Hello! We're 2/3rds of the way through October and I am feeling...alright? Yeah, let's go with alright. Not bad, all things considered.
Online figure drawing has stopped altogether. Here are a couple of pieces from last month before I called it quits:
Yeah, that second one is a self portrait from when I decided to do some poses for the group back in July, in the same back room where we held the very first Defining Bodies meetup in May 2016, where I also modeled nude for the first time.
I do miss figure drawing. So much. I think I say that in every blog post, I repeat it all the time, but there are days where I'm just really stupidly sad about it.
There has been a new thing that slightly fills the hole in my heart: my friend Laura Blankenship recently rented out a studio space at the William King Museum's new Art Lab, and since last month has been hosting little meetups she calls Create and Chill there. The first one was outdoors, but as it's getting colder they've moved into her studio with masks and safe distancing required. Everyone just brings whatever art they're working on, we sit and work for a couple hours while chatting and listening to music, and it's just so very nice. It isn't the same as figure drawing, but the vibes are very similar, and Laura is a wonderful, thoughtful host. She's trying to do it every other Tuesday now, and it really gives me something to look forward to and motivates me to always have SOMETHING I can bring with me to work on.
Here's a painting of Hedorah that I got started on at one of the meetups earlier this month:
(this one is based more on the original concept art by Yasuyuki Inoue)
In keeping busy, I also finished this large, personal painting earlier this month, which I'd started back in August:
I Always Feel Like I'm Being Judged, or, Is This What a Man Is?
I posted this to my Patreon last week, with a very lengthy write-up about what it means, who it's about, and the event that made me put it on hiatus for about a month. Really uh, heavy, personal stuff that I don't feel like writing about again here, you see. If you'd like to read that, please consider subscribing to my Patreon! It just takes a dollar a month to read about that and to see so much other art before I post it elsewhere, along with process stuff and rambling that I don't feel like doing elsewhere. Not everything I make goes in my portfolio on this website or on social media, so that's the best way of keeping up with my work!
(over the weekend I bought a BUNCH of art books that had been donated to the local library, so when I start getting into those I'll probably be sharing a lot of sketchbook stuff and notes!!)
I'm also somewhat back to work on Slimepunk! Issue 8's outline is finished and I'm currently working on the thumbnails and dialogue for it! Once that's done and I at least have the outline for issue 9 finished, I'll finally start work on drawing issue 7. I'll start posting pages on the website again sometime after issue 7 is finished and 8 is at a decent place. Patreon subscribers at the $5 level will get to see the pages earlier, as they're finished of course.
Volume 1 is selling well! I've sold off more than half of the print run now! You can still get a physical copy or PDF on my Gumroad if you've been holding out! I'd LIKE to have it on ComiXology as well, but cannot seem to get it to upload at all, and their support team isn't helping much at all, so I just...got frustrated and gave up for a while after a week of emails and repeated failed attempts. I'll try again later.
And...that's it for now. I'm still not doing as much as I'd like or working as hard as I feel like I should be, but this is a definite improvement over how I was feeling earlier this year. Despite everything, I'm still at it, right? On a more personal note, I've also been exercising on an almost daily basis AND flossing my teeth daily since the beginning of September! Hooray for healthy new habits! I think those things have certainly helped, and I hope to be able to keep them up and maybe add some more good habits so that I'm not just a constant useless blob.
The horrors aren't ending any time soon, but at least they're a little more manageable now.
Take care!