Art!, Dumping a Dragon, Holiday Drawings, Manga

christmas doodles, what else

Merry Christmas, Dreaming in Color! I took a break from serious Dumping a Dragon work because I was out of the house for most of the last two days. But the good news is I discovered a wonderful new art program to use on my Chromebook! Here are my doods. They’re all still Siv and Noelia!

Discovered I really like coloring with the pastel tool. Love the warm reds and purples. Have been feeling these two colors a lot lately.
First drawing I did in my new program. It’s super free and it doesn’t even have its own app store icon and it’s called Autodesk Sketchbook but it’s GREAT and Siv is so handsome in this! A blend of sketch brushes and airbush shading.
I HAVE GOOD NEWS. I CAN DRAW ON MY CHROMEBOOK WHILE I BIKE. It was amazing and challenging and Noelia looks BOMB AS HELL in this.
Art!, Comics, Dumping a Dragon, Holiday Drawings, Other Peoples' Work!, Writing Journey

holiday vibez

Christmas arrives in five days! I have three days of work before a planned week off at home with Ryan, including an overnight stay in Duluth. Similarly, I finished my first semester at Saint Thomas yesterday and I was excitedly biding my time until today when I could make an OC Christmas card.

At first I wanted to do a feature of an old crew but I decided I needed to honor the fact that I am STILL working on Dumping a Dragon, despite a few weeks in the last few months when I was thinking it was dying. I’m almost at 50 pages actually (which will be celebrated by a separate blog post). I was sure that just like Cadence, DaD was going to die right around 45 pages, and right at the part of the story I expected it to.

Making no promises about its future, I feel very proud of myself and humbled by my inspirations that I haven’t stopped working on it. Taking breaks is totally allowable and not indicative, apparently, of its certain doom.

I find myself regularly daydreaming about Siv and Noelia when certain songs come on, etc., and I’m finally going to reward myself in a few short pages of doing yet another flashback to fonder times for them, so I get to finally draw human Siv.

Anyway, of course it’s human Siv who graces this year’s Christmas card, but I think Noelia kinda steals the adorableness show in this one. Only I would totally wear Siv’s ominous YOU BETTER WATCH OUT Christmas sweater.

Noelia is supposed to look like she’s wearing crushed velvet. Limited success I would say.

Into the Spider-Verse

Another blogworthy event is that last night I saw “Into the Spider-Verse” and it was AMAZING. It made me glad for reading the first few issues of Miles Morales back when I was in college; I feel like it gives me some serious nerd cred now, haha. And Nick Miller as a pudgy grown up Spider-man was fantastic in every way.

Image result for into the spider verse

I feel like the movie paid such homage to comic books in a way I never thought I’d see; it got me at once jealous and emotional, haha. Since it’s just hit theaters there aren’t any good screenshots to demonstrate what I’m talking about. But the film regularly overlaid their handsome CGI with comic elements including yellow-background narrative text, motion lines, and sound effects. I even cried a few times! In the first few moments of the film I was like “um Miles is supposed to biracial” (because his mom presented as African American) and then she yells at him in Spanish and I was like “…oh good!” haha. There are also some noteworthy voice actors in it which I was proud of myself for recognizing.

And it was great that Miles spends the first 75% of the movie kinda failing. He doesn’t immediately gain control of his super-powers; he doesn’t even immediately believe in himself. 

Oh, also, I will say the big screen did nothing to add interest or appeal to Spider-Gwen for me. She’s as boring, generic, and Trying Too Hard as she ever has been (and her ballet flats were really stupid.)

Anyway, I was glad I got to usher in a short break from school and responsibilities with such a good comic book film! Aaaugh! 

Also my husband and I are big dorks and I love him so much because we always laugh loudly at the same fucking things and I’m sure everyone in the theater hated us, but I don’t care and I love us. SO. MUCH.

I can’t wait till after Christmas so I can finally post my new art of us. Only that also means I have to make cat art since Scribbles isn’t in it. *tear*

Art!, Holiday Drawings, Original Characters, Sun-Walking

sing-songy valentines drawings

Yet again, some 4 years later, I somehow ended up accidentally using Lee and Lucy for a Valentine’s drawing. Probably regret Levi’s hat. He’s not a hat kind of guy apparently. Not that it looks bad, it just makes him look so un-Levi-like. I fucking love both their cute little faces. And Lucienne’s glorious thick Tangled-esque braid. Friendly reminder that Lucy and Lee have reminded me of Rapunzel and Flynn ever since I saw the movie in theaters when I was first writing it eight fucking years ago per IMDB.

Used a surface blur this time around to soften the grainy familiarity of colored pencils. And nod to Levi’s “SW” hat.

Hopefully now that I finally put the lyrics from that one song into a drawing I’ll stop being so ridiculous about it.

Art!, Holiday Drawings, Ryan & Me

surpassing witchy warmup

Apparently the Mary as a Witch motif has been very inspiring to me lately. Worked on this over the course of three evenings. FRICKING LOVE IT. One of my most sophisticated color palettes and compositions on the computer in ages. Glad I more or less covered up my panty peek so I’m ont embarrassed about that…in all frankness you can still see it under my semi-transparent flutters. ^_^

This witch drawing was very well received on Facebook, but somehow it still doesn’t feel like an official addition to my art unless I post it in my blog.

For the record, these two sketches below were definitely my warmups for that witch drawing, which is cool. I actually let these two be sketchy/thoughts/experimental. I love the red and black one; it was first, and then I think I tried too hard with the other one and ended up abandoning my attempt to add hair because nothing looked good.

Art!, Holiday Drawings, Original Characters, Ryan & Me

autumn cometh

Putting this together made me feel super productive, because I have a lot more moderately finished pictures than I thought IN UNDER A MONTH!! (It’s been months since I’ve posted less than a month apart!)

I’ve started my new job and I. LOVE. IT. I love my students, I love my coworkers (that’s saying a lot for teacher coworkers…my experience thus far has been feeling like gum stuck to their shoes), I love my drive, and I love the crumbling, bug-infested building we’re in.

I’m gonna go ahead and thank that for my productivity artistically, but I could be wrong. I just know that getting home at 4 has never felt so much like I still have life left in my day even though I’m working full time.

So here’s what I’ve done!

pastel magic lg

I LOVE THIS THING! I’d done a painting recently where I ripped tape for the border and loved how rugged it made the border look. So after like a month I finally remembered to try a painting like this. I made it eensy weensie and I sketched it first and then just kind of crazy painted it and then sketch line arted it afterwards. She’s like some sort of punk pastel magician.

I would say she is the closest projection of the kinds of students at my new work whose images I’ve fallen in love with. So much envy happens when I see kids with fluorescent hair cut in outlandish fashions. I miss the days when my mom would pay for $150 color jobs for my hair. Or when I could dye my hair an unnatural color without feeling like it had to be a peekaboo or else I wouldn’t be professional enough.

Another young teacher at work gave himself merman hair last weekend and I got envious all over again. I just don’t know if I’m flamboyantly gay enough to use that as an excuse. And with the number of times I’ve been mistaken for a student, I feel like I don’t want to make that worse.

All the same, I love soaking in the pure, unadulterated creativity of the students around me. It brings me back to the days when I could draw crazy people and write ridiculous stories without thinking twice about it, because why would I?

cat bending
catermination colored

Ryan and I were re-watching Avatar while I was trying to doodle, so this is what he told me  to do when I asked him what I should draw. I harassed him because all I really draw anymore is Ryan things but it’s because he comes up with adorable ideas like this that happen to do with him.

HEE HEE so what, last Sunday or something when Ryan was on his way home from his second job, and we were both overwhelmed by life (he’s got two jobs, we’re trying to live on the rest of our summer money, I am taking two classes right now, both of which I hate…) and so I felt there was nothing better to do than to turn us into cheery kawaii cat people who believe that they can make it. I tried to call it “Catermination” but Ryan wouldn’t let me say that without going CAT TERMINATON?!?! and gesturing wildly at Jericho on the bed.

When my entire family was watching football I had no other choice than to bring up my drawing tablet and ignore the television. So  I drew a weird elf girl blowing a weird bubble.

blow
p i g t a i l s

And then I drew a weird cat girl scrutinizing her hand weirdly. And I love her hair.

So, in light of my upcoming move in 17 days, and a job I like, BRING ON THE NEXT CHAPTER!