Octopus, Octopi.

Plurals. PFF. I am such a damn scatterbrain lately, it's a wonder I can get anything done without combusting. The sun is finally starting to show up with something resembling consistency, and I'm starting to feel a little less like I suck at existing. It's either Seasonal Anxiety Disorder, or I'm back to having a critical deficiency in vitamin D again.

No, I'm not exaggerating. This actually happened. I had to take superhuman amounts of it just to get out of the red.

ANYWAY. I made some arts. I'm probably overdue for a sketchdump, but I have a lot of badly drawn wangs to navigate around so that will have to wait until I'm not drawing/playing Portal/grinding in Pokémon.

Yeah. Sorry, Razell, but you came out of my brain, so you're pretty much obligated to dabble in skanky drag costumes when I'm feeling exceptionally hilarious. Or really, just because drag queens are one of my primary sources of inspiration. Also, because I apparently don't care about consistency or beginning my sentences with grammar that isn't stupid, I totally forgot to draw his horns. :/ Like my older picture of Privilege, this picture was drawn in my sketchbook, which has incredibly uncooperative paper. I always seem to forget that when I start drawing, and when I progress into the coloring stage, I end up screaming at the image in desperate hope that the heavens will burst open and magically transform my stupid moleskin paper into godly bristol.
The green texture in the background was lovingly devised a month before with walnut ink and boredom. Scan it, free transform+shift to scale, and adjust the hue in photoshop, and BAM. Instant background.

Avarice! I had a thought that I wanted a picture that was primarily line-oriented, but I got restless after hours of lining and some painstaking pointillist pissery, and got out my inks. I'm...okay with how it turned out. I need to start paying more attention to the balance and composition in my pictures. Her tentacles look alright though. I still have some time before Sakuracon, so I'm trying to get out some new and exciting artwork, and I think she'll adapt well to bookmarks too!

I painted my new headphones! :D Sensing a bit of a theme here? In the past couple of months, I have created a lot of octopus-inspired junk, and once I get my mug back, I'm going to take some pictures of it with some of my bitty sculptures.

Now that we're sufficiently caught up with the stuff I'm working on, I should probably try and sleep now. I'm going to embark on a mask-making project soon, so I'll take lots of pictures of the process!

Holy freakin' update, Batman.

Distracted with a capital DERRRRRR.

Quarter winding down, along with my ability to construct grammatically sound sentences. Getting ready for cons and desperately trying to pump out new work for people to enjoy. However, I am totally uninspired for any of my own creations anymore, but in an effort to keep drawing, I'm doing a lot of fan art. Hopefully it doesn't show the stagnancy I feel inside, but as always, the best way to work through a rut is to keep working.

So, as an apology for floating away for so long, here's a Raja sketch that's about 85% nailed down.

I......need to sleep. A more intelligible post to come. Soon. Maybe.

Snow, Snow, Snowed in!

Since it is now ACTUALLY WINTER in the sense that there is enough snow on my hill to trap me here for a few days, I have actually had a few moments to sit down and be productive!

Read as: Playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. I did some paintings too! Speaking of Zelda, here's a silly little comic I did today.

I like making comics, but I don't think I'm particularly funny. Whatever, I'm having fun doing these. :D I also started a two new wood paintings today. They are a quite a ways from being done, but here's a preview!

I need to go to bed before I think of more new projects to embark on. <3

A regular sleep schedule? Pff.

I don't really know what happened with the last week or so of my life. I seem to recall getting a Sony Cybershot for Christmas and taking lots of pointless pictures of food, a dirigible shark, fits of obsessive painting, and playing lots of Fire Emblem and Minish Cap. Anybody who knows me knows that I have an extremely sporadic sleep schedule, and I will usually be awake at 3AM doing something artistic.

This is my most recent finished thing. It's really more of an excuse to monkey around with creating textures and screwing around with color balance in photoshop, and I think I spent a little too much time on this portrait to simply call it a sketch. It always amazes me how people can create photorealistic portraits with traditional media, especially pencil, and I was going for a similar feel with this. I have a number of female characters/muses that buzz around in my brain and play important roles in the stories I have yet to share, and Quill is one of the oldest and most important. This portrait isn't very indicative of her personality at all, which I find kind of annoying, but I was feeling a bit emotional, so nyeh.

Razell doodles I clipped together and posted to Deviant Art a few days ago. I have seriously bad handwriting, but don't worry about trying to read the speech bubbles, because they aren't important. I am super proud of that cobra, though. I find animals hard as hell to draw, and snakes in particular are difficult to convey with a believable sense of form. I think it's in the scale patterns. However, if it's one thing I love, it's doing research, so I spent about an hour looking for photos on the internet so I could scribble out a tiny cobra in my sketchbook. Whatever, SUCCESS. It's a decent looking snake and I am proud of it. So there.

Just like that, it is now 5:15 in the damn morning, so I should prooooobably attempt to sleep before I get on with another project or another episode of Jem and The Holograms.

Assorted sketchbook stuff, etc.

Let's start with something new.

I bought a new sketchbook yesterday, which was totally unnecessary, and this is the first thing in it. It's sketchy and quick, but I kind of like it because it's one of the better pictures of Raen I have. It's also pretty illustrative of the kind of relationship he has with Gabriel.

This is the big sketchdump I put on Deviantart a few days ago, but now I have the time and I feel like talking about it a little. Gabriel has been showing up a lot in my thoughts and sketches lately, but I'm not entirely certain as to why.  He is my oldest muse and I depend on him quite a bit for direction. So yes, in order of appearance:

Top Left: Gabriel in an elven style sweater outfit. It's almost Hollowellian in design, which I guess would make more sense if I ever shared my concept and costume designs for the Hollowells. Haha.

Top Right: A thumbnail sketch of the Junk Sphinx. One of the other cyborg monsters that roams the wasteland.

Directly below Gabriel: Privilege in a winter bunny outfit. I ended up liking this sketch so much that I took it into photoshop and posted a colored version on Deviantart. I am now more pleased with the sketch than I am with the final version. Oh well.

Next to Privilege: 3 AM is a great time to scribble mindlessly while listening to Beyonce. I don't know, I guess the thought was that Raen is a whiny romantic so of -course- he'd transcend time and universes to sit around in women's lingerie sobbing over a telephone in the desperate hope that Gabriel will FINALLY PAY ATTENTION TO HIM. Again, I don't know, but it's funny.

Directly below beyonceRaen: Tiny Junk Sphinx head.

Below Privilege: Yep, the Luka chibi again. It never got a makeover in photoshop because I am lazy.

Next to the Luka Chibi: You know those "draw this again" memes that keep popping up over deviantart? I didn't really want to share any of my super old and embarrassing art, so I just decided to reconfigure one of Gabriel's old costumes. It's pretty skanky, but I get the impression that sorcerers are expected to bare some midriff while they toast the country side with flaming pillars of destruction.

Below all of that: The Junk Sphinx! It didn't really deviate far from the barebones sketch at the top of the document, which is cool. I usually go through a long and exhausting process of designing my cyborgs and I am rarely pleased with the results.

Finally: Gabriel and chibi Gabriel. This is how he currently appears in my head.

After having typed all this up, I realize I never crossposted my first sketchdump to this blog. It's not super interesting, but maybe I'll do that later. Once we get a little further along towards New Year, I'll probably do a self evaluation post with a summary of  my art in 2011. The only other thing I can think of that is pertinent to art is that my stupid tablet pen is jacked up, which is making it nearly impossible to do all the comic work I set out to do! Argh. I have some replacement nibs coming soon, and if that doesn't fix the problem, I get to pay more money for a new pen. Crap in a hat.

Maybe if I coax and coo and smile prettily enough, my stupid pen will behave enough to let me do a little more work on my current page. Then I can put up a teaser pic. In any case, I feel kind of crappy, so it's time to lie down and play more Minish Cap.

I swear I'll try to sleep after this.

You know, I seriously wonder why I seem to create more interesting works when my brain starts to fizzle out. I have been sleeping poorly, even for me, as of late, and I spend hours contending with the frantic misfirings of my brain and sometimes I get some cool stuff out of it. Other times, it's just pages of the word "FUCK" scribbled next to stick figures doing gymnastics.

45 minutes. Ink, gel pen, cartoons, and pseudonightmares. Maybe it's my compromised sense of fuck-giving after so many hours awake that allows me to simply scribble without an agenda. Maybe it's my habit of looping songs. Maybe I just really like to draw Canta in various stages of gender neutrality and exploration.

In any case, I need to try and sleep before I get stuck at my desk and start to paint again.

Are you sick of me yet?

No? Fantastic. Yes? Also fantastic. So it turns out my order that came in today came from Deleter, instead of the one I was expecting with my white ink. So my materials post will have to wait a few more days, I think. This may or may not mean I'll plan it and actually come up with something that is informative and reads well instead of "HEY LOOK AT THIS OO ISN'T IT NEAT HERE LET ME SHOW YOU MORE NEAT STUFF OOO".

I have very little else going on in my life right now, so I basically live and breathe at my drafting table. I'm a bit compulsive when it comes to tasks, work-related or otherwise, so I tend to get locked in and kind of obsessive, which explains the crazy amount of work I'm churning out these days. I took a break from writing and drafting stuff to reread some Elfquest, which I do a few times a year. Elfquest is the series that basically started me on the path of art and I will always treasure it. I occasionally do fanart for Elfquest, but nothing has really been worth sharing. I rather like these little ATC things though. They are small and cute and easily carried around in a photo album to show to people! The image above consists of three ATC sized cards with (left to right) Nightfall, Leetah, and Moonshade. I spent most of my time on Leetah, but significantlt more effort on Moonshade because I found her harder to draw. She has a more squarish type face and her eyes seem to be large even for an elf, so striking a balance is a little trickier. Although that may also be because I tend to draw more oval faces by default.

Anyway, I have to get back to feverish scribbling and not sleeping.