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.
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.
Okay so on Black Friday this year I convinced my mom to buy me a discounted iPad on Amazon like a true American consumer. But it hasn’t been hugely surprising that I finally seized the opportunity to get one after I hard debated Apple products before deciding on this two-in-one. Also, the allure of adapting to the changing face of digital art was very very strong.
So, without further ado I now present to you my various Apple Pencil ProCreate doodles. Gag, so many mainstream products in that sentence.
I was watching Into the Spider-Verse and was inspired by its offbeat and vibrant colors and also by the bug-eyed commonalities between my husband and son. As usual when I end up being experimental with color I’m REALLY into this. It looks like he’s watching a laser light show in a very brightly lit room.Doodled my husband last night at work cause I wanted to a sheet of all doodles, and then this was all I drew.I did some art for my classmate/friend/temp nanny of their cats and I’m super into the bold graphic nature of it even if I forgot to color their faces/noses.This was in my head since
Ok so this week we’ve had a new nanny working with Ronan and it’s been REALLY emotional not only because I’m PMSing and it’s making me hella anxious, but because the prospect of choosing someone to be in my life and my husband’s life and most importantly my son’s life when I can’t be is INSANELY daunting.
So I set about on the task of depicting the strong protectiveness I felt (when I saw her tumble down the stairs accidentally while holding my child…oof) and then when I left her in my house to take care of my child. It’s not the same soft affection of kissing Ronan’s forehead when he sleeps, it’s fierce, overwhelming, and sometimes accompanied by frustrating helplessness.
This was my first attempt and it didn’t capture my aggressive squeeziness.This was my second attempt and Ronan looks super cute and I love the lines and the soft colors but it definitely still wasn’t what I was going for.
I like how Ronan looks the least in this one but it finally got the right mood, but I wish I could spend more time on it still. Meaning I probably will.
Another big piece, this came up a bit out of nowhere. One of the ladies I follow on Instagram makes merchandise revolving around tough, alternative mamas. And after my first round of holiday gettogethers with Ronan around, I realized how just, primitively protective I am of my little prince. Between that and the wolf theme of the Instagram mama I follow, I hatched a Wolf Mama drawing of me and Ronan. My husband said the furries of the internet would love me for this. That makes me sad.
Regardless here we are, me with my scars and stretch marks and Ronan with his fingers in his mouth and a handful of my hair as he tends to be these days.
I also got an iPad as an early Christmas present from my parents and have been slowly getting familiar with the all-famous ProCreate. But my caseless, fragile, slippery iPad isn’t quite the baby-friendly mobile drawing station I expected yet, so it’s gotta wait till my case comes this weekend before I can really integrate it into my baby time. Here’s the picture I did first on it. My mom said Ronan’s eyes creep her out but I think that’s a personal problem.
The Pencil definitely has enviable brush stabilizing that I would never want my Wacom to have, so that’s a game changer for incorporating text into my work. ProCreate also very obviously works for graphic and illustration work in a way that Clip Paint Pro doesn’t and I also wouldn’t want it to. So so far my conclusion is that the iPad will work for the style of graphic, marketable work I want it to, but it’s not necessarily the same sketching, brainstorming, feeling, serious illustration platform that I didn’t want it to be. That is, my Wacom and my desktop art station will not become obsolete because of the iPad.
As I slid my hand around my newborn’s back and settled into bed with him, I realized I never expected to be this kind of mom.
Especially in these early weeks I thought about what I was feeling and deciding about my child and felt like a psychologist, clinical, calculating, and insensitive. Except all of those early child psychologists were men, who weren’t affected by the same rush of hormones as a mother is, who aren’t evolutionarily primed to know their child is sleeping next to them, regulating their breathing and body temperature and feeling secure just by the smell of me.
It’s raised the question a few times in my head about what kind of mother I think like as opposed to what kind of mother I feel like. A lot of my feelings are instincts, intuition, and hormones. My husband has admitted a few times he doesn’t feel connected to our mewling newborn the same way as me, and for someone as clinical and masculine in her thoughts as I am, this has been a remarkable identity transformation.
For me, too, I’m bombarded by sappy mom posts about how overwhelmed with love moms feel for their babies – which is true; I’m confounded by how strongly I feel for Ronan, and the rush of affection I feel when I squeeze his warm squishy body against myself. But for me, the love is honestly aggressive, assaultive, truly hearkening to the “Mama Bear” identity more than anything. Mess with my cub and I’ll rip you apart.
There’s also the fact that as I’m moving through this postpartum period, the hormones are starting to ebb and thus affect my creativity a bit less. I’ve always known the PMS-y hormones make me ultra creative, and giving birth to a baby is truly the ultimate culmination of a rush of female hormones. So I was explosively creative despite my deep and confusing hormonal distress. And now as my body is slowly returning to normal (a new, cyst-free normal), my creative levels are returning to normal as well, and admittedly I feel like I’ve dried up a bit. I don’t ever force myself to create, so I went from making two or three sketches today, baby aside, to knowing I’d rather read a book or play the Untitled Goose Game.
I really will have to redefine normal for myself though, and that’s before I even go back to school in 2 months. Eep.
Blammo! I have just now completed a brand new Emotia drawing. It’s been a year and a half since my last piece in this series, and good god was there plenty to try to put into it since then.
I would like to present, “I am Growing But Please Let Me Be.”
This took an extraordinary amount of work to conceptualize. I actually had a fairly completed first draft of this concept that hung me up when I got to the shading pieces. Looking at the first draft now I definitely see how it hadn’t hit the mark yet, but honestly it left me fairly surprised that when I sat down to restart again, I actually completed it. All week I’d been trying to start a new draft and not getting much farther than an outline and maybe a background color. But I also couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I guess I knew I wouldn’t quit until I had finished this.
I’m not really sure why or how this ended up being the final pose. The previous drafts after the first attempt were much more aggressive than this one. But I looked through my other Emotia paintings a lot as I was working on this and none of the others are incredibly assertive or aggressive either, so ultimately I don’t think that would have worked. Plus, if this hadn’t been the final pose I don’t know if I would have liked how I tried to incorporate the books/papers.
Anyway, there were so many emotional layers to try to fit into a single image from 2019. It’s been intense. It’s been really difficult to process.
In many ways I don’t believe I’ll fully process my cyst and subsequent surgery, weight loss, and recovery until long after I’ve also given birth. The cyst still feels like an emotional gaping hole because I have a lot of resentment for the timing of how we found it. While on the one hand if we’d found it on its own, when I wasn’t pregnant, I know we would have felt convinced it meant we could never have kids, and that would have been devastating (and also incorrect). But as it happened, not only did it make the first trimester really really difficult (not that anyone loves the first trimester), it robbed me of the opportunity to essentially see what my healthy body was supposed to look like without the cyst. And I never will, because the next time my belly will be empty will be after I’ve given birth to a human.
And it also definitely feels like the cyst came out and my baby filled that hole without actually…patching it up so to speak? It was really interesting gaining those first 15lbs after the surgery because I still maintain that since my belly had previously been stretched around the cyst, I didn’t get a pregnancy belly so much as my baby belly filled up the cyst belly, same shape and everything. It wasn’t until after I passed the point that my cyst had brought me that my stomach looked and felt different to me. So it felt more appropriate to include the representation of my pregnancy still in a gaping hole in my body.
Finally, this year I’ve also just been calmly keeping my schoolwork in lockdown. What a better way to represent that than have it be squished under my thick ass? I actually put some screenshots of three papers that I wrote for my program on the fluttering papers haha. It was hard because I haven’t really had any significant textbooks necessarily for this program; it’s been mostly the paper-writing that has provided most of the learning. Grad school has definitely been a non-issue in many ways, but it always seems to come up and people always seem awestruck that I’ve been doing as much school as I have this year, with as slow as I’ve actually been going with the program.
Moving up, I’ve got my heart on my sleeve this time because pregnancy has destroyed any sort of social filters I used to possess. I’m cranky, you’ll know. Immediately. You offend me, you’ll now. Immediately. Fortunately, most of the time since maybe May, I’ve just been indifferent. But hell hath no fury like my opinionated ass if you start to rile me up.
This has not felt like “me” either. I’ve felt a bit of distress over the seeming lack of control I have over my tongue. I don’t consider that maybe I’ve gone too far till after the deed has been done. Fortunately I can still focus on smoothing things over with people after I wound them, without actually apologizing given that usually I lose my temper over shit I definitely still mean.
And…the eyes. So 2019 has been a very…public year for me. But not in a social, I’m involved with people kind of way. Pregnancy just is a very public affair. Your body becomes public property, essentially, with everyone soliciting their opinions, admiration, curiosity, etc. where they have previously not shown any interest in me. I think that’s the biggest difficulty I have with how closely people watch me these days. I know that many of the interactions I have had with people, especially at work, would not have happened if I weren’t pregnant. People who hardly consider me a fleck in their vision have to ask me “how are you feeling?” every time I see them. So really, the question is not even directed at me, but my pregnancy.
And the thing about pregnancy is most days, most hours, most experiences are just daily living, only it’s living that is happening while I also have a little boy in my belly rolling and jabbing and growing.
People are just really excited and curious about pregnant women and it generally ends up being inappropriate, invasive, and unnecessary in their execution. And circling back to me not being able to hold my tongue, if you are the 50th person in the span of a very long day where I work 8 hours and then go to 6 hours of class who loudly and enthusiastically asks “HOW ARE YOU FEELING!??!?!?”, then I will probably shut you down.
Maybe it’s because I’m someone who has had mental health problems for years and years but someone asking me how I’m feeling when they’re really just wanting to know, most likely, if I’ve got morning sickness right now (people honestly believe it’s normal or expected for a woman to throw up for an entire nine months of a pregnancy apparently), ends up feeling offensive, intrusive and disingenuous. If you didn’t ask the other two people who walked in before me how they’re feeling, don’t fucking ask me. Especially if you don’t actually care what I have to say (if I’m not comfortable with you as a person in my life, do you think I want to be honest when you ask me that anyway? Because the chances are, if I was great before you asked me that, the moment you ask me that my most honest answer would be “irritated” and you don’t want to know that, do you?).
Just because you’re really excited about babies and pregnant ladies doesn’t mean that the pregnant lady you’re projecting this onto has any obligation to share your enthusiasm. There’s less and less to be enthusiastic about when relaxin makes your neck crack every time you turn your head, or your thighs are constantly sore and achey because your pelvis is so aggressively shifting, or your baby moves so rapidly in your belly you get light-headed, or you read another article about the amount of blood you’re going to lose after you give birth and suddenly consider the possibility that you’ll just bleed out after delivery and die in a hospital bed.
At work at least, I’ve expressed my annoyance to the people I trust enough to lessen their pregnancy-related inquiries, and I’ve been rude or cold to enough other people so that my daily experience with people asking about my pregnancy has dropped to a more tolerable level. At school, I found, with few exceptions most 22-year-old girls and varying ages of men are disinterested if not terrified of “the pregnant girl in their class.” I could get away with nobody but me bringing up my pregnancy in a whole class, even after I was very obviously pregnant in my two summer classes. But when I did unironically have to pee two or three times during a lecture, everybody was quick to justify it for me, so I’ll enjoy the free pass to have an overactive bladder while it lasts (although the overactive bladder before pregnancy was most definitely a cyst symptom. It’s going to be crazy when I can potentially go 6-8 hours without NEEDING to pee in a few months.)
So…yeah, that’s the eyes. In my first draft I expressed the constant public interest in my body as a spotlight, but that didn’t feel right. It wasn’t really a source of light for me in any way. Usually it causes latent anxiety if not my normal irritability. And since I knew I wanted my belly to glow (although in the first draft I just did this weird like “here’s my heart, it slid down from my chest into my belly” which I didn’t end up liking), I didn’t want there to be a competing light source. I was going to try eyes on stalks for a while, or just like a grid pattern, but then last night as I was trying to decide how to display them I was like “wait why don’t I just do scribbly inky black drawings of eyes” and aha! Ryan helped me make them a bit more interactive with my hand and then I gave them some pigment and that was done.
Speaking of Ryan, while I originally wanted to incorporate the floofy white skirt that was in my last two paintings, I opted out of that and just highlighted my wedding ring. Which I haven’t even been able to wear for three weeks because it got too snug and I was paranoid it would get stuck. But I still thought it was important to note that my marriage has been a source of constant stability and refuge for me. Ryan has been an amazing and steady source of emotional and physical support for me. We’ll never forget those first few days after my surgery when I couldn’t get up from the toilet without his help. I’ll never forget how he cried when we saw our baby at 12 weeks before our surgery. I’ll never forget the sheer joy, camaraderie, relief, and pride of choosing a name for our son. And I also can’t take it for granted that he has been patiently supporting me while I’m in school even if it’s meant leaving him 2-3 nights a week alone to fend for himself. We keep in constant contact and if we argue it’s straightforward, quick, and honest. I really would be completely alone without him.
Finally, my other Emotia paintings except for “Rise Again, Fighting” don’t really feature “me” even though they’re embodiments of “me.” This time around, this feeling I was trying to depict was so intimate, and so closely related to my own bodily experience, I didn’t even bother pretending like it was happening to someone else. On the contrary, it’s very much me, and my body, that has been affected by these experiences.
The rest of the drawing feels a bit simpler than I expected but again, looking back at the other Emotia drawings, they haven’t necessarily been conceptually more complicated than this. If anything this one is a lot more focused and personal than especially some of the earlier ones were.
Another interesting contrast to the other ones is that at least in the last two I worked hard to include some of the recurring elements of earlier drawings. But any attempt to do so this time around would have been forced and unnatural. I think that makes a good point, though, about how different from my past self I have felt this year. I actually wrote a paper for my careers class, unexpectedly, that made me realize not only that I am in a very different place in my life than ever before, that that is in fact not a bad thing. Of course I am. I am having a child. That will change everything. I am fundamentally as I have always been, but in many ways my beliefs, feelings, and plans have shifted to revolve around the new and slightly strange concept of “my family” …where now, for the first time, by that I mean, my husband and my child.
And with that, here’s all the earlier ones! Most recent to the oldest.
You know it’s really hard going into it to wrap your head around what you can expect throughout the whole course of being pregnant. 40 weeks is a long time. You grow a baby over the course of most of a year. And since I got pregnant right before the new year, it really is the cornerstone of the whole year of 2019 for me.
There’s a lot of moments to enjoy, and it’s great having so many people surrounding me to support me and listen and take care of me (usually anyway). My husband has been amazing x infinity hands down, patiently yelling at me when I complain about my daily changing body, planning activities for us after our son is born, and not giving me too much shit when I want to eat disgusting amounts of food (this week’s legacy was a double cheeseburger with a large shake – from a SECOND fast food restaurant).
But there are also lots of moments, more so right now that I’m looking pregnant, I’m feeling my son move everyday, and the summer is quickly flying by to where my son is coming in just about 3 months…where I’m just pretty scared.
Things should be feeling MORE real by now, and they probably honestly are…which is what makes them so scary. With the internet, and just…people giving you unsolicited opinions literally at all times in all situations, there are just a lot of big scary things that can happen to a baby. They probably WON’T, but when all you’re doing is waiting and waiting, it’s hard not to imagine many worst case scenarios sprinkled into the good daydreaming.
Obviously you can’t spend nine months in a state of perpetual excitement and optimism. Obviously there are days when I feel sorry for myself for gaining weight, or being sore, or having an anterior placenta. Unfortunately, those have been most days for me at the moment. I can’t help it. I’m naturally anxious when I’m waiting for things, and when people ask me how I am I feel guilty that I’m basically perfectly normal right now honestly. We got a lot of preparation for baby out of the way a month or more ago, and a lot of it is going to wait a month or so until the baby showers start happening.
The good news, and always, always, always the bottom line is that the only person I’m really in this together with is my husband. Always just him. Nothing else, or anybody else really matters, ultimately.
And luckily for me, my husband is AWESOME. He patiently yells at me when my self-esteem gets low (it’s almost always low right now), he doesn’t judge me when I get whiny, and he is so totally up for being a dad. What it comes down to is just putting one foot in front of the other, doing life together on the days when everything feels normal, and fighting through the days that feel terrible and scary because all I can do is wait and I’m hormonal and scared and frustrated.
I can only hope our little boy grows up with my husband’s calm in his head, and his deeply loving nature.
Okay so I must have officially crossed the threshold in the last few days – or else somehow wearing looser clothing has inspired MORE focus on my bump than two weeks ago when I was rocking my new ruched shirts – but I don’t know, EVERYONE has been all about my bump and it’s…really hard.
I’ve spent many, many, many years being self conscious about my belly. I have pictures of me on the cusp of puberty where my tummy already stuck out past my (very barely there) boobs and I remember how I slowly started to hate that.
Looking back on what I expected my pregnancy to be like before my cyst, it was simpler – I was excited to just finally say “yes I’m pregnant” when asked about my large belly. And not necessarily notice a significant physical change. So when the cyst was gone, and I got the chance to experience a more natural bump progression (don’t get me wrong, I in no way suddenly became flat-stomached), I guess I was just…not prepared for people to want to notice my stomach.
And comment on it.
And touch it.
This week, looking probably more pregnant than I’ve wrapped my head around, I’ve caught myself being SUPER self-conscious about my stomach and trying to hide it like I used to.
It’s something I want to try really hard to work on because it does make me sad – I finally have a baby bump and I’m anxious about it most of the time when I’m in public.
Hooray! My surgery is over – it’s been 6 days already! – and baby is sounding as sturdy as ever in me. I’m 14 weeks and 1 day today! We bought our first onesie over the weekend (my blessed mom gave me a boxful of baby things at 5 weeks when we told them. I’m looking forward to investigating that again now that I’m not dreading the wait to a “safe” time).
And Saturday afternoon, we finally became social media official!
I would say sadly the image itself went a little under-appreciated. I could have posted a onesie with a cat in the picture and people would have given it the same attention. But it’s fine, I think it turned out super cute. And I actually totally redid it; I had a draft done for weeks and then restarted on Thursday. Understandably this turned out wwaaaayyyy better. I’m getting some airbrush shading practice in after avoiding it for most of the beginning of my digital art days. Between this, and buying some stuff, I’m finally starting to believe this is all real!
And the last, but certainly not least dramatic thing…my cyst is out. I lost 10lbs. I look pretty different (except when baby starts to get me all bloated). The more I’ve thought about, the more I realize I’m not “shocked” per se because, like, there was a part of my brain I think this whole time that knew something was wrong with my stomach, and knew this is what I was always supposed to look like. When I pined after a body type, it wasn’t stick thin or big boobs it was just…me, minus the cyst. Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t think I have fully conceptualized what I look like. I’ve gotten no photos and I can’t wear anything tight yet because it hurts my incisions. And tomorrow I have to take the steri strips off it; that’s like phase 3 (the last phase) of healing and I’m sure it’ll result in a new type of discomfort for a day or a few.
As expected, the most difficult part to figure out about, honestly, a lot of it is the combination of baby vs. cyst. I just hit the 2nd trimester and any time now baby’s gonna be popping out of my pelvis. So, what’s left of my belly, is it baby? Is it flab? Is it, as my husband insists, leftover skin from the sudden absence of a 10lb, foot-long cyst? I’m not gonna know for pretty much a year. I’m glad the cyst is gone, but it’s bittersweet that I don’t know how to enjoy how I look now or how long I’ll even look this way.
Shoot, just saw I didn’t color her labret piercing. I’ve been trying to draw tasty looking frappuccinos for ages and I think this one finally looks enticing. I like the blue/purple/pink shadows on her skin. Was feeling pissy Friday night so I made a pissy Micah sketch. And then tried to do a lame background.Wednesday night I spent a while on this while Ryan was playing video games. I’d been wanting to do like a “slice” of light on someone and when I’d tried it in the past it kind of got away from me. So this one was super successful in that sense. I’ve been trying to use airbrush shading a lot more and I have mixed feelings about it; I had to add some paintbrush texture shading to offset how blurry it made everything look.
I just also like how symbolic this one feels in terms of where I’m at right now. I feel very bleak and in the dark but there’s a definite light to focus on in the future. It’s just faraway and uncertain.
