We hit a pretty sharp decline there, huh.

When I first posted early in the month, everything seemed fine: I was excited about doing the Monster March challenge, working on lots of new stuff and starting to get volume 1 of Slimepunk ready to print while gearing up for volume 2.

And then the reality of this pandemic set in.

I made it maybe halfway through the month as far as Monster March goes, skipping a few kaiju and stopping altogether on Gyaos. It was just taking too much time to do and get too frustrating for me. My faves are up in the kaiju gallery now, including this Hedorah that I was quick to bust out:

I don't feel bad about quitting. I moved on to a new daily art thing anyways. Our next Defining Bodies figure drawing meetup was supposed to be last Sunday, but I canceled for the sake of everyone's safety. In place of it, I rigged together a Facebook event, opened it up to other local artists I'm friends with outside of the group, gathered pictures from most of our models and a few new folks, and have been posting a pose a day for everybody to draw from. It's been a full week now and engagement is down, but we've still got roughly five or six people drawing each day, and I'll keep doing it for as long as I can. You can follow the Defining Bodies Instagram for daily updates on each pose!

Issue 6 of Slimepunk concludes in a couple weeks. I haven't drawn any of issue 7 yet, and still haven't worked out the rest of the arc of the second volume either. I'm slowly rereading, tweaking, and formatting all of volume 1 for print, but with shows canceling all around and people losing their jobs and needing whatever money they have to cover essentials, I feel weird about trying to release the thing in physical form. Our local shop closed yesterday for the foreseeable future. I had the owner mail me what books we had in our pull waiting to be picked up and tipped him for the trouble. I threw money at some local acts on Bandcamp when they waived their cut of all sales last Friday, and I'm trying to buy things here and there online from friends too.

I also have a three page Ninel comic fully drawn and partly colored, but...finding the motivation to work on it is hard. I was going to try to finish it this weekend, but...no energy.

Here's a painting I finished early in the month, originally about toxic behavior, but it ended up being more about how a bunch of us are feeling right now:

Everything feels so unstable, and the fact that I'm still going to work daily, with an auction planned tomorrow, feels weird and wrong. Sure, the Virginia governor declared that all unessential businesses should be closed during this, but storage facilities weren't on that list. They weren't on the essential businesses list either though, so I'm really not sure where we fall. I don't see too many people, luckily, but I do handle a lot of cash and with my girlfriend's jobs locked down, that means I'm more at risk than she was. Tuesday morning I almost worked myself into a panic when I started coughing and having chest pains, but that went away quick after taking my own temperature and calming down. Not having a car hasn't helped, as I spent a solid week walking to and from work, often twice a day so I could get lunch at home. It made me realize that I couldn't just...keep carrying on like normal, my body couldn't do it. So: lots of naps, lots of Animal Crossing, watching bands we like play on Facebook Live, keeping art to just online figure drawing and silly character design exercises. Sort of a low power state, I guess, for as long as it needs to be this way.

There's no need to be super productive if you're stuck at home during all of this. The thing about Shakespeare writing King Lear under quarantine is...just whatever. Give yourself some time and space to acknowledge that yes, we're going through some weird, unprecedented shit and that it's perfectly okay to just sit and play videogames if that's what helps you get through it. You don't have to write a novel and I don't have to keep working on Slimepunk if the energy just isn't there for it.

(I do feel like I picked an awful year to stop drinking alcohol, though, sheesh)

The feeling that things are going to get worse before they get better is hard to shake, but I'm certain that things WILL get better. Or at least I'm choosing to believe that they will. Take care of yourselves and those closest to you, help out others if you can, and play Animal Crossing. We'll get through this if we all stay safe.