I didn’t write my usual update over the weekend because I worked graduation on Friday night, and it apparently wiped me out for two days. It was a lot of fun, but the ceremony happened outside and it rained the whole time, which you can imagine was less than pleasant for everyone who had to sit on the field the whole time (guess where I was assigned). After all that, I decided that I was going to give myself some grace on the blog, as I’ve learned over time that if I find myself doing a thing out of a sense of obligation when it was supposed to be fun or creatively satisfying, then that means I need to let myself not do the thing until I feel like it. None of my creative pursuits make me any money, and they don’t need to make me money, so I have to remember that the point is of doing them is pleasure.
Anyway, I had a very restful weekend, and the last week of the school year starts today, so I have a bit of time to get this quick update together before I start my workday.
Art
I did one piece this week, as is my recent “oh God, when will the school year just end already?” pattern. Like with my last few pieces it ties into a scene from the New Mutants run that I’m re-reading. Because this scene involves both a horse and a rabbit, I looked up some photo reference for those animals and did worked from there. All told, it was pretty fun to incorporate the reference, especially since there was so much transformative work going into the composition separate from what I got from the photos. If I ever get into attempting more photorealistic figures, I’ll definitely keep this experience in mind.
Besides reference, I also determined that I wanted to desaturate this piece significantly in comparison to the usual palettes that I use for my work. I think it works pretty well overall, especially in contrast with the extremely saturated highlights I used on the finishes.
Comics
At this point this is mostly just a placeholder while I scrape some brain cells together to write intelligently about anything. I’m enjoying Legion of X still!
Video Games
I’ve hit my five year cycle of wanting to play a fighting game, which means I am now about a week into the project of playing Street Fighter V. I’ve done most of the characters’ story modes, and now I’m noodling around with the various arcade and survival modes. It is a wild fictional universe that is incredibly earnest and embarrassingly cheesy at times, but I enjoy it. I’m grateful that there are a wide variety of costumes for all the characters, including two whole outfits where Cammy gets to wear pants. It’s awkward as a man in my late 30s to use the woman who wears a one piece swimsuit to all occasions as my main fighter. Like, all the character designs are kind of absurd after a point, but it’s nice to see Capcom have finally considered the players who don’t want to look like horndogs because of their fighter choices. I’m sure I’ll be back in another five years to meditate on the final form of Street Fighter VI.
Media
We’ve been watching a series of survival TV shows about British people being abandoned on a desert island to try to last for six weeks, and that’s fun. It’s sometimes harrowing, but I think the fact that it’s always a group who have to figure out community while they’re doing all this other hard stuff makes it more compelling and less emotionally fraught than other shows like Alone.
Rachael and I also watched The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and it was good. It’s actually a very sincere buddy movie that also happens to be a meta-joke about Nicolas Cage’s acting career. I feel like it lifts some beats from Adaptation, but Rachael insists that the two movies are significantly different. It’s been a minute since I watched Adaptation, so I could be forgetting some stuff.
Coffee Shops
I have not been to any coffee shops this week.
Catchy Title Goes Here 