to this drawing done at the time I was working on Nikkei (anywhere between 7th and 9th grade, so 14-15yr old Mary…oh shit, that’s a decade). The Spice Shack is some dumbass coffee shop I invented for Nikkei (since his name is a spicelololol), only in the above picture, I drew in myself and Ryan with my original muse posse. Those are the “muses” that are featured in my embarrassing Wordpad conversations in fact. Micah/Myoku is pissed that Ryan’s taller than him, but Danny/Eripmav insists that he’s not *that* tall. I didn’t want Andrew/Bakura to look that much like Micah/Myoku and Ryan, so I shortened his bangs. Ingrid/Sophie/Mikara is most likely saying something profane in my ear. And Shani is looking adorably vacant as per usual. Can we all appreciate the fact that I did better with the perspective this time around though?
All of the pictures below I don’t even remember making. Okay except for the “You draw a lot of girls for a straight chick” one which I did last night, in response to the batch of women that I drew during my Saturday class at grad school hahah.
Yep this is the batch of girls I drew while at class. My professor didn’t even yell at me! She just looked and said with her adorable, faint Finnish accent, “Ooh, talented girl” and then she reminded me of my host mom. ^_^
My goal over my weeks off this summer is to really nurture my art and writing again. I had this somewhat depressing conversation with my father this morning about why I’ve stopped writing, but he concluded what I’d been feeling too and that means essentially accepting where I am right now. I just don’t feel like I have stories to tell. Pictures, definitely. Doodles aplenty. Paintings for sure. But stories? Not at the moment, hard as I may be resisting that.
