HAPPY YEAR OF THE RAT, EVERYONE!

January 2020 has actually been going alright so far after a rocky, emotional start.

I'm making good progress on issue six of Slimepunk, and I'm hoping I can have enough done so I can start posting again next month. The pages that are finished so far are being shared on Patreon with folks who are subscribed at the $5 tier, if you want a headstart on everybody else.

My first painting of the year, depicting a bellydancing friend in an inflatable Godzilla costume, can be seen over here. I also did my first real fanart work last week, my own attempt at drawing Shin Ultraman:

And I've posted another weird, personal, NSFW painting on my weird, personal, NSFW account End of April, if you follow that, with some words about my figure drawing friends who appear in it.

Speaking of figure drawing, the first Defining Bodies meetup of 2020 was this past Sunday, and it was absolutely what I needed. I've updated the figure drawing album on here with some recent work, but it's time to promote my Patreon again by reminding you that $3 subscribers get to see EVERY drawing I do at our monthly meetings, no matter how bad or ugly they are, along with rambling about what I was trying to do.

The Shin Ultraman and NSFW painting went up over there first, too. Basically, most everything I do now goes on Patreon at least a few days before it goes anywhere else. Even just a dollar a month gets you access to a bunch of process posts and things!

It's also where I first revealed Ninel's return in a two page dream comic I made called Another Dream: Mutual Friends. The comic itself is up on Other Sleep's website now, but patrons got to see the full process for it, from the original thumbnails and scribbled dialogue to the finished pages.

So yeah...not a bad way to kick off January, I guess. I have several other, more personal goals I'm working on this year too. Last year I managed to keep track of my spending habits, and this year I'll attempt to do a better job of saving money. I've decided to stop drinking alcohol for at least this year, just to see what it's like. I made the decision to quit last month, so I already have a good head start.

I had some other, bigger goals last year that I never managed to pull off. Rather than try again, or double down and try to make up for it, I'm trying to think a little more modestly this year. My big exercise goals always fall through, so this year I'm scaling it back to just a little light jogging and/or some pushups here and there each day rather than trying to stick to a demanding routine. Washing my face daily too, it's a small thing but it's reasonable, and I can build off of it.

I dunno, I'd read something last year that talked about how, if we try to make a bunch of changes all at once, we're doomed to fail. It's better to start small, build a good foundation that you can later expand on. I've always felt like I'm super scatterbrained, and maybe there's no way to completely rewire myself out of it, but I realized last year that part of the reason I never feel like I know what I'm doing is because I never really spent time building any foundations.

Studying anatomy for months last year was a good, solid thing to do. I didn't feel super productive when it came to making finished work, but it helped me regain at least a little confidence, and I want to keep at it this year, relearning and better understanding what I'm doing with my art, how I'm doing it, and how I can improve, rather than sitting paralyzed and directionless.

Things aren't stopping: I will be printing the first collected Slimepunk volume this year for sure. There will be more dream comics with Ninel. I'm working on a cool project with my friend Mark O. Stack that will have a Kickstarter next year. I have so many paintings I want to do and I'm getting a clearer understanding of how to make them. I will be at KapowCon in May and RobCon in June. Defining Bodies will continue to meet monthly as long as I can host and convince people to come model and draw.

And if I fail to succeed at any of these things, if any of it falls through? It's not that big a deal. I can start again, and I think I finally know how to look at my failures and learn and grow from them, making the next try a little easier.

It's hard to look at everything happening in the world and not feel despair. But I think it's important to know how to work on in despair. Take care of yourself, and if you have the strength, look after those around you as well. See you soon.

If January is any indication of how the rest of the year is going to go for me, then 2013 is going to be a crazy busy year.

First off, here are the four watercolor paintings, a series called the Same Mistake, that I did for the art show that is currently on display at the Bristol Grind House:

Secondly, I drew a 10-page, silent sci-fi western snowstorm comic over the course of a few days, completely on a whim after a massive snowstorm hit us. You can "read" the first five pages of that HERE and the rest of it HERE. You can also check it out on deviantART HERE and HERE. Maybe I'll post it all on here. I guess I should do that.
 

Also? I’m kind of an amateur stand-up comedian now. After watching my friends do it for quite a few months now, I decided to give it a try myself. I’ve done it three times now. I'm not so sure how good or funny I am, it's really impossible to tell when you're up on stage, but it's a new and fun and terrifying and beautiful creative outlet for me to play around in.

Oh, and I drew this for my friend Sterlin:
FURTHERMORE, I’m doing freelance design work for the local newspaper now, which brings in a little extra cash and lets me use a different part of my brain. I just wrapped up a logo for a thing recently. Not as steady work as I'd like, but still, hopefully this will open up to more opportunities, right?

And finally, I am in this art show at Floating World Comics in Portland. Zines are available to order and stuff too, so check it out! There are a LOT of talented folks in there, all of us paying tribute to the Incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius. Really, I feel like I don’t deserve to be in there next to artists like Dave Taylor and Sloane Leong. It's like I pulled off some sort of heist. Here's the panel I did, which I somehow failed to post when I did it back in November:
Yeah, it’s February and I’m in two art shows at roughly the same time? I don’t know how that happened. I’m savoring it, because it will probably never happen again.

Um, obviously, chapter 6 of Other Sleep isn’t done yet, but it will be soon, I swear. Look, here’s the cover for it!
And I think that covers everything, right? Now I must get back to work! THERE'S MORE TO COME.

[Brett]

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! I kind of had a slight nervous breakdown earlier today, maybe. Over my art. Heh.

I've been working on some paintings for this art show that starts next week at the Bristol Grind House. Here's the flyer I put together for it:
Watercolors and Microns on canvas is what I'm doing, because I'm a masochist. I've been working on them for two weeks now maybe. Well, two of them anyways, the other two I started on just last week. It's a narrative, but uh, I didn't really know what the narrative was until the other day? Yep. It was supposed to be just three canvases, then it ballooned into four. When I do things, I have to go about doing them in the most punishing way possible.

Anyways...I had them all in what seemed to be a finished state this morning, and I sat them all side by side, and...and I hated them. And I started to think, "fuck, this was a terrible idea, why did I do this, I should've done something else, fuck fuck fuck." And I contemplated painting over at least two of them, abandoning the narrative and just doing something more thematically tied together? Or throwing all but one out and maybe trying to do something different over the next few days.

I spent three and a half years in the graphic design program at ETSU, and in that time I sat through way too many critiques that would go on for literally two or three days sometimes. I failed my portfolio review three times and shouldn't have gotten another chance. Why they gave me four tries, who knows, but I passed that fourth. What I'm getting at here is that school was really rough on me, my pieces were never really terribly notable during critiques, and a small group of professors I was unfamiliar with mostly thought my work was lousy and I just really had to fight in order to graduate.

So all of these memories were going through my head as I was staring at these paintings, thinking about how they'll be up for a good two or three weeks, seen by dozens of people, people I've never met, never will meet. And they'll be judging them, judging ME based on them, even if they never do meet me or see any of my other work ever again. These four paintings are all I have to make a good impression, to convince these people I've never met that I don't suck. And I'm absolutely blowing it, only ONE of the paintings was really strong, the rest were flat and vague and ugly.

I gave myself a bad head rush and a case of the hiccups as I paced around, panicking, trying to think of what to do. I didn't want to throw them all out and try to do something new when everything has to be done by Sunday for Sterlin to hang. And I didn't REALLY want to paint over the canvases, but I was getting desperate and thinking that was the only way out, I was tired of looking at these crappy paintings.

I told a friend on Facebook that I wish I could just erase three and a half years of art school critiques, to which she responded "Keep this in mind: You're an artist, not an art student...and a really good artist at that."

And that...kind of snapped me out of it. I kept thinking about all the lousy critiques I sat through, being told by professors that my portfolio wasn't good enough for the BFA program, all that negative stuff. And her comment reminded me that people DO enjoy my art, and then I remembered this guy who wrote me on deviantART last week, telling me my gallery was his favorite that he'd seen in years.

So I stopped, took some deep breaths, collected myself, once again looked at the paintings, this time more objectively, and set about working on them once again, all afternoon, until once more they looked like they were pretty much finished.

And I was satisfied this time. I was able to figure out how to strengthen each painting and make them stand on their own while still telling a complete story. All it took was a kind word from a friend to help me step back and clear the black clouds out of my brain.

I guess the moral here is, if you like someone's art? TELL THEM. Let them know you appreciate what they're making. Because artists, we're neurotic as fuck. I often find myself in this hole, hating my work, hating myself for hating my work and not being any good, and it's discouraging. But a comment or two is all it takes to get me back on my feet. 

Anyways. Show goes up on Sunday. I'm gonna take pictures of the individual paintings tomorrow once I've deemed them complete, and post them some time next week. Stay tuned.

(originally posted on my Tumblr)