After spending a few months doing soft airbrush lines that I would generally cover up, I switched things up when I made a Micah character sheet. I’m teaching Super Stories again this summer and I wanted to give the kids a bit more they could do with their character development. I made them a pencil version too, but I finished a version for myself.
hehe
inspired by me
Super dumb that I pulled this off so easily when I tried to make Micah with his staff when I first wrote about it last summer and I ended up with a very different kind of painting haha
This is what I wanted to make to compare him to his old era of staff fightings.
I’ve been thinking a lot in the revisions how similar Andrew and Ingrid are
Here are some old ones of this adorable trio
I’ve also been thinking about this intense one from approximately the same era for a while haha
This was literally just a concept drawing, it was loosely for Time-Painters where Andrew was a master painter and to some degree Micah and Ingrid were his apprentices? But one of the two of them goes off the rails. I don’t know, it kinda flopped
i added some lovely lines and it makes me happythis fine line portrait turned out soooo preeeettyWOLFGANG AND SHIN AS HIGH SCHOOL SWEETIES GAHHHthis is really fugly but it was lineart practice shin soohyuk is the most magnificent and unusual character of all time and i want to tuck him into bed and smooch his forehead
but also i don’t know how he can be so delicate, so yesterday i spent the day studying him and actuallly ducking traced him like i’m a fucking 10 year old to try to understand his weird wonderful anatomy better.
It’s been a vast and varied holiday season in my house, so it should come as no surprise that I ended up with several drafted Christmas illustrations before ending up with one I was happy with.
So that means you get lots of bonuses – the finished one I’m very happy with; IT’S SO COZY – and the drafts for the other versions.
<3I really liked this one and everything, but it was too much the same tone as the Halloween one, with Lucienne being a goblin. I also got freaked out with how similar Andrew and Ingrid looked ahahha.
I’m trash so I wanted to make a parallel kiss pic to Andrew and Micah’s forest kiss from Lilydale. I’m not quite as squealy, over the moon about it as I was about the first one, but I am into the TONGUES hahaha
It gives major Cirrus/Syracrus vibes from that picture I did of them in high school which is hilarious because Cirrus is The Ultimate Badguy in the 3rd Heartwood book. Really there’s visible tongue because MLM manhua has taken over my brain
I had the first flash this day talking to the receptionist about books where I’m like, excited to have some more brain space left rather than terrified of finishing this all-consuming trilogy.
The evil Cirrus + tongue picture in question lol. Kinda looks like Syr’s tongue is like a probiscus hehehahahaha
But I feel like I’m trying to emotionally prepare for it. Good news is there will be plenty of edits ahead of me I’m sure teheh. And it’s gonna be extra tedious since I wrote both of the last two parts without editing!
But I love them all so much and I’m sad already to be moving toward the first of the last two (large) scenes
Which of course culminate in A WEDDING EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Gotta throw in one of the OG couple pics of Andrew and Micah from Code: Compromised
An unexpected scene led to Andrew getting a concussion which was very goofy but potentially insensitive to the seriousness of concussions
Bluey and Gravity Falls brought it to my attention that a favorite cartoon trope of mine is eyes facing different directions
I’m sad that the hottest kiss (that I traced from a manhua for practice) turned out so bloody? I guess in that sense this was a practice lol
Well…the worst case scenario has happened. My dad planted the idea in me to turn Lilydale into a series and…well, that’s working out.
So that’s most of the art that I’ve been doing lately, but honestly what art could I possibly need to do ever again tbh, they’re perfect
And THEN…I was getting underway with it and the anthem band for MicahxAndrew, All Time Low, released a new single and IT. IS. A SPIRITUAL. EXPERIENCE for me.
I literally told Ryan that the fact that this song came out while much of the plot of this second one was planned and the new single matched the theme PRECISELY…like something about that is so unreal and implausible that…that’s the shit that moves me.
So here’s an image dump of illustrations since I started Superior.
Don’t worry, this part of their story is only TWO OUTTA THREE hehe
Maybe, probably. We’ll see haha.
Micah’s sad and angry in this one, ft. Sleepwalking lyricsAndrew on a snowmobile is an image Micah and I mutually find very sexy. But we know how I feel about drawing machines. Anyway, more Sleepwalking lyrics.This one I did at the tail end of Lilydale and I 100% imagine this is engagement photos for them.This was initially supposed to be an Inktober prompt but it did not remain on theme, but I loooove the vivid colors and the sketchtasticness
Ingrid goes full mom mode in SuperiorHere’s an amusing and super awkward now v then for Micah and Ingrid but now she’s taller than him as a faerie
HHHH I’m chokingAnother tail end of Lilydale one, SO KAWAII KYAAAAInktober prompt “empty” from Micah’s drunken night out
Yeah so it’s been done for like six weeks at this point but I still can’t get out of the Lilydale brain rot. I did two revisions myself and now my dad has it! And so far his comments have been totally what it’s needed.
I have a good feeling about this project. Even my supervisor asked about it yesterday haha.
So it’s me so I’ve always toyed with the idea of illustrations in my work and I was thinking how much I usually like it when content I like has candids of the characters. And I realized the likelihood of the characters taking photos of each other on their phones is pretty high, so I did a bunch of sketches to varying degrees of completion around this.
I did this one yesterday during a session and I can’t even. I want to eat him. Cutie.I designed the chest piece Micah gets at the end of Lilydale specifically to put it into this picture. Also I find it delightful because Ingrid, Lucy, and Micah. Hearts.Lucienne is an absolute goblin in this book.Micah and Arwen <3Micah’s spiritual encounter with a bobcat. It’s after he takes a piss in the woods.Mother. I was working on this stupid image for weeks and it’s still not finished. It’s very…creamy? I don’t know if I love the lack of texture haha. WHO AM I I’ve always hated texture tehehe.
I suppose I need to acknowledge in writing how OBSESSED I am with Micah right now. I’ve been on a two month All Time Low kick because Alex’s vocals match Micah’s voice and a lot of the tone in a lot of his songs is very Micah. Fortunately they’re songs I’ve heard after the fact so I know I didn’t accidentally inject them into Micah haha. But yeah, and fortunately this book would be published with my last name VanAlstine so people don’t start going Micah Stillwater…Mary Stewart…are they…the same Because yes, and no.
Oh yeah so I got really into mandalas after I discovered the symmetry tool, only the funny part about them is I’m not proud of any of them after the fact. Except this juicy orange.
I can’t believe it! Three weeks later, I’m done with Lilydale. It rounded out around 45,000 words.
I think it’s my favorite conjunction of characters forming new relationships. I literally didn’t bother coming up with any new characters except for Sam and Micah’s evil faerie mom. Micah and Ingrid are half-siblings now. Ingrid and Andrew both slept with Erik, but he’s dead for the whole story haha. Lucienne met Ingrid in Lilydale and kind of likes her? But it’s very understated. She’s a badass archer. Also Micah/Julian’s cat Fadil is a fun throwback to that being Julian’s original name, back when he was Andrew/Bakura’s adopted kid he found in Egypt. bahahaa
Micah and Andrew basically don’t have any relationship problems for most of the story cuz I’d say the main theme ends up being Micah’s identity crisis. Andrew isn’t asked to change a whole lot mostly because he started with a very mild animosity with faeries but as soon as Ingrid and Andrew realized Erik fucked them both up, the get past it.
So I have a lot of WIPs for Lilydale art and rather than waiting to post about this being done I was just going to post them all now.
I probably also have to make a page in My Mental Breakdown pretty soon too.
I worked super hard on the two portraits below to make into a sticker. This kissing one took like 5 minutes and it’s one of my favorite illustrations in a long time.Micah looks a bit awkward and wide and I have a different idea for his tattoo but I love his colors.I’m still not really sure what I don’t like about this one. I think Micah’s hand and bouquet are the best part.Bonding over mental health crises before they bone 😀 Ryan will never forget when I kept struggling with Micah’s closest arm and said it looked like a loaf of bread.The fabulous four, all looking quite sexy if I say so myselfThis was supposed to be super dynamic and whatnot but I kept not quite nailing the body positioning I wanted, but his face is so beautifully shaded it’s not a total waste. I’ve been trying to work on an epic cover? or something but remain stuck on wanting it to kind of look like that but not super.Lucy is a smug, sexual, reckless sonofabitch and it’s a lot of fun. Also ft my trans boy Sam who is based on a 12yo client I have and I told the client lolHad to go on Pinterest for men’s fashion since Micah likes dressing niceAndrew gets very nervous out in the wild I painted the Smith Ave bridge to try to use as a background in one of the portraits up there but it all got covered up ha. My son was super excited about this though as he calls it “the Ronan Bridge.”
So one of my other 12yos saw the kissing picture as my phone background and asked if I was going to post my story anywhere. Honestly it got me thinking, once I finish some revisions, just to put it out in the world myself and see what comes back.
I don’t know.
We’ll see.
Regardless, I’m really happy with how this story worked out. I think it does faeries justice, and it honors everyone’s histories as characters. Except Erik, who was pretty much a dog.
After trying and failing to read like 3 different books I finally decided it was time to put into action my do-over for Andrew and Micah to fall in love. When Ryan was reading Code: Compromised he was really bothered by the teacher/student dynamic (he doesn’t understand it like I do) so I resolved at that point to give them another go, and I knew I wanted to do a story about the Fae.
So I had this brainfart two weeks ago to set the story in Saint Paul because the Lilydale bluffs by my house are SOOOO magical so two weeks later I’m 35 pages/10,000 words in to my first story in 2 years and my first written story in 4.
I got to work on this painting on and off during telehealth sessions so it rose to a much higher level of completion than my work sometimes does.
Shocking all of us, I FUCKIN FINISHED Code: Compromised (best name I could come up with). It rounded out at 298 pages, infuriatingly. Haha. It’s not super high quality, overall I’d say though the images are better and more artful and obviously more skilled than when I was 18, realistically the paneling and bubbles are about like they were when I was a teenager.
I think the concept was super solid and the plot was really tightly knit, not trying to do too much, and the development of Micah and Andrew’s relationship was really tender and balanced (even if it oogs my husband out because Andrew’s older than Micah, sorry, I have my kinks, if you can even call “age difference” that…the teacher/student thing maybe, but age is shrugs.)
I go back and forth on whether I want to plunge into a “real” draft of it but I know I’d want to use my computer tablet for that, and having the time to do that seems like a distant dream.
I have to give an invisible blog shout out to All Time Low for their new album Wake Up Sunshine literally being the anthem for this whole story. It was fun to use a really old band’s new work to create my first new work in a really long time. I haven’t figured out how to best document like, I don’t know, the growth of these two since they came around in middle school. I know soon I want to add a page for this story to My Mental Breakdown but that’s another thing I have a hard time imagining squeezing into my stupid adult life.
The weirdest part about this project is that I’m really happy I finished a story but it was almost physically painful how obsessed, compelled I felt to work on this. At times in the last few months I was neglecting not only my child but my husband too and that was…weird. Writing feels like its cost has increased greatly since I was a carefree high school student. And the funny thing is that I don’t even feel “wowed” by this project’s quality, but if I’d put out 298 quality pages I think I’d be dead now.
So, more resolution on this project to come, but in the meantime, IT REALLY IS DONE! wow!
Here’s some art!
One of my favorite lines from ATL – “cause I’m not too far, and you’re my favorite place.”GLOWY SMOOCHYHands down my favorite page in the whole thing, and the upside down bi flag was coincidental; its’ a sunrise too hahaha. IT’S SO CUTE THOUGH GODDAMN
i had my headphones on and my husband just texted me from the living room that i was breathing very heavily, i guess these guys make me pretty hot hahaAfter musing on the accidental bi flag in the last page I threw this together today. I realized it is actually Pride month. But most people are keeping their mouths shut about it since there’s not going to be a Pride festival right now and the country has been literally up in flames for the last two weeks. So I think they’re realizing their Pride is not…super appropriate in light of Black people being murdered by the police. Yeah, current events in the captions of anime boys hugging!k so apparently Harry Styles revolutionized the fashion world and like, the song that he was wearing a crop top in is some 70s trash garbage, but I thought Micah would be excited at the opportunity to wear a crop top, so I did this haha.
Lastly I wanted a statement to live on my blog forever about recent events. A lot of white people are having potentially their first encounters with white guilt so Black Lives Matter is currently a very trendy slogan to get behind, in addition to many white people stating for the first time that they’re mad about racism. As someone who went through their teens blissfully unaware of the diversity around them, before stepping into a very whitewashed community for a year, before stepping deliberately back into a diverse neighborhood in South Minneapolis without fully grasping how I was still contributing to systemized racism and also basking in my white privilege, who then read Counseling the Culturally Diverse by David Sue, who then felt super guilty for glamorizing diversity and being a bit exhibitionist about diversity in my art, who has then backed off from pretending like I have a place to speak about or be part of the Black community, who has then come to some sense of peace about things, who has now realized many people did not go through all this…I have done a lot of smh at the white community around me, well-meaning as they are.
Many of my friends, Black and white alike, were in the cities protesting following the murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white fucker of a police officer who is now being charged by our amazing Keith Ellison for second and third degree murder. Riots ravaged my nearby city. Shit got destroyed. Uncle Hugo’s was burned to the ground. I was…quiet, withdrawn and depressed, wanting to flee the country as snapshots from apocalyptic games, movies, books flashed in my head, thinking about my innocent albeit white male son growing up in a crumbling country. Since then it seems like there is some really important systemic change that’s beginning to happen, and a lot of organizations, like BLM, have received amazing charity funding that they’ve been scrounging for for ages. And I’m really glad for that. But I know with most traumatic events, the people who weren’t “hurt” by it will move on with their lives. And I wanted to make a statement and a commitment to not forget that I always have and always will support powerful movements like Black Lives Matter. And I am committed to raising my white male child to make this world a better place for his Black brothers and sisters, to know that he has privilege, to encourage him to use it to improve the lives of those who have less privilege than him.
On this blog, Black Lives always have, and always will Matter.
