Category: Redefining Evil

Holiday Drawings, Original Characters, Redefining Evil, Sun-Walking, The Heartwood Trilogy

love day

mary v.

I knew I wanted to make a Valentine’s Day picture. It finally occurred to me reading someone’s post on Instagram that I hate Valentine’s Day as a corporate greed and performative holiday that make coupled people feel pressure and single people feel miserable, but it’s always so tempting because I love pink, hearts, and kisses.

Surprisingly, I decided to make a smooch between Lucienne and Ingrid rather than Andrew and Micah. I was actually working on a concurrent kiss but not Valentine’s picture of the boys, but I knew I wasn’t going to get that finished in time. Thinking about it on my drive to work, I think I’m going to have to make a version of this with some line art, but I finished this at 10:30 very specifically to have it done on Valentine’s Day, so without further ado.

I was going to stop at a sketch for this and I actually think the sketch turned out really pretty too. The angle of Lucienne’s face was a bit better in the sketch.

I had some smooches in mind with them and other partners they’ve had in the past thinking I had several more that were done on Valentine’s Day, but I think this Lucy one from Sun-Walking was the only one.

Circa 2012 I believe
I kept picturing this one until I realized it was a Christmas picture. Circa 2007.
I thought this was a Valentine’s Day picture but that’s not when it says I uploaded it to this blog, so I’m confused and scared. Anyway, it’s got a bloody heart and a smooch about to happen. And Ingrid. Which gave me the idea, I’ll record here, that since I killed off Erik I can turn him into a faerie challenging Ingrid for the throne in the Redwoods, so now I want to write that ahahha.
A spicy 2008 shot that makes Ingrid look like a harlot but I think that was the point
I was immensely proud of this braid crown, and I was immensely proud of the braid crown for the one I finished yesterday, so I had to post this one. Funnily enough it’s actually from the same scene as that purple one, but this was from my rewrite of Wind-Running. And yes, their ten year age difference DID end up feeling yucky. lol.
Art!, Cadence, Error, Original Characters, Redefining Evil, Ronan, Ryan & Me

inktober etc.

mary v.

I decided to try to commit (cautiously) to Inktober this year because I had so much success doing my 100 Days project last year. 21 days in and I haven’t missed a one and I’ve produced some pretty painterly pieces around a theme. In fact I’m writing this at my (new) job but I have some more to add to the inktober dump when I get home.

The prompt for this day was “stuck” so I was going to do a sexy conflict with a dagger involved but I wasn’t in the mood so I did this purple skinned orc type instead.
Kawaii boobie fun colors
I almost couldn’t generate an idea for “pick” so I threw it in as some dialogue haha
One of the earliest prompts that I really got into
Ahhh…Solaris
My kid being a tall skinny gremlin
Ronan was getting weird with his toys
a quick family portrait
I spent so many days working linelessly I was beginning to doubt if I could be satisfied with lines, so I did just lines
Ronan kept asking for Mommy, Gaggee and Ronan pictures when he’d look at my old pre-baby family portraits. But we’re poor so I haven’t gotten this one printed yet.
this prompt combined two days so i could spend more time on this archangel gal
so ronan was super sick this week for the first time ever and it gave him super toddler powers that almost broke us. but yet he’s obsessed with the stars and moon like a true witch’s child.
sexy danny after he popped up in my dream, using the same lyrics i used a decade ago
last night i had a dream i was crushing on the crow lady from kikis delivery service since ronan and i watched it this week, but she told me she thought i had a thing going with andrew but i was afraid he was going to friendzone me. ronan was very confused and couldnt figure out if i was drawing mommy or daddy. story of my life ronan. story of my life,
Art!, Redefining Evil, Writing Journey

dailies “behavior change” project

mary v.

So one of my classes for this spring semester is called Learning & Behavioral Change and, surprise, it involves a behavioral change project! Our professor wants us to essentially use the skills we learn in class to develop a new habit/break a bad habit. And of course a bunch of his examples are like, weight loss, diet, etc., and I’m like, well I don’t foresee that going well as I get increasingly pregnant. Some of the non-negative examples were like, write a journal daily and meditate daily. So I was like well…I already journal enough, and I don’t really want to try meditation.

And then I was like !!!! I’ve been feeling distant from my art life lately, why don’t I do a DAILY DRAWING?!?!

I figured it wasn’t quite specific enough to just do a drawing since I could do sketch or computer and it would be difficult to keep them all together then. And like also, my digital tools are spectacular and I kind of never feel like I fully utilize my $800 display tablet.

Sooo, a digital drawing a day! And then I have to write a paper about it.

The good news is it’ll keep my blog busy, so here’s some of my favorites.

Used a reference?!?! What?!?! Cool.
Practicing some different brushes/actual painting.
So I never liked Fall Out Boy’s “Champion” that much but the line “if I can live through this / I can do anything” had really been speaking to me since I found out about my cyst. I listened to it 5x in a row on my drive to work this week and got this flash of Ingrid looking pissed off and fierce as hell with these lyrics. Ryan asked if he should be concerned but Ingrid is typically covered in blood haha.
Art!, Redefining Evil

danny’s a poo poo head

mary v.

So for some indiscernible reason, I have had like four dreams with Danyil in them in the past three weeks. Like, of all my characters, wtf does he think he’s doing getting stuck up in my head? Anyway, last night he was trying on all this different finery, purportedly for the Redefining Evil ball, and so I figured I’d better draw this poop. It’s like a really bad drawing but oh well.

Art!, Cadence, Other Peoples' Work!, Redefining Evil, Sun-Walking

bang bang (there goes your heart)

mary v.

After my recent (No) Trouble piece I started thinking about how awesome all of the super “girl power” songs have been lately. The next day the guy on the radio was all like “There have been some females on the radio lately who are just ON FIRE” and I was like HELL YEAH so then I came home and watched the music video for “Bang Bang!” (Nicki Minaj, Ariana Grande, and Jessie J). I just started doodling and as soon as I did Cirrus’s pointer finger I ran with the idea and made my most powerful women into a drawing. I kept sketchy black lines and colored sketchy style, including shading. Weirdly I’m super into how the black lines ended up looking over the super pastel color scheme. I also love Cirrus’s star shirt. The writing on the bottom ended up being subtle enough to kind of create a nice solid background and I loved the little hearts I spontaneously added.


Started doodling waiting for my boyfriend to get home because we’re both so hipster and easy to draw and this was something he said to me last week and then I added terrible hashtags and giggle.

I took this picture of my boyfriend cuddling with his giant cat a long time ago and had lofty aspirations to turn it into a super fancy drawing and then I spent 5 minutes on this.

nsp peeps

Speaking of him, I made some promotional art for the podcast that he does with his brothers/dude friend and they’re all super funny while they dick around with video games so go watch them be derps.
 

Art!, Emotional Breakdowns, Redefining Evil

new

mary v.

 

This is the first piece I’ve finished on my brand new laptop! I definitely went broke on this new beast of a computer at just the right time. Trying to pull my photos and documents off my old computer showed me how close it was to death. I mean maybe that’s all in my head…

Anyway I have a computer now that doesn’t make me scared of working in Photoshop. And also (shhh) I’ve upgraded to a “trial” (wink…wink) version of Photoshop CC, so everything is shinier and newer than the last version I was working in.

As for the actual piece, it started when I was nearly exploding with aimless frustration today and I needed to do something to channel my feelings. Since Ingrid is pretty much my muse (and I’m casually working on another rewrite of Terror of Night) I went with her immediately. Also because I love her hair. I was working on a page of “Stealing from Raquildis” when her pose popped into my head, so I gave up on that and worked on this instead. Shades of red are definitely my go-to colors, especially for digital work. I followed through a little more with shading and cleaning up the lineart, too.

Art!, Redefining Evil, Sun-Walking

only sketches to show

mary v.


Getting texts from Kyra at various points in the story while she was reading Sun-Walking made me more sentimental about Lucy. So I drew her post-story with tattoos and scars on her legs. … Yay?


Weird fluffy Ingrid.

This has been a somewhat discouraging last few months for my art. Really, since my art show, I haven’t produced much of anything unless it was a sketch for a student or a birthday card or a mindless doodle. Mostly, I do blame the fact that I work 47 hours a week and I have consequently lacked the time and energy to really dig into a creative project.

But another somewhat stranger thing that I have realized is that many of my most prolific periods have correlated to…uh…well, loneliness. During the height of summer when I’ve been home alone all day, or during semesters where my life revolved around going to class and going home at night. Where I wanted to write the perfect relationships because I didn’t know where they were in my life and I desperately needed them anyway.

All my major projects have reflected upon something I’ve experienced. I wrote Nikkei about my favorite cat, and about all my inside jokes, and all the manga I devoured. I wrote Rebels because I wanted a team, allies. Redefining Evil meant to unite my faith journey and my occult interests. Cadence was a coming of age story about a girl who decides to choose the right path rather than the one she wanted, only to find that they were one in the same. Farewell, Fairytale exposed to me my secret romantic that was hiding beneath the implausibilities in romance. Catcher did the same, poking myself into acknowledging that I could never be as cold as I acted. Sun-Walking declared that I didn’t think romance and independence were mutually exclusive. And Unface, which was the last original idea I completed, was my way of telling myself that some things are meant to end.

And I guess the thing is that I haven’t really had the time to think about where I am now. For the first time in my life, I’m not a student. I haven’t even had the time to think about that because my life transitioned so easily from learning to teaching. More than that, my life has somewhat smoothly transitioned from being alone to feeling like I have someone.

I was really hoping to plunge back into my make-believe worlds in this week off but I’m finding I don’t even really know where to start. I had a sizable start on Stealing from Raquildis but there are two problems. First, every time I open up that last WIP page, I just stare at it, scribble a few lines, and then lose interest. Secondly, my poor computer is beginning to putter out and opening such a massive file creates massive and heartbreaking lag on my computer. I’m not sure I’ve got the patience to wait forever for one damn line to render.

So the only open projects I have are Time-Painting, which actually seems pretty dull now despite my stellar crew of Andrew/Micah/Ingrid, and the rewrite of Redefining Evil. I told my dad that like the story would most likely benefit from as many changes as I’d think about doing, but that changing the shit out of it kind of makes me feel like I’m insulting the work that’s gone into the story. And I got a little stuck in Ingrid’s narrative. Also, dealing with the supernatural/spiritual aspect of the story is difficult. I don’t necessarily believe in the same elements that I charged into the last draft of the story and it’s harder to include the details that I did, yet leaving them out has actually made it feel flatter in places. That should probably be my way of knowing that I shouldn’t work on it right now, but it’s definitely my go-to project and doing that is considerably easier than starting a story from scratch. ARGH!


Weird sexy sex Ingrid. I love the poppiness of this though.


I just did this a few days ago and I love it. I can’t commit as easily to a sketchy digital piece as I did to this and it ended up drawing from Degas and I love the color scheme. It feels slightly unfinished but I don’t know what to add to it.

Oh and here’s some emo crap that I did when I was super stressed out a few weekends ago. I changed the Chevelle lyrics because “scene” didn’t fit but “mess” did.

Some more lyrics I decided to work on for an inordinately long time because typography sucks.
be still my soul

Art!, Emotional Breakdowns, Original Characters, Redefining Evil

oh, baby you’re a classic

mary v.

baby-youre-a-classic

So I accepted some time ago that Micah represents myself in male form so that nobody’s been able to accuse me of overusing my “Mary Sue” (as Margaret daintily put it…to my chagrin), but recently I have begun to acknowledge that Ingrid/Sophie is my female representation of self…but only when she’s black? Not sure what this means, but I kinda like it I think.

Anyway, I LOVE DRAWING LIKE THIS. I did a really clean sketch and then painted under it in CS5. I tried some light vector shading, staying in a tight color palette to avoid becoming garish. I LOVE TIGHT COLOR PALETTES but so far I haven’t done anything except browns, haha. I don’t really like Micah’s lips but I couldn’t give Ingrid full lips and then keep to my lipless stylized style for him.