Category: Redefining Evil

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.