So I can’t believe it somehow got overlooked in my blog – I think initially I was probably a little embarrassed – but I’ve been kicking around a new idea for a novel/graphic novel for months that finally just kinda, I don’t know, took off on its own. I was really into the idea of writing boyxboy love for the first time after I realized I have trouble writing a functional, blossoming hetero relationship because I’m no longer trying to fill my own void for romance. Plus it felt very appropriate to hook Micah and Andrew up. And Danny made a brief appearance where he then died like usual haha.
Anyway the idea has always felt super solid (started from reading A Sorcery of Thorns btw) and I was just hung up on the visuals, so I was just like who cares and I did something to keep moving and now that I’m entering drama/sexy territory I’m just kind of flying into it. I’m also excited about the idea of writing out the rough draft and figuring out an iPad program or something to refine it once it’s all written down.
As it’s progressing it’s definitely turned out a bit spookier than I expected but like, in a cool way I guess!
this is from like december before I had started trying this project as a graphic novel again. I kept Micah’s blue hair but I gave him a fresher style and I love it, it’s a good contrast to Andrew’s hair which I usually draw down like Howl/Haku now (which unfortunately is the same length as my hair and thus sometimes he just looks like me. Haha. Old problems never go away.)
I have way more doodles and whatnot on my ipad but I just can’t bring myself to blog on my ipad especially since I’ll never ever get an ipad keyboard. I have so many physical keyboards! I cannot abandon my actual PCs even though Ryan bought me airpods yesterday and I haven’t stopped using them since. >.>
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.
Click for full version! Oh yeah, I forgot about Micah’s very very very veiled Nikkei reference. I gave him a striped cat tattoo haha.
This was my weekend project for my daily art. The image literally dropped itself into my head on my drive home from work on Friday listening to the radio when that Khaled x Halsey song was playing for some weird reason. I hung onto it long enough to get home and start sketching it and the whole thing kind of completed itself from there.
I am getting SUPER comfortable, apparently, painting without lines – thanks mostly to all the daily drawings I’ve been doing since February! It’s pretty great, and I’m really happy with how they turned out. Literally my main question was “wtf couple do I used?” and nobody really spoke to me so I had to kind of go with more my aesthetic right now, which was Noelia and Micah for some reason.
I’m finding at least in the preview size of this that a lot of the glorious details of this are lost – not a common problem for me; I found myself working at 60-100% a lot of the time especially toward the end when I was just adding details like jewelry and of course all the raindrops.
Even after spending quite a few drawings experimenting with other brushes I find the best brush for painting is still just dropping the opacity on a pen brush. I don’t end up liking the fuzzy cloudiness of pencils I also can’t make as dark as I want them to be. I just kept shifting between 20-70% opacity and a lot of color droppering and it did everything I needed it to.
Even when you compare it to like this first “painting” I did back in February you can tell a lot of that hesitance and awkwardness about doing shading that’s stronger than lines has gone away.
In fact, I had originally added some light lines over their faces to add some structure but ended up working them back into the painting as I moved on. Pretty crazy. Very grateful to really really feel some muscle development from all the days I’ve been working with my tablet.
And even if I don’t feel like that, at least I don’t make stuff like this anymore! 😀
remains one of the scariest pieces of work I’ve ever completed, look at Lacy, what color is that?? ha
Hehehehehehhehehe
That is all. I was going to dump some of the other good dailies I’ve done in the last month but I feel like I’ll save that for another post soon.
So one of my classes for this spring semester is called Learning & Behavioral Change and, surprise, it involves a behavioral change project! Our professor wants us to essentially use the skills we learn in class to develop a new habit/break a bad habit. And of course a bunch of his examples are like, weight loss, diet, etc., and I’m like, well I don’t foresee that going well as I get increasingly pregnant. Some of the non-negative examples were like, write a journal daily and meditate daily. So I was like well…I already journal enough, and I don’t really want to try meditation.
And then I was like !!!! I’ve been feeling distant from my art life lately, why don’t I do a DAILY DRAWING?!?!
I figured it wasn’t quite specific enough to just do a drawing since I could do sketch or computer and it would be difficult to keep them all together then. And like also, my digital tools are spectacular and I kind of never feel like I fully utilize my $800 display tablet.
Sooo, a digital drawing a day! And then I have to write a paper about it.
The good news is it’ll keep my blog busy, so here’s some of my favorites.
Used a reference?!?! What?!?! Cool.Practicing some different brushes/actual painting.So I never liked Fall Out Boy’s “Champion” that much but the line “if I can live through this / I can do anything” had really been speaking to me since I found out about my cyst. I listened to it 5x in a row on my drive to work this week and got this flash of Ingrid looking pissed off and fierce as hell with these lyrics. Ryan asked if he should be concerned but Ingrid is typically covered in blood haha.
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.
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*
Today I made the excellent decision to go see a limited showing of the TV documentary on my god, Miyazaki-sama. I weirdly saw it advertised on my Instagram stories and it had a limited showing for tonight at a nearby theater and I felt like I couldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t go see it.
My take aways include: everything that is good is a hassle (or something along those lines; I can’t find any quotes or gifs from it), and, “forward, forward, always forward.”
Honestly it makes me stop wanting to be a baby about stopping a project I start because it’s not perfect and that’s about as much as I feel the need to say on that end.
So, yay!
And also here is a doodle I did while my stats professor made us watch “Stand and Deliver” for our statistics class. >.o
I have a week left in my first semester at Saint Thomas after tomorrow. We also got a new kitten in our family – I got bored and fixated on wanting a baby and we needed to do something to help abate that. So we found her at Petsmart and she is perfect for us, even if Snowball doesn’t think so yet. Her name is Scribbles!
Anyway, between her taking up all my emotional energy and my stats class almost ending, and then also being stuck on a difficult page of Dumping a Dragon, that project is dragging. I guess all my creativity is actually. I got my Christmas drawing done for Ryan and that was about all that has been completed in the month of December yet.
I also did a casual crossover drawing that I let myself keep sketchy in lines and color, but it’s still a lot of fun and is a throwback to older crossover drawings I did in my teens.
lol i just noticed i never colored danny’s pants. now he’s a floating spirit.
Other than this mostly as much as I am still turning over the next steps for Dumping a Dragon and whatnot, as with what stopped me from continuing to do Cadence, I’m just wishing the story were different. I feel frustrated that I have all this passion for drawing people interacting and such a love for interesting character design, and then so much of this story is being held back by the fact that Noelia is just interacting with a bunch of oversized dragons with limited facial expressions, and then weird fantastical settings that I really couldn’t care less about so I keep under-drawing, under-developing, and avoiding in panels.
I couldn’t have expected my first go back into graphic novels to be good after 5+ years, but my problem is that these are two glaring issues that are making me once again want to work on a graphic novel project, but not this one.
My brain has been very nostalgic lately for Redefining Evil and for Nikkei and for Bakura and Danyil and the old couples I made. The other day on my drive home from work they played Animal I Have Become back to back with an Offspring song and I thought about my blissful life as a 14 year old creator for basically my whole drive. Being in middle school really did create the perfect conditions for growing an entire creative world for myself.
[edit] Ugh I just did this adorable doodle during tonight’s lecture in my diversity class and I love her. All the scrumblies were me trying to erase my class notes to save it and it was super laggy so I’m leaving the scrumblies, since they fit my style anyway.
Early last week I reached the long-awaited point in Dumping a Dragon where, after initially riding the high of creating Sivarthis’s dragon self, I always anticipated hitting a creative wall. And indeed, whether I damned myself to that by expecting it or not, I hit a wall.
I ended my first meet cute/flashback and had NO IDEA how to ease into the next segment. I tried four or five or twelve things. I wrote out a script. I sketched thumbnails. And every time I tried a page, it felt flat and lame.
Finally while watching the latest season of the Great British Baking Show, I started inking a page without much confidence…until I added the background.
This. Damn. Mountain.
Fixed. Everything.
Honestly, not only am I SUPER proud of that in terms of being a scenery image I’m usually pretty weak at, I’m super proud that it became the first page to get everything moving again. Even though I rewrote dialogue and tweaked panels until my eyes bled, and I asked for advice before immediately rejecting it, I am proud of how it turned out. The colors, the composition, most importantly the fact that I shamelessly magicked Sivarthis into looking a bit different, a bit more manageable, and having him allude to the fact that he could just change his size at will so that he can fit into frames with Noelia, haha.
Plus, this way ends up keeping the story following the novella more closely than the alternate way I had contemplated doing this scene.
Oh yeah, of course when I had hit my wall I was also preparing Sun-Walking for a witchy friend of mine to read. Which meant, though I didn’t need to, that I reread the ENTIRE 145k thing on my weekend off. I literally accomplished nothing new. Just reread Sun-Walking. More. God I love that project so much. After my witchy friend finishes it and we make adjustments to it, I think I’m going to have my dad find some publishers to pitch it to again. I’m finally ready.
I’ve spent the last 2.5 weeks working tirelessly – truly, tirelessly – on the graphic novelization of To Trust a Dragon – which, as a graphic novel, is probably more suitably titled Dumping a Dragon. Or something. I suck at titles.
Anyway, it’s been a LOT of fun to work on, and the pages look great, and super professional. Everything Cadence struggled to be what with my conflict between digital and traditional. In this project’s case, my Cintiq is doing literally everything it should be. Its drivers have been cooperating, so rather than like it had been over the summer where I would start my computer up, try to start my tablet, and then various things were broken that required 2-3 computer restarts, it’s been a lot more plug and play.
And I don’t know if I’m just really stupid happy with the character design for my kids (Siv and Noelia…finally added the A to her name; I tried so long to go with Noeli, and I tried to rename her, but nothing fit. So I added an A and voila…she feels real) or what, but I literally love drawing their faces over and over. The biggest tell will be when I switch Siv from adorable expressive tooth-scar man with the foof of colored hair to being his true dragony self. I will fully admit I’m scared that’s gonna put a damper on my retelling. Like I’ve got all this momentum and I’ll get like 20 pages in and get to the bulk of the story and then be like fuh I don’t wanna color 70 more pages of dragons smoking and shit. But like, at the same time, I’ve been going so nice and easy on myself that if I need to change Siv’s dragon design from one page to the next for any reason, hell, I will. But I also haven’t been stressing about saving my pages as JPEGs, because that’s so final and makes it harder to reliably go back and change things if/when I want to, so the idea of changing a character design so I can draw it more fluently isn’t super terrible.
Nothing is technically stopping me from setting up a blog for this either, but I feel like that would tie me down to this project in a way that’ll potentially scare me off from it. So, for the time being, I will make my husband help me with it, and make myself happy, and that’s about it.
Anyway, I’ve gotten 10 pages done in 2 weeks. I don’t think 5 or so pages a week is a bad rate by any means.
And without further ado, I’m testing WordPress’s new gallery block and hoping it won’t fuck everything up!
Snaps from “Dumping a Dragon”
Noelia’s hipster (like herbal tea, thrift store job hipster) lil sister Adriana, being dubious
Aww bbs, this is from the first page and I can’t believe how different my lineart looked!
Raging chibi Noelia, so kawaii, 11/10 would squee
I take my art ssssoooooo seriously
Some slicy intimate panels
Sivarthis no
lololol my TRACED minneapolis institute of art, FUCK ARCHITECTURE
And last but not least, my personal favorite, my avatar for whenever I am driving/dealing with annoying people/dealing with my computer being difficult/having to convince myself not to have Dairy Queen after dinner every day…
I resolved while talking to some patients a few days ago that I would take some time off from video games to focus on producing art. It helped that on Sunday I got to buy 3 books for my birthday on a trip out with my parents and husband. So all I’ve been doing on my “weekend” is reading, creating, sleeping, and chores. Good times. The only shame is that I’m not into coffee right now. *tear*
Anyway, so Sunday night on my way home from work I got seriously into “Don’t Take the Money” by Bleachers, and as I was sitting at my art desk Monday morning wondering what to draw, I got a vision from the line
Till I saw your face and hands covered in sun and then I think I understand
and I was like OOH what if I did shafts of sun/shadow on LUCY BECAUSE LIGHT AND STUFF
Needless to say, when I tried the “shafts” part it looked very harsh, bruise-like, and stupid, so it evolved into a more straightfoward light source but with some still fabulous, layered shading and tone transitions. I had her have like this shawl thing draped over one shoulder originally that the more I tried to work with the more I was like -___- I hate, so eventually I was like … this piece is nothing except risk after risk, so I sliced off her whole shoulder and went for some good ol’ fashioned taping a fresh sheet of paper under the rip. I ended up loooving the kind of abstract, sunset shape of her shoulder in the new part.
I find myself very stuck on Sun-Walking. Lucienne feels like my quiet, best friend of a conscience, making me brave and anchored. I put myself to sleep by drifting off into Helios and Agaar. It’s peaceful, it’s centered. It’s a whole world, with a fearsome, loving couple at its helm. I wish I knew what to do with my persistent passion for this project. I keep rereading the manuscript. It’s good. It’s really solid. It’s worth coming back to again and again, and at this point it doesn’t even need any major revisions. So like, at what point do I just gather myself and send off some queries again? I don’t know. The world has become so sacred to me I almost don’t dare to try to push it into the public eye. I don’t want it violated by anyone. At the moment then I suppose I’m just very happy to have Helios and Lucienne to slip away with in the middle of the night, and to be able to continue to draw inspiration from all the themes of the book.
