After spending the last month now working almost exclusively on my tablet, I finally got around to doing a traditional painting of my heroes, Noelia and Sivarthis. One night I sketched out about 5 consecutive pages of “Dumping a Dragon” listening solely to “The Last of the Real Ones” by Fall Out Boy, because for some reason it resonated so deeply as a song about Sivarthis’s love for a small human girl who accidentally became his whole world.
I can’t quite believe how well or how easily this painting turned out. Last night when I got home from Chicago (see following paragraph) I was too worn out to try to navigate digital art, so I finally grabbed my amazing buttery smooth bristol board and started a sketch of Noelia and Sivarthis in bed. Honestly I hated how the lineart had started to turn out and I was positive I would discard it this morning. I’ve just been getting used to bold and polished lineart from my computer and I was a bit thrown by the sketchiness of traditional art. But if not for that I probably wouldn’t have approached the painting the way I did…which I’m OBSESSED with. I decided to lay tape over the last part of the lineart, which didn’t even run to the edge of the page, and then decided to try my seldom used method of creating white space with painter’s tape, since I’d never tried it on this paper before.
Not only that, but I dragged out my typewriter and managed to eke a bit more life out of it. I kind of blame my patience, but it’s becoming almost impossible to use. Granted, it definitely pays off, and I love how snugly the text fits into the center of the drawing. You should have seen me trying to glue it though haha.
And in this case, the power of their poses is definitely intentional. At the early part of their relationship, Noelia is definitely more withdrawn than Siv is when it comes to love. He sees her in a typical dragon fashion as a jewel, a treasure, something to adore. She enjoys him, but doesn’t necessarily have that depth of passion, and has a lot of doubts about them.
I decided to finally do this painting – though the image has been in my head for a few weeks – because over the weekend my nerd man and I drove to Chicago together to see Fall Out Boy perform in their hometown at Wrigley Field. We also got the chance to attend a free popup immersive art experience for their latest album. It was SUPER Walker Art Center, post modern art but like, I can accept that under the circumstances.
Also, this blog entry gets to be a testament to the fact that I am STILL working on “Dumping a Dragon!” I missed it more than my cats when I was in Chicago, and today I’ve colored 2 whole pages.
Granted, my overview of how many pages I’d worked on during my last entry was a gross exaggeration, and I’ve just now finished up coloring page 11. But 11 pages in a month is a pretty good output and more than I ever thought I could manage.
Apparently, according to my timehop the other day, I was working on my last graphic novel …Whispered the River a FUCKING DECADE AGO, when the hell did my life get so far in?
So here’s an old romantic drawing of Cirrus and Syracrus to follow Siv and Noelia. This drawing will always remind me of when this guy at church looked at what I was working on and awkwardly remarked on the amount of tongue in their makeout.
I mean…he wasn’t wrong.
I actually have every single page of the original draft of …Whispered the River scanned on my computer, so it’s kinda fun to flip through them.
Meanwhile here’s my favorite panel from the Sivarthis/Noelia breakup scene.
Clean and tidy and sad and emotive. I love both of them here but I’m definitely a bit mad at Noelia because she exemplifies all the insecurities I had about my own relationship when we were just starting out.
I’m starting my second week of school, so we’ll see how much time and energy I have to keep plugging out pages when I get home from classes.
It’s almost time to start a new scene in “Dumping a Dragon” and it’s only gonna get more exciting from this point on…so I hope I can handle it haha.
Oh also the next thing on my creative agenda is to do a drawing of my favorite couples. Siv and Noelia; Lucy and Levi; and Danny and Ingrid (whom I haven’t drawn FOREVER.)
