Art!, Emotional Breakdowns, Myoku Needs a Tag, Original Characters

serious boys

It’s been a rough and emotion few weeks
And it shows haha.

My portraits are…real dark.

This one was from last week because I was hooked on a Chevelle song, tale as old as time am I right.
And I think someone I followed on Instagram posted real glowy eyes so I popped em in at the end.

all. this. time. felt slow. we’re alone. underground. where we’ll grow. endlessly.

Here are two Chevelle drawings from the mid to early 2000s. I know Micah in that one is probably 2004, Sotoka’s most likely 2005 or 2006.


Honestly this other one I thought of during a session so I don’t know specifically why it came to me buuut. It wasn’t even going to be Andrew at first, but it didn’t seem like Micah’s vibe so I switched them haha.

It’s called

Murder on My Mind

Yahahaha it made me think of this one. Which is definitely from 2003.

Emotional Breakdowns, Lilydale, MicahxAndrew, Myoku Needs a Tag, Original Characters, Other Peoples' Work!

honing skills

i added some lovely lines and it makes me happy
this fine line portrait turned out soooo preeeetty
WOLFGANG AND SHIN AS HIGH SCHOOL SWEETIES GAHHH
this 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.

i fucking can’t
Emotional Breakdowns, Lilydale, MicahxAndrew, Original Characters, Writing Journey

superior

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 lyrics
Andrew 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 Superior
Here’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 choking
Another tail end of Lilydale one, SO KAWAII KYAAAA
Inktober prompt “empty” from Micah’s drunken night out

Emotional Breakdowns, Myoku Needs a Tag

just a cute micah + a then and now

I was starting to realize how that fancy Micah painting I did earlier this year looks good (kind of awkward though), but isn’t really comparable to other Micah portraits I’ve done over the years. So I endeavored to make a more anime style one that compared better thinking it would take several days plus, but…I did it in like a few hours. It’s super hecking cute. That’s all I have to post about, but I am kind of working on some other nostalgia rot of Andrew+Micah+Ingrid+Lucy how they used to be versus how they appear in Lilydale. I just haven’t gotten it to a satisfying point yet.

I did it! But the final product is just Micah and Andy haha.

Art!, Emotia, Emotional Breakdowns

what little hope i have i hold for you

The mood has finally struck. This image came to my head a few days ago when I realized it’s been quite a bit since my last Emotia painting when I realized the last one was before Ronan was born. A lot of milestones have been reached since “I am Growing.” For example, I had a baby haha. But I’ve also had another surgery since then. I also finished grad school. And the love of my life is in one of his hardest periods since I’ve known him right now.

Ryan joked when I was talking about the feather that it was Emily Dickinson, but it is.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

Emily Dickinson

I’ve thought about this poem a lot since we analyzed it back in high school because we talked about how delicate and easily crushed it makes hope sound. But I’ve never understood that better than now as it seems my family is in a period where every time a new hope is born it gets blown away in a Gale.

So I’ve had to put it in a cage, and it makes it harder to reach, but it’s still there glowing softly in my chest.

I’m also a therapist now, and it’s been an interesting time to be holding brand new and grown up wounds for my clients in a period when a lot of new wounds have been cut in my family.

The other “interesting” dynamic to everything has been that honestly at least recently, the misfortune hasn’t been strictly my own but that of my loved one so I’ve had to explore to what extent I hold their pain as my own and how to navigate that space while establishing myself as a professional. FINALLY.

I am at my second job since graduating in May but it’s been feeling really good and hopeful at Oak Ridge as a straight-up therapist. Someone said something to Ryan about friends from work for me and I was like ah no, I have neither friends nor enemies at work and it’s great. I show up, work, and go home. And the work is helping people navigate their own labyrinths and that feels great as well. I have some really wonderful clients who have really connected with me.

Anyway, as for the other imagery in the new Emotia, the Ronan tattoo is pretty self explanatory. I wanted to incorporate him in this painting since for Ryan and I both, he’s been a steady source of joy and togetherness. He had some bad Two weeks when he got sick for the first time after starting daycare, but aside from that it’s been a true privilege to watch him grow and learn.

Ah yes, and my leg. After a year and a month I still have nerve damage and regular nerve pain as well as chronic back pain from my herniated disc. Yes the cyst was traumatizing and Ronan’s birth with the C-section were traumatizing but not anywhere near how devastating my back injury was. Not only in its effect on my day to day life, but its lasting impact and to what extent it made me question my own strength and my body’s ability to carry on. The lightning looks pretty dope though huh.

Honestly this Emotia kind of created itself. The idea came about yesterday and I worked on it throughout the day and into today without much hesitation. I’m not sure it’s necessarily quite as refined as some of the otehrs but the symbolism is all there and the art is the quality I wanted it to be.

And with that, here’s all the earlier ones! Most recent to the oldest.

Endure
February 2016

Art!, Emotional Breakdowns, Error, Manga, MicahxAndrew, Myoku Needs a Tag, Original Characters, Writing Journey

quarantine/riots/manga DONE

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 SMOOCHY
Hands 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 haha
After 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.

Art!, Emotional Breakdowns, Holiday Drawings, Ronan, Writing Journey

the end of a decade

New Years is my favorite. I would say this one looks the most different but I haven’t ever prioritized staying up until “the ball drops” as much as I have always prioritized reflection, which I have spent lots of time doing the last few days.

And today when I was bored at work I put this together!

Enjoy the visual walk down memory lane.

I think it’s definitely a bit easier to put this together since my blog has been up for almost an entire decade haha.

Also here is my visual mantra for 2020.


And some other doods.

Art!, Emotional Breakdowns, Farewell Fairytale

2009 | 2019

So these days my husband follows a lot of trendy anime artists on Instagram and he kept mentioning how people were doing the 10 year challenge to finish out the decade.

I do comparison photos a lot but I decided I had so much new art technology I would try my hand at using one of my new devices.

My husband got me an enormous 22in XP-Pen 22E Pro tablet for Christmas and I tried for a while to use that but at the moment the sheer size of it is too overwhelming for me to try a specific drawing on it before I get used to navigating one end of the other, and its 16 hot keys I haven’t really set or gotten familiar with.

So I ended up going to my senior year manga, Farewell Fairytale, and realized immediately I wanted to do this garish drawing of Elodie and Micah. They were my weird mid-20s engaged couple who were weirdly chaste and half their humor was accidentally being intimate even though they were ~*~*~*~*saving themselves for marriage~*~*~*~*~

So after a few attempts to do a half-kiss like usual I realized I wanted to express them as a couple as they WOULD be a “decade” later (of course not really aging them intentionally, and definitely avoiding Micah’s creepy goatee), as I know love and commitment to be now…hanging out in your pajamas, sipping wine in the dark after a long day and making each other laugh in your home, where you’re the most at ease.

I ended up using the iPad because I kept thinking of its glowy brushes and the “street lights” effect that I wanted. The original drawing was used in a website layout with some oldschool Search the City lyrics

Streetlights carry me home tonight

So that kind of inspired the new urban vibe. I got to do a few nods to the original characters. Elodie has a wolf tattoo because of Fyodor. The original drawing is on their phone screen like a Facebook “10 years ago…” and the neon light on their wall is an umbrella since I couldn’t work that ugly thing into the redo, haha.