Oh crap, it's May and I haven't written a new blog post or updated my portfolio on here since February, even though I've been staying busy!!

...I'm not sure where to begin, really. A couple good personal things: first, I got vaccinated back in March! Went with the Johnson and Johnson when an opening came available thanks to a family friend. Also, my birthday was a couple weeks back and I'm now 33. Here's the last self portrait I painted at 32, from a pose I did for figure drawing:

(I should mention before diving further into this: if you subscribe to my Patreon, you've already seen most of this and more, and will continue to see new art and process stuff before anybody else gets to, so please consider signing up for that!!!!

Speaking of which, weekly poses in the new online figure drawing space have been coming along nicely!

It's been a perfect pace for trying new things and playing around without worries about having something pristine looking. I owe a lot of my sanity this year to that group.

I haven't worked on Slimepunk since maybe March. That last comic project I worked on, despite paying well, took a lot out of me and sequential art just hasn't been on my mind much lately. I haven't forgotten about it, though! 

I made a new social justice kaiju portrait recently:
All over the country, cruel new bills keep being introduced, focused largely on trying to ban trans kids from playing sports AND keep them from receiving the healthcare they need. It's terrible. If you live in or near a state where one of these bills is being considered (looking at you, Tennessee), please do something to try to fight it: donate to any local organizations, call your senator, whatever. We can't just sit around and do nothing while these terrible attacks are happening.

On a lighter note: Godzilla Vs Kong came out, I've seen it four times, and did this watercolor painting inspired by the nighttime Hong Kong fight:I may try to do prints of this one for a show this weekend? More on that in a bit.

Additionally, I tried my hand at doing my own little redesign of the king of the monsters for fun after seeing several others doing it. May I present to you Godzilla Rift and his son Minilla!I just love kaiju, y'all. I've also done a King Ghidorah redesign, with more to follow!

Dance classes are going well, and I'm thrilled that my instructor decided we should choreograph something together inspired partly by my work. We've just gotten started a couple weeks ago and haven't done much, but I'm excited about it and have started plotting out some paintings to go along with it, based on certain poses and moves. It's gonna be really cool, I think!

I started on the nonbinary portrait series I mentioned in my last blog, with a self portrait that I already dislike and won't share here, BUT here's the one that followed, of my friend Dan, who's an illustrator and has their own cool kaiju redesign thing going with their fan universe called Godzilla: World of Monsters. They were the one who inspired this whole series idea!I've painted one other person, traditionally, since then, but still haven't heard back from them about it.

(I should mention that something happened in March that was one of the scariest, most stressful things in my life, emotional and draining and stuff, but we got through it, everyone's okay, things are pretty much better now and I don't want to talk about it here)

OH. ONE LAST THING: This Saturday, May 15th, is the second anniversary of JC Punk Flea, a monthly pop-up created by Nik Bang, set up outside their killer shop Projexx. I'll be setting up there! It's my second show this year! I'll be an hour late because it starts at 12 and that's when I get off work! But I will be there! You should come!

Okay, that's enough for now. Other stuff is happening, or will happen, and I'm also in a weird mental liminal space where some MAJOR changes may be happening that I just don't feel like talking about right now. Take care, get vaccinated, and I'll try to post again next month instead of waiting forever again.

Hello! This is the first blog post I've written for 2021, and I thought I'd have posted something sooner, but I've been working since the year began and only recently have had time open up for this.

The first big thing I did shortly after the year began was decide to move online figure drawing away from Facebook, to a more private space where we could post nude poses without worry. Weekly poses have resumed, alternating between nude and non-nude, and I've been greatly enjoying it. Being off of social media also means things feel more like an actual community, we can actually hold conversations and things in a way that just wasn't possible in a Facebook group. I love it. It's something that's really holding me together so far in 2021.

With more poses and more art coming in, the Defining Bodies Instagram has been pretty active too, getting our work out there to more people!

I also kicked off the year with a couple of wonderfully fun commissions: KAIJU PET PORTRAITS.

I think I need to pivot away from mutant portraits and start trying to do more of these.

Between working on those, I picked up a really killer gig on a comic with my friend Danny Djeljosevic, who I did BattleARC 2088 with. That's where most of my time went for the past month. I drew and colored 12 pages over the course of 5ish weeks. I don't know if I can talk about it or even show much, but here's a random panel:

We got half of our payment up front before I'd drawn anything, and will get paid more once it's all done and submitted, pending approval! It was a lot of work in a short time, but worthwhile. Having just finished it over the past weekend, I've been spending most of this week trying to catch my breath.

Speaking of being out of breath: my goals this year aren't all that ambitious, but one of them that I personally really wanted to focus on was learning to dance. Why? Uh, I'm not sure I can explain it. I want to be a more flexible person, more graceful. I want to move more intentionally and expressively.

I have a dancer friend I was going to talk to about it, just to get an idea of how to start and things. As luck would have it, she just recently got a job teaching a number of dance classes at Night Owl Circus in Johnson City! I immediately signed up for two of those classes, dance body and dance improv. At this point, I've taken five classes total with her, one a week, and it kicks my ass every time. I'm slow and creaky, I feel old and uncoordinated, I struggle to keep up, overthinking moves every step of the way...but I'm really into it! It's honestly another of those things holding me together this year, especially when I was up to my neck in work on the comic and couldn't do much of anything else, dance was a welcome break away from that. I plan to keep at it for as long as I can.

Oh, here's a big thing: I have an article up on them. called How Do I Know If I'm Nonbinary? It's my first professional writing gig, and it happened thanks to Samantha Allen, who recently took a job as an editor there and convinced me to write the piece! It's a really personal thing to write about, one that I hope will help others who are questioning their gender identity or those who know people trying to figure things out. I'm really really proud of it.

Work began in December on the next issue of Slimepunk, but it's had to sit on the sidelines while I handled all these other things that I was actually getting paid for, haha. I'm slowly getting back at it, but with another project lined up to work on before long, it may get set aside again. So it goes!

I've also made the first few steps towards kicking off a new personal project, portraits of nonbinary people to illustrate that we can dress and look however we want. The idea hit me while working on the article for them and after seeing a friend complaining about how they don't really see themselves reflected in nonbinary art. I'm starting with a self portrait, of course, but the people I've reached out to so far have been excited about participating and I'm excited about getting to paint them!

...Is that it? Yeah, I think that's it. So much in such a small span of time! I think I need to get some rest. You should too, if you've been overwhelmed with things.

Yes, that's what I went with for the title. It's cold and I'm tired, plus it's my blog, I'll do what I want.

Usually at the end of the year I like to look at all the stuff I watched, read, played, and listened to, pick my favorites and talk about them. This year, things are...different. Like most folks, I did have PLENTY of time to do more, and yet, I didn't dig into half as many 2020 releases as I did last year. I mean, with movies, I only really watched two: Horse Girl, all the way back in February, and Soul, which came out the other day. Both are good and neat! But they didn't do much for me, really.

The thing is, I DID watch a LOT more movies this year than usual. As of today, my Letterboxd profile says I've watched 205. I watched a whole lot of tokusatsu stuff that was new to me: good stuff like Lady Battle Cop, Cyber Ninja, and Submersion of Japan, along with some absolute garbage like Kamen Rider the First and Return of the Dinosaurs. I got to watch a couple of Ishiro Honda's films from before he made Godzilla, and got into a handful of Andrei Tarkovsky films I hadn't seen, his final movie the Sacrifice probably standing as the single best thing I watched this year next to Andrzej Żuławski's biblical sci-fi epic On the Silver Globe. Both of those are just...incredible.

Speaking of Honda, his biography A Life in Film, From Godzilla to Kurosawa was the only book I really devoured this year. Everything else I tried to start reading was just set aside at some point, or I'm still slowly trying to work my way through. With comics, I didn't read even a third of what I did last year, and nothing really stood out to me as exceptional outside of the work of some friends.

My favorite album of the year is definitely Aesop Rock's Spirit World Field Guide, but I can't really articulate why. My favorite SONG of the year is Enlacing by Clipping, a song I just want to swim around float in for hours. Purity Ring's pink lightning hit me harder than anything else by far, and I cry almost every time I listen to it. Momentary Bliss by Gorillaz and Happy by Danny Elfman feel like 2020's big anthems, though.

I guess I watched more TV than anything else, and my absolute favorite thing of the year was undoubtedly Ultraman Z. As part of their push into international markets, Tsuburaya Productions released each new episode on their Youtube channel with English subtitles every Friday night. For over half of this blasted year, I kept up with every episode as soon as I could watch. There were definitely weeks where it felt like the new episode was the only thing I had to really look forward to. It was a lifeline. Such a joyful, exuberant, optimistic show that celebrated the things that make Ultraman so great while also incorporating more elements from Pacific Rim and Evangelion and having some of the best tokusatsu action of all time. I cried through the finale last weekend. It's just so good!

The only 2020 game I played that wasn't a rerelease of something older was my girlfriend's copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and like most everyone else I was hooked for about three months. Nintendo sent me an end of the year review email thing the other day, informing me that I played my Switch more than twice as much this year than I did last year, which comes as no surprise, and Animal Crossing is where the majority of those 350-some hours went. Everything else I bought and played was older. The only new physical release I bought myself was Mario 3D All-Stars, if that tells you anything.

So...yeah, weird year. I just had the hardest time connecting with anything that I wasn't already familiar with to some degree, as you can tell. I didn't seek out anything truly new, nor did I have much desire to. I'll probably continue to feel like this for a while, too. Ugh.

I also usually write about personal accomplishments and goals for next year. The best new habit I picked up was that I stopped going to the grocery store every week. The amount I spend on groceries monthly is still roughly the same, but it's made me better about paying closer attention to what we have and working with that.

I also haven't had a drink since sometime last December, and since early September I've been exercising AND flossing my teeth regularly, habits I will definitely carry try to carry into 2021. I came out to my family as pan and nonbinary, which is kinda huge, but not without its own wrinkles: none of us have really addressed it since I came out. I dunno. I talked about these things already in other posts anyways.

I'm most grateful for our decision to take Nod in for surgery. I'm so glad we took that chance, expensive and risky as it was. I'm so glad he's still with us and doing just fine, and every day when I see him I smile. If we'd lost him back in May, this year would've been so much harder, truly. I love that grumpy old chinchilla so much.

And hey, even though his surgery was such a huge expense, I did pull off the amazing feat of spending quite a bit less money this year altogether! I started keeping track of things in 2019, and at the end of the year was shocked at the totals I came up with, so this year I tried to pay closer attention and stick to some goals. Which worked! Probably thanks to the pandemic keeping me at home with little desire to try to go out and do things, but, y'know. I relied on my credit card more than I wanted to, so that'll be something to watch out for next year. I do almost have it paid off, at least.

As for what next year will bring, I have no clue. I don't have it in me to think about the future, to try and look ahead because I can't even begin to predict what things will look like even a month from now. Slimepunk will return, a new webcomic will launch, and I will keep drawing and painting and making things at some rate, that's about all I know right now. I'm trying to make some plans to post more art on social media and try to get more people to subscribe to Patreon, on top of beefing up my online shop a bit more. We'll see if anything sticks, I guess.

Thanks for being here. I'm glad we made it through this year. Keep living.

Hello! It's almost the end of 2020! We're almost there! I'm so tired! I will probably be tired for most of 2021 as well, let's be real.

First thing's first: there's a new short comic up over on Other Sleep called Another Dream: New Self. Here's the first page:

I drew all three pages of this in February, and even started coloring in March, but then the pandemic hit and everything went sideways. I finished it this month as a way of easing myself back into working digitally with colors once more since all I've been doing for the most part is painting.

I actually got semi-productive again in November, starting with a self-indulgent tangent I went on called, uh, Nude November, where I took a different nude photo of myself every day of the month (starting on the sixth or so, maybe?) and posted it to my NSFW Instagram and Twitter. That was a nice little creative thing to do that kept me motivated. You should know how to find the links to those accounts at this point if you want to see that content, ha. Here's one I'll share though, that's life imitating art imitating life:

Online figure drawing picked back up at the small capacity of a pose a week, and that was the pose one week. Here's the actual painting:

And just to keep the nudity rolling, here's a painting I did last month as well called She Looms:

(my scanner really tends to blow out the whites and lighter tones, especially skintones, so apologies for the cellphone pics here)

The big thing, though? The thing that feels most important? I'M WORKING ON SLIMEPUNK AGAIN. So far all I've done is just draw the cover and first page to issue 7, both of which are pretty heavily detailed and left me kinda drained once I finished inking them. You can see the cover inks on my Patreon, if you subscribe at the Comic Consumer level. You can see a smidge of the first page on my Instagram. 

Copies of volume 1 are still available on Gumroad! Had I been more business savy, I would've done some kind of sale for the weekend of Black Friday or pushed it as a potential Christmas gift, but it's a little late for that now.

Regarding Patreon: I switched a couple tiers on it, with the Comic Consumer level dropping to $3 a month. The plan is to post Slimepunk stuff there as its finished, along with other Ninel comics and this new thing I'm slowly developing that's based on some VERY old ideas from high school, which, when I get to work on drawing it, will be serialized there as a webcomic and nowhere else. The Figure Drawing Fan level got bumped up to $5 a month, and while the stuff from the online group is accessible for ALL patron levels, the more explicit nude stuff goes there. I really want to try to push that more and do more with it, especially on the NSFW front since Instagram's upcoming changes to their terms and conditions may shut down my End of April account...

And well, there's other stuff I've painted that I don't really bother to post here, more kaiju fanart and other nudes that are more quickly done.

Umm...was there something else? I dunno. I still have things I'm working on and hoping to wrap up before the end of the year. I wanted to talk about more personal stuff and the media I got into this year, but it's already taken me days to write this and I need a break, so that'll be another post for another day, yeah?

See you again soon!

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!

Hello. I feel like writing a blog post to distract my brain, but I'm not sure WHAT to write about. Hang on.

OH! Here's how things are going with volume 1 of Slimepunk: by the end of August, I had 18 preorders altogether for the physical edition, which was enough to order a small print run of 40 copies. After receiving and approving the proof, those 40 copies came in at the beginning of this week, as well as the envelopes to ship them in! I'm excited about this! To have the whole thing in one book is so surreal and neat.

I gave two copies to the Bristol Public Library. It's officially in their system and will be available to check out in the kids section AND the teen section soon! How cool is that?!

You can still preorder a physical copy for yourself here, grab a PDF copy here, or just read the whole thing on the website!

This also reminded me that I needed to put Slimepunk on Goodreads, so I went ahead and did that too. If you've read along online or got the PDF when it released earlier this month, go rate and review it for me, please. And here's a reminder that there are other comics of mine on my Author page as well, if you're inclined to rate and review those.

(everything except BattleArc 2088 is free to read, y'know!)

I uh, haven't been working on much. Did some nude paintings that can be seen on my NSFW Instagram account, plus some more kaiju fanart because I don't have the capacity to do much else. Here's Gamera's first foe, Barugon:

Things have sort of come to a halt for the online figure drawing group. I was running out of poses and energy. It was never meant to go for as long as it did anyways! If you'd asked me back in April or May, I would've sworn that we'd be on the other side of this pandemic by now and that I'd be able to host figure drawing in my own home again! But nope, we're inept, we botched it, there's no way we'll be able to meet up again this year. It sucks and I hate it.

Figure drawing truly is the one thing I miss because of covid. It makes me sad and frustrated that I can't have friends over, cook for them, put together a playlist, come up with fun themes, and sit and draw, yelling whenever the timer goes off. I miss it more than anything else, and the online group was fun, but it was not even remotely an adequate replacement for that intimate socialization.

I've started doing some sketches from a reference website someone shared, which is getting me back into doodling nudes, so I've got that at least.

Speaking of nudes, I had a Facebook post go unexpectedly viral this week?! I occasionally do art inspiration posts on my personal page, where I drop a painting or illustration or something and talk about why I like it. It's just nice to do. Last week, I shared this nude pre-cast clay sculpture by Ramon Sierra (hopefully that link works), which I'd found in a Tumblr post a couple months back. It's just super cool to see such a gorgeous sculpture of a larger model, when I primarily, foolishly am so used to just seeing sculptures of fit, muscular, thinner models.

And it took off. As I type this, it's at 4000 reactions and 17000(!!) shares. How wild is that?! And, much to my surprise, it hasn't gotten a single hateful or fatphobic comment! I'm really glad it's made an impact for so many people, but what's weird to me is how ever since it started getting wildly shared this week, I've been getting dozens of friend requests per day from all over the world. I finally remembered to tag Sierra himself in the post the other day, and I hope more people see that, click through, and follow him. HE'S the one who deserves all the attention, not me.

I have accepted about 30-ish of all the friend requests I've been getting. My feed could use some more variety for sure. But for real, it's surprising and overwhelming.

So...that's all for this blog, I guess. Maybe once I get these copies of Slimepunk shipped out, I can really start working on volume 2. I've got other things to work on, but still little energy, and I've had people mentioning setting up shows or pointing me to places looking for artists to show their work, but...I don't really have anything planned for that sort of thing at all right now. I don't have that hustle in me.

And for now, with everything else going on, I hope that's okay. Take care.

Hey everyone! Big news! The first volume of Slimepunk is finally being printed!!!!

Hooray! This trade will collect all six issues of Slimepunk, along with the Patreon exclusive minicomic Faerie Ishee: Home to Roost, plus some fun extras. It's a whopping 134 pages total, and I can't wait to get it in people's hands!

To that end: preorders are up on my Gumroad page. You can preorder the trade here, which will release in October. All copies will be signed and include a free sticker!!

There's also a PDF option, which is a bit cheaper and will release in September, if that's more to your tastes.

Preorders will last all month, and you won't be charged until the respective release day for whichever version you decide to get.

I am a little nervous about this. It's the biggest release I've done since Other Sleep six years ago, and without any shows to promote it at, in the middle of a pandemic where everyone is struggling, well, chances of making sales aren't great. Preorders are the best way to do this without taking a huge loss myself. So I won't be shutting up about this any time soon, sorry about it. It would be much appreciated if you helped me out though, spreading the word as much as possible about this! The more preorders I get, the more I can print!

OH YEAH. If you're subscribed to my Patreon at the $5 level or higher, you get a discount code for the physical copy AND I posted the PDF there for free! So you may want to consider that option too.

Work on this is what took up most of my time over these past few weeks. But I worked on other things too!

First off, here's a new social justice kaiju portrait:
I'd been meaning to do this one for a few years after having it requested by a couple people. Better late than never, right? Ableism has also been a big personal blindspot, so I made it just as much for myself as a reminder to do better.

I actually DID set up at an outdoor art show last month, hosted by Wolf Hills Brewing in Abingdon, with a few friends. I didn't sign up until about a week before the show, and just frantically gathered up everything I had laying around since the last show I did all the way back in December...and did surprisingly well! I kept my mask on whenever I talked with anyone, and aside from the constant wind blowing Nodzilla stickers and other things away, being outside made me a little less anxious. Doing more like it wouldn't be so bad, but also, if no other shows come up, that's fine too.

There was also some work I did for other folks, including a thank you painting for a friend who was extremely kind and generous to us during Nod's surgery, a tattoo design, and licensing more paintings to Eight-Foot Brewing in Florida. Hilariously, I had to work out a way to censor one of my nude paintings for them to use as a label, but it turned out pretty good:
You can see the uncensored version in the Paintings gallery of my Portfolio, of course. It's so neat seeing my work adorning cans and bottles, even though I stopped drinking in December and swore to go all this year without it. Maybe not my best decision, given how insane 2020 is, but I'm sticking to it.

You may have noticed already, but my apocalyptic 2016 comic All of This Will Crumble is now available on here to read for free! Go check it out! After you read it, if you're interested, you can go to my Goodreads author page (which I just claimed last week) and rate/review it!

It's clear now that July was the month where I finally managed to get back on my feet. I'm not at the pace I'd like to be, but it's still nice to be juggling different projects again.

Online figure drawing doesn't have the energy it once did when all this started, but we're still at it. Here's a recent favorite:
With Slimepunk's first volume finally wrapped up, I'm also back to work on writing and working things out for volume 2, hoping to get started actually drawing it soon. There are also plenty of other things I want to draw and paint right now and just haven't had the time or evergy for. As usual, all new stuff will go to Patreon before it lands anywhere else, so again, please consider subscribing to that!

That's it, I guess. Just gotta keep going. PREORDER SLIMEPUNK PLEASE. Take care!

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.

It’s really weird how we collectively experienced March as one long, agonizing stretch of time that never ended, only for April to pass in the blink of an eye despite nothing happening.

I mean, I certainly didn’t do much in April.

Like most sensible, sane people, my girlfriend and I have been staying in this whole time, only going out for work and for groceries. We wear masks when we have to be in public, and we refuse to see friends or have people over. With Tennessee reopened and Virginia following next week, we’re a little horrified by how many people are eager to throw caution to the wind and go back out. So yeah, the chances of us doing anything social with people any time soon are low. Maybe in late June. Probably July. And only after heavy vetting.

I did do one big thing last month: over the course of a couple of weeks, I put together a zine as a means of coming out to my parents as pansexual and non-binary. On the 18th, I put a mask on and took it to them.

It went...okay. Not bad. Awkward for sure, and I keep fixating on the more negative points when the reality is that it could've been so much worse and my relationship to them hasn't changed all that much. There are still a lot of hurdles and the ground is shaky, but I’m glad I did it. I awkwardly came out to my brothers on separate occasions, too. They took it better, and one of them straight up told me he has my back.

I don’t think there’s any way of coming out to older, conservative family members that isn’t awkward or a little scary. There’s no smooth, painless way of doing it. I made a zine for specific reasons, one of them being that it was an easier way for me to get across everything I wanted to get across without having to fumble my words out loud...but it was still pretty tense to just...sit there and watch them read it while the Tom Cruise remake of the Mummy played on TV next to us…now any time that movie comes up I feel REALLY WEIRD.

Anyways! I made the zine available to read in its entirety in a public Patreon post that you can check out here. A few people have asked about buying a copy and I feel like it’s too weirdly personal and specific of a thing to do that, but I wanted people to be able to read it nevertheless. Hopefully it can help others who are struggling with their identities or struggling to come out.

My birthday was at the end of the month, the 29th. I’m 32 now. I had cards from my parents and one of my brothers waiting for me when I went into work that day, people wished me a happy birthday on social media over the course of the day, and my girlfriend and I got burgers. For once, I really did want to be with my family, if only to see what the energy would be like after coming out, but it’s better that we didn’t see each other, I guess. Safer, I mean. It felt surreal, but I guess I just have to get used to that for now.

Online figure drawing has continued with daily poses, aside from one particular week mid-April that I decided to take a break. Participation has dipped, and some days are better than others as far as folks sharing their sketches goes, but that’s understandable with everything going on. It’s still the only art I’ve been able to do myself, aside from some fun little crafts my girlfriend got me to do with her for the children’s library. One week we made paper airplanes and colored bubble art, and on my birthday we made monster feet out of kleenex boxes.

Figure drawing is the one thing I really truly miss during this pandemic. I keep telling people I’ll continue with this online group for as long as I can, as long as we have poses from people to work with, but I’m also getting a little weary, and it just isn’t the same as having friends over, making food for them, laughing and listening to music while we draw together. Yesterday I posted a picture of a cat that someone sent me as a joke, and it was actually a wonderful change of pace, but nothing compares to actually having someone posing right in front of you.

There are so many other things I’d like to work on. There’s still so much work to do with Slimepunk. I want to do another digital painting like the Alien Queen I spent all of February on. I have other things that I’d like to do watercolor paintings of. I want to take some of the ridiculous character designs I did for a thing I did on Facebook back in March and flesh them out into real characters. I want to do something for a zine I was invited to participate in. I want to start exercising again. We got stuff so I could try making flatbread like everyone else.

I just can’t find the energy to do any of those things.

You can see in my last post, from the end of March, where I talked about just taking a break from those things and trying to relax, that one shouldn’t feel pressure to be productive during a crisis. But I’ve reached a point where I’m tired of doing nothing, and it bugs me that I don’t have it in me to do any of the above things. I’ll try to find a way to work up the spirit. I don’t know how to do that, but I’ll try to figure something out.

Until then, staying safe and healthy is the most important thing. Take care, and I’ll do the same.

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.