2020 sure is a year, huh.
I still have little to offer as far as art goes. Here's a painting I did from a pose sent to me by one of our models that couldn't really be used for online figure drawing:
A head full of static is exactly how I'd been feeling at the time, but little did I know that things would get even noisier.
Have I talked about our chinchilla on here? His name is Nod. Ashley brought him to live with us a couple months after we moved into the new house, and within a couple weeks I went from uncomfortable and skeptical to being absolutely in love with the little jerk. When I taught a class on minicomics last year at the William King, one of the examples I made was about him, using the nickname I gave him: Nodzilla. I also made stickers of him. He's the softest little ball of hate.
Anyways, some weeks back, we'd noticed his behavior had changed: he was eating and drinking less and straining to urinate. By the time I got him to a vet, he was starting to urinate blood. An x-ray confirmed that the little guy had a bladder stone, and expensive, risky surgery was the only option to get rid of it, otherwise we'd have to put him down. After a few days and some tough decisions, we ended up driving him two hours to the emergency vet in UT to have him operated on.
You know, while a pandemic is still going on, meaning they took him from our car and left us to our own devices all day, the majority of which we spent in a nearby garden park trying not to freak out. The stress of all of this destroyed my appetite and gave me a consistently upset stomach, which I'm still trying to get over. Nothing else mattered during this time, Nod was my sole concern and everything else I was doing or just hoping to get the energy to do fell to the side.
We got him back the next day, his actual surgery having taken over 2 hours and the vets wanting to watch him overnight. It's been about 3 weeks since then. Those first few days were scary, we really thought we were gonna lose him. He's doing better, his incision is healed up, he's back to being cranky and getting into everything when I let him out of his cage, but he's still not eating like he should, so I still have to keep watch on him. And, even scarier, there's a 50% that he could develop another stone anywhere between a month and a year. Fingers crossed that isn't the case, but yeah, I'm still filled with worry over our little kaiju.
(also, please holler if you want to buy a Nodzilla sticker! I have plenty)
After all of that, well, George Floyd was murdered and I have been more or less glued to Twitter since then, watching protests and demonstrations all over the world as they happen. We attended a couple local ones, a march and a vigil, masked up of course. Since then I've been trying to do my part by making donations and sharing relevant things on social media. I hope this energy keeps up and that real change happens.
Who knew that in the middle of a pandemic I'd come out to my family, take my chinchilla out of state for surgery, and jump into activism?
It's hard to even think of working on art during all of this, but I finally got things going with online figure drawing again last week after a two-week hiatus (the above painting is from before that), moving to a Mon-Wed-Fri schedule for new poses instead of trying to post daily. It's a better pace for sure, just enough to keep me drawing at work rather than just devouring a lot of tokusatsu, though I'm still doing that too, watching as many things as I can. I'm working a little in my sketchbook again, and feel like soon I'll be back to work on Slimepunk and other things, but...who's to say.
I've just realized Rob-Con was supposed to have been next weekend. Dang. I'm gonna miss that show.
I don't know where I'm going with this. The future really is uncertain. The desire for things to "get back to normal" is a conflicting one. We can't go back to the way things were, we absolutely shouldn't. We should be doing everything we can to insure that things will be better for everyone than they were before. I don't miss making art as much lately, but it also doesn't feel like I'm quite myself without it. Just gotta keep doing what I can I guess, as we all should. Right?
Take care.