I juuuust realized that this go around with preparing my art for public consumption is not nearly as traumatizing as all the work I had to put into the Skyline art crawl, for basically some strangers to pretend to be interested in me for a weekend. But it’s still a crazy feeling and always feels like a bit of betrayal against my childlike inner artist who just wants to draw things that make her happy.
Anyway, can’t pass up the opportunity to show some of my more seldom appreciated digital art in a show my wedding photographer is curating. I’m going to install tonight and my stuff does look pretty damn spiffy.
I can’t believe it’s been 13 years since Cinnamin died, and since I wrote Nikkei. That’s literally half my lifetime ago. There are a lot of things about my life that have changed but in a big part I’m still very much the same dopey, nostalgic, passionate, artsy little nerd I’ve always been. A part of me though wishes I could be still writing my first-ever graphic novel all over again, and that I could have the lack of self-doubt I’ve developed as an adult. In a lot of ways I think my self-esteem was better then than it is now. But I do think he looks like a total stud. Not a seventeen year old stud, but a total stud.
It does make me happy that he and two other characters from Nikkei were still around to be written in my last story. Maybe not as leads, but they were there. That’s why I know I’m such a nostalgic piece of shit haha.
Times have been terrible this past week. Honestly the lowest of all. My life has been essentially shattered, and not by something beyond my control, but by my own thoughtless hand. I’ve lost an enormous amount of what I’ve held dear. Fortunately for me, I married a man whose forgiveness and tenderness know no bounds. I didn’t even know it till now, either. We’ve been deeply wounded – I wounded him, and after tending to his wounds till they began to heal, I realized how deeply I’d been wounded too.
In a sense I feel like he’s all I’ve got now, and everything else is empty and cold. He can make me smile and explode and he wipes away my tears and because of his faith in me is the only reason I don’t hate myself entirely. He wants to help me heal no matter the cost to him.
So when I endeavored to make an extraordinarily depressing painting of us, he was by my side making suggestions and providing affirmation, as ever. I feel like this really dug into the essence of what our hearts are like right now. I’m drained and wounded and confused and I’ve slashed his heart in two and tangled him up in my own hurts. But he’s held my hand and held me close and told me we’ll make it through.
There are some mistakes that are truly life-altering. I’m still reckoning with what I’ve done and ruined. If not for him to guide me through this and to hold my heart in his hands, I’d surely have destroyed myself by now.
I’m really, really sad. I’m in a true spell of situational depression. It’s all I’ve been able to think about today – it’s always there, even when I’m laughing or curling my toes or pressing my nose to my tablet as I create. And I can only hope that because of him and because we know how to care for each other and ourselves, that my wounds too will begin to heal up. That my lifeblood will slowly refill inside me. That I’ll use this as a lesson that everything I do affects my husband, in small ways and large, and that I must protect myself but also him. That my future is with him, and that we can get through anything as long as we’re together.
I am thrilled to be able to add a new Emotia drawing to my ongoing series! This series is and always has been an evolution of self. It’s shown so many wildly different selves that began in July of 2014, two and a half years ago. Since then, I feel like I’ve gone through so many self-facilitated changes that have had huge effects on me. Many of these have been professional or ambitious in nature, but they’ve always had a component to them that represent something about my relationship to my now-husband Ryan.
In “I Do Believe in New Beginnings,” I feel like I have unified myself. That’s why an element or more from each of the previous Emotia paintings are all represented. The feathers from “Endure,” the heart (on her shirt) from “Feelings I Don’t Want”, the light bulb from “Things Will Work Out (I Hope)”, and the fire from “Rise Again, Fighting.” I’ve still got tears and loose ends, but it all comes together now. Obviously, the giant white foof skirt is a nod to my recent marriage, which has really helped make me feel like I’ve accomplished something as a person and I’ve come together with someone who will protect me, encourage me, and strive to understand me for my whole life.
This piece then is pretty exciting in that way. I really feel like I’ve been waiting for 2017 since at least 2015, if not honestly for most of my adolescent and adult life. I have never, ever felt this whole. I feel perfectly in touch with myself. My art is thriving, my writing is thriving, my love is stable and huge and wholesome, I’ve taken control of my anxiety, and professionally, I am somewhere I’m proud to have survived – and heading somewhere I can’t believe wanted me. But they wanted me because of all this dedication I’ve put into my achievements. They saw it. They honored it.
The original Emotia piece was done because of the crazy, terrifying sense of dependence I had on my identity as Ryan’s girlfriend. It had consumed my creative energy. “Feelings I Don’t Want” was supposed to purge that sense of fearful dependence and of dishonesty towards self. I really hated myself at that point, but I didn’t know how else to strive for what I wanted. The six-month mark with Ryan was the farthest I’d gotten with another person, and I really didn’t know what I was doing.
The next paradigm shift came after I’d attempted to move out of Ryan’s apartment and into my own studio, and realized in this process that I DID want him – but I also really wanted to be myself. I’d felt beaten and bruised from our fights and my time in daycare and his time miserable at Comcast. This was just before I had started working at Palmer Lake and while Ryan was working with his ex-girlfriend, whom I desperately wanted to trust.
Not very long after that, I started graduate school and I loved my jobs and I was really coming back into my identity as myself. This is why Rise Again, Fighting, is so bold and celebratory. I was doing things for myself again – and miraculously, the man I loved still loved me for it.
The next drawing came over a year later, and plunged back into confusion and pain. It still creeps me out, because I essentially predicted my own fall hours before it happened. “Endure” continues to represent THE darkest hours in my entire life. I honestly broke. It was the one night in my life I had suicidal ideations. It was the first time I really, truly scared my fiance. I cried harder than I’d ever cried in my life – screamed, honestly. Yes, it showed how desperately I wanted to make my education at Adler work. But it also showed how terribly it wasn’t working. Things really did get better after this painting.
It hurt, and I remember sleeping on the couch at work and worrying everyone the next day – because I’d been up till 1am and had subsequently quit/postponed my grad program. I remember talking to my peers about it. To TRob and Austen and Tara and Popp. Everyone supported me and my move to save myself from that chaos. And over the year, I thought the urge to go to school would come back. But honestly, what’s happened instead is that I’ve stretched my value to myself. I’ve learned to see new ways I can push myself and grow. Hell, I survived Holland Center, and it got me to PrairieCare. Also, I decided to muster up the courage and do something about how I felt that night. Granted, it was about 9 months later, but I finally got myself to the doctor. I paid handsomely for it, but I feel like finally medicating my insane anxiety has let me control my life again. It hasn’t fixed it, but hell have I taken so much ownership over it.
That’s why the raging fire from “Rise Again, Fighting” has become beautiful spirals. I’ve found sophistication in my passion. I’ve channeled it and organized myself and matured so much. Seriously, for the first time in my life, I think I might be an adult. Yes, that means that now I get to choose that I want to fuck around with my husband and be obnoxious in public at Target, and that means I get to choose to be lazy, but it also means that I get shit done. I trust myself to accomplish the things I want. And I trust myself to keep striving for more, wanting more, finding more, and pushing myself as a person. I don’t judge myself by anybody else’s standards anymore, not even educationally. I know I’m surrounded by people who respect me in a plethora of different ways I never would have anticipated.
lol so I’m a bit embarrassed but I’m going to write about my entire thought process behind this drawing anyway. This is not only not my first drawing of this color palette, but it’s not my first sad Myoku drawing, and it’s also not my first featuring Fall Out Boy lyrics. But like, I love this song, and I hear it in my head every time I read it, and I really wanted to do some art today that didn’t have to do with the wedding.
So what better solution than to get really weird and essentially do a picture of Myoku where he’s essentially grieving not being “part” of me anymore? Hehehe, ahhah….hehh…so yeah, like I said, super uncomfortable, but my sentiment was that there were times when I would pretend conversations with him where it was like “you’ll always be around in some form or another” and at this point in my life, I have so moved past that. And I stop and think about it and think about what it would be like if he were like, still “around” and it would just be terrible for him. … Hehe so that’s that.
I love the dusty shades of purple and red and all the great texture to this. It took me forever to sort through all my brushes but it was worth it.
Also on note of my 100 days project, I must say I’m impressed whenever I think I’m out of ideas, settle on something, do it, and then immediately come up with two whole separate ideas I could’ve done instead. Best part of that is, I’ve got more ideas for tomorrow!
I thought I’d post about what I’ll probably be up to for the next while. I can’t help it and I’d better just admit that wedding planning has completely overtaken my attention. Tonight, I happily crafted my little comic bubbles for my table markers while making my fiance help me. Didn’t even think about how specific of a craft it was. Just did it, because it’s what’s on my mind.
Well, on Wednesday last week it hit 100 days till my wedding on 1/7/17. I decided in light of my obsession with wedding stuff that I’d do a project. I know since I met Ryan (literally since I made a drawing of our first kiss) that my art has become dominated by him. Somehow without realizing it he really did become my muse in every sense of the word. Between that and the fact that weddings are a lot of work, especially when you’ve got an artist stick up your bum and want to do it all yourself exactly as you prefer it, I don’t really have the energy for aimless drawings as much as normal. So I figured, why not channel my crazy consuming love into productive art in another form besides making centerpieces or banners. And like, if I decided that this project would be something I could share at my wedding, then it’d scratch that itch for feeling like I need to be doing something for the wedding all the damn time.
So, while most artists are celebrating Inktober (which, yes, I’m still super jealous of), I’m 5 drawings into my 100 Days of Love sketchbook project.
Every day, I’ll draw something that comes from Ryan and I. Whether a goofy anime doodle, or a sultry, emotive charcoal drawing from a real, raw moment when Ryan pulled me out of the darkness in my head, I’ll draw SOMETHING. I’ve already even had one throwaway day where I just started a sketch for our private ceremony invites. That’s the thing, I know they won’t all be winners but that’s never the point of daily art challenges. The point is to produce work. And I am, and in this case every time I draw for this project I’m also reminded why I want to marry this nerdy guy scrolling on Twitter while watching football next to me. In every way, this project is an amazing endeavor that I’m excited to have made a commitment to doing.
So today was my Grandma Stewart’s funeral, and it was tearful and emotional and yet made me proud of my family.
But in a very bittersweet sort of day, I also decided to use some extra money and my increasingly stable financial situation to UPGRADE my digital art life. With the help in many ways of my fabulous fiance, I bought my first Cintiq! Obviously I got the smallest, most affordable options but it is
I really didn’t mean to go into blog hiding! It’s just weird when I’m in a graphic novel phase because all my artistic efforts go into pages which obviously get posted at http://cadence.melizabethart.com instead of here, and then I look silent and distant but I’m not.
Here are the illustrations I’ve been working on in the last few months!
Okay so I love this lady possibly just because I finished her hours ago. But she covers everything I wanted to artistically do. I wanted to add a drawing to my old-ass drawing portfolio. I wanted to make her clothing semi-transparent. I didn’t want to choose a race for her. And 100% because it was raining when I was coloring it, she’s dew-drizzled and blue. Also her hoodie was inspired by my recent jaunt by a waterfall in pouring rain in a clingy plastic poncho that I kept grabbing like this, hah.
Here’s a birthday drawing I kind of did more for Ryan than me. I just realized proper shoujo legs should be twice this long. BUT ALAS
Ryan came up with this comic idea like a month ago, and I finally delivered on it – naturally while watching Van Helsing with him. God I love that movie, Hugh Jackman is such a goof in it. Anyway, ISN’T THIS COMIC THE BESTEST
I did this painting because of a student and I sent the original home with her on the last day of school. She got me into an amazing pop punk band called Neck Deep because I asked her to give me some lyrics to fill the book space on the right, and when she found these I got intrigued and had to listen to the song. And naturally loved everything about it. The punk pop bands Ryan and I love are from the early 2000s, and we didn’t know new bands like this but of course they’re what we love. So yay for students expanding my interests!To give myself a break from pages, I did the chapter image for the next chapter of Cadence that would start up after the scene I had finished inking. As you’ll see in my next illustration, I’m kind of into the ornate frames around portraits lately. It easily classes up what would otherwise be a basic portrait.
When I knew I needed an emotional break from people when I had my friend/bridesmaid staying in my living room last week, I shut myself in the bedroom and blasted Neck Deep as loud as I possibly could in headphones just like I was a teenager again, and I chose green in contrast to my folder full of pink-background digital sketches, and I used my sketch brush and drew the punkiest pop girl I could muster, who is somewhere suspended between exhaustion and rapture. Also yes I did listen to LA Devotee approximately 10 times in immediate succession. Isn’t this little vignette just lovely? I do love a good hood to create its own frame for the portrait.
Anyway, in other news, I’m afraid I’ve lost steam for Cadence once again. This time it’s more because I’m looking at all the huge forks in the story that are supposed to happen and going HOW COULD I EVER FINISH THIS PROJECT. Like, so much happens in it that I have barely concluded the introduction. And I’m looking at all these plots and arcs thinking how I’m not really excited to do them. I was ashamed to write about it and make it public but this blog has always been a safe place to discuss my whims and woes. There is a strong possibility I’ll return to Cadence, but for now I am going to see if I can develop an idea I had for probably a novella starring Lucienne, Levi, and the rollercoaster of a relationship I had with a student this last year (god that sounds sexual, but of course I mean it in a mentor/mentee sort of way).
Also, I am focusing a lot of energy lately on wedding things. I made my silhouettes for the vases I’ve been planning for some time and I’m hoping I’ll be able to churn out 5 more Saint Pauls and Minneapolises in the next month or so.
2016 has been a crazy, and somewhat unrewarding year so far. A big part of me couldn’t be surprised that after everything that was accomplished in 2015, 2016 just sort of…arrived. What’s worse, I stopped being particularly good at handling the stress of paying rent (for the first time), working full-time (which recently went through a huge stressful period, but is otherwise super fabulous), planning my wedding (which is expensive), and trying to be in a masters program. So, I’m in the process of filing for a year off from it. For that reason it’s been a really tough week.
I thought I could handle it. I thought all I needed to do was “endure,” because I didn’t think I had any other options. “If I quit school, I have to pay my loans” was the biggest reason to stay in my program. I’d been struggling against whelm and apathy about it since last fall when I had to take some online classes I loathed. As the fall progressed, I got to get into some actual Art Therapy classes, which helped…but at the turn of the year I had to take a semester-long prerequisite that’s a long ways away from home and included some terrible drives in inclement Minnesota weather, and I had to try to fit in two classes at once, and also a new practicum which needed 100 hours and took up all my extra days and evenings that I could spare. So suddenly I was never home, I was constantly tense waiting for the next busy period where I had nothing but a protein shake for dinner, I was poor and had no option of making more money because I was too busy for a second job, and I was scooping out of a mostly empty pot of energy being stretched thinner and thinner and feeling like there was no payoff from any of it.
I was driving home from work one day and I realized the only thing my fiance and I could do was “Endure.” There was nothing to look forward to today, or next week, just…next year, and the years following, when I finished this dumb program and got a career, and maybe we’d have kids, and so on.
So I realized that I needed to make a new Emotia painting. I wanted to express the beautiful, grind my teeth anger involved in just….enduring. In knowing that there will be a payoff, somewhere.
But what emerged from the painting is an expression of how well I ended up being able to endure after all. In a way, since it was completed some 5 hours before my breaking point, it was a harbinger for ripping out that handful of feathers, the beautiful but challenging parts of my life I realized needed to be purged for now. The piece is pretty dark – strong, but dark. Because when I realized that I didn’t want to endure anymore, I kind of broke. Kind of in the same way as the girl in this painting. She’s not broken, but she was definitely falling apart. I see the feathers she’s clutching in her fists and I see how I realized that something had to give.
Unfortunately for me and my recent goals, that something was graduate school.
I haven’t been prioritizing school for at least 6 months lately. What I have been prioritizing is my relationship, and my workplace, and my finances. School has been a nuisance at best, and a source of intense stress at worst. School has meant looking at my upcoming week and seeing my two nights that I’ll be home, one of which I’d actually be home with my fiance, and I’d just get this strong resentment for how long this program would take and how little it was adding to my life.
Tuesday night (after working on this painting for two nights!) something stupid triggered a panic attack and after four hours of buildup my parents ended up at my apartment in the middle of the night because they were the only ones who could calm me down. I’d totally lost it (see: the blood on the wings) and the only thing I wanted to change was school.
The hardest part about this is due to the stock that I’ve always put in education. I was so great in my undergrad I never had to think twice about whether I could be successful at it. … Because all I had to do was homework. All I needed to worry about was research projects. I didn’t have a job, I didn’t bother with relationships, and didn’t think about money. As an adult, with so many other things I care about, school doesn’t pay off like that right now. It’s expensive, and exhausting, and SLOW.
So, for now, for a year I’ll say, I’m done. I’m going to gather my bearings. I’m going to endure this interim, and keep my goals, and enjoy the rest of my life. I’ll be stronger when I go back to school, and I’ll be ready for it. But I’m certainly not now.
This Endure piece is lovely. I so dig it. It’s a natural progression from the previous three. The third was an awakening, and this one is definitely awake…and struggling. I’m heading where I want to get, but it’s really painful. It’s beautiful – hence the feathers – but riddled with sacrifices.
I’m so proud of this fricking lineart too. I did the lineart in one organic, intuitive sitting. I had sketched this pose, and then gone, ugh, it’s so simple, and then started a new one, and then opened this pose again and decided FUCK IT I like how it looked. I really thought the coloring would hang me up because of how labor-intensive it would be, but I just kinda got it. I knew what the feathers should look like, and each one was a few quick strokes. I figured out the color scheme when I sketched it, and I also developed that awesome mesh look on her cleavage and her sleeve, and I was like UM YES.
Here are the other Emotias. You can see that I’m still within the spectrum of the strong reds I made it into, but not as vivid as they were this time last year. Last year had a virgin freshness that this year doesn’t. I’m a bit more of an old soldier at the moment, so to speak. Hood up, riddled with scars and bloodied by my own beautiful choices.
All this makes it seem a bit melodramatic, but I’m just trying to express that I’m not in a shitty place. It’s just that a handful of things were out of whack, digging into me in the wrong ways.
So, I’m fixing it.
I’m in another painting. I’m hoping the next one will be more hopeful, or joyous, or both. But for now, it’s been a beautiful struggle from which I’m glad to have a reprieve.
I wouldn’t have been able to paint these vivid reds and brilliant eyes of this one if not for my fiance, and my parents, and my soul sisters, and my compassionate coworkers.
T
