Weekly Upload 03/12/22

I think this was mostly a sanguine week of work, if you set aside the sense of impending doom everyone has about the mask mandate ending this weekend and the potential anxiety explosion we could face come Monday. I saw two shows this week (like, the in-person theater kind), one socially with some friends and the other as support for my work bestie who has run herself ragged trying to prepare a student musical under pandemic conditions this year. Both were fun! Both involved late nights! I’m very tired this morning as I write all this.

Art

I think I mentioned last week that my copy of the Morpho book on clothing folds came in, so I’ve taken a sudden interest in observing how real life clothing works and thinking through how to recreate those looks in my drawing. I did a couple of pieces this week that were meant to give me chances to practice folds on slightly looser fitting clothes (superheroes tend towards the form-fitting side of clothing), and I’m mostly pleased with the results. I’ll probably keep doing weird clothing stuff for a little bit while I’m focused on this element. I’ve also started playing around with the settings on my sketching brushes a little bit. My rough drawings tend to look kind of blobby because I’ve gotten in the habit of using a brush that has a pretty dynamic size range, and I’m starting to feel the limitations of that, particularly when I’m working on comics pages and have to work in a much smaller space than what I’ve gotten used to with my other art. I’m hoping that moving towards a finer tip brush will help me develop some more refined habits around detailing, though I’m absolutely certain it’s going to slow me down in the short term. I think the more interesting question will be whether I adopt a similarly fine tipped brush for inking. It’s a largely open question at this point, but an interesting one for my brain to noodle over while I’m drawing.

Week 10 Art Output
Slightly less this week, but I think this diptych is pretty strong. Trying to practice more elaborate clothing folds. I also began the next page of my fancomic, though we’ll see if I finish it by the end of the week. #drawing #xmen #artistontwitter pic.twitter.com/DGIun6RNRG

— Jason Jones (@Jkjones2185) March 12, 2022

As for the fancomic, I have a decent idea for a new sequence, though I haven’t figured out how long it’s going to be yet. I’m working on the first page right now (which is all I’ve scripted so far), and then I’ll see if I want to post it before I move on to the next part or not. I think at the very least, giving myself permission to take breaks in between pages to do standalone pieces will help a lot with the grindy aspects of production. The two week period where I only worked on two pages back-to-back was really difficult.

Comics

Somehow I managed to have ten new comics to pick up on Wednesday this week, and I still have a few that I’ve not read yet since I’ve been deep in drawing land. The highlights for the week were the conclusion of the Life is Strange series that’s been going on for a couple years. I’ve been into that book since it started back at the beginning of 2019, and the final issue provided a really lovely coda to Max and Chloe’s story. The conclusion to Christopher Sebela’s Comixology Unlimited series .Self dropped, and it was perfectly satisfying. I find Sebela’s story concepts to be deeply fun because he loves a near-future dystopian moment. Also in the Sebela column for this week was volume 3 of Crowded, which I jumped on after the first arc concluded, adored through the second arc, and then spent a year patiently waiting for the series to conclude all at once. In terms of creator-owned work, it might be one of my favorites of the last year. I’m absolutely certain that it’s due to the art team’s work; Ro Stein and Ted Brandt deliver a visual style that leans just enough into exaggeration to make for some really fun characters who still feel grounded. I look at their stuff and want to be able to draw people who look like that. Now that the whole series is done, I think I will plan to reread it all at a go some time soon.

Media

Like a lot of people, we watched season 2 of Love Is Blind and were baffled by the motivations of the people on the show. Unlike a lot of folks, we finished that and thought, “Is there a better version of this?” Enter Love Is Blind: Japan! If you’re looking for a bit of trash television that actually follows people who seem to be taking the whole dating and romance thing seriously, you can do a lot worse than this show. The structure of the series feels much less like a bunch of people pretending to date for the sake of being on TV than folks who are serious about trying a novel way to find a long-term romantic partner. I found myself liking most of the couples, even as it became apparent who was likely to get married and who was just incompatible. In slightly less trashy television, Rachael and I decided to give Space Force a second chance since we’d heard it gets much better in the second season. The first season is deeply uneven, with a few episodes that really work and many that are just bizarre. We just wrapped the first season up last night, so we’re looking forward to getting into the good material now.

Pandemic

The statewide mask mandate has ended, and we’re all just waiting to see what kind of chaos might erupt at work after the weekend. I hope that it all ends up being a big nothing in terms of impact on case numbers, but I think the optimism of last summer before Delta and Omicron hit has left me feeling like declaring things over in terms of community mitigation is premature. I wonder (probably idly) if this is just going to be a cyclical pattern for the foreseeable future.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to any coffee shops this week. I did eat a burrito from a taqueria before I went to one of the shows I saw this week, so that was nice, even if it wasn’t the same as hanging out for a couple hours.

Weekly Upload 02/19/22

It was mostly a pleasant week. At work we’ve wrapped up the argument and research unit that helped bridge the worst of the drag that is January through February (lots of work days for students to do independent reading and writing), and we’re about to start a short story unit based on some stuff that we designed and used four years ago. It’s nice to revisit old materials, especially since we’re going to combine them with some texts we haven’t used before. I’ve also been dealing with some mild grumps about the Comixology app update that dropped this week, but having a long weekend sitting ahead of me helps to soften the general blow.

Art

I’ve taken a week off from working on my fancomic to do some standalone pieces that have been quite fun. I feel like I’ve played a lot the last couple months with some techniques related to rendering line work that I go back and forth on. I feel like they suit different moods in my pieces, so I’ll probably switch back and forth between them for the time being. I did one portrait this week where I ended up making two versions, and I’m still not sure which one I like better. The blended lines make for a more painterly look overall, but I also love the striking contrast that the black lines give, especially since I tend to gravitate towards really vibrant, high saturation colors in my work.

I’ve also begun reading a graphic thesis on teaching and visual art called Teaching Artfully by Meghan Parker. I’m only about a third of the way through it presently, but I’m enjoying what it proposes in terms of art’s function as a tool for shaping what and how we think. There’s a brief discussion of self portraiture as a way of reflecting on what we see and emphasize in ourselves that I found especially fascinating. I’m sure I’ll have finished the book by next week and will have more thoughts.

Week 7 Art Output
Three pieces that I’m pretty pleased with. Never did decide if I liked the version of Pixie with the black lines or the one with the lines colored to blend in with the rendering. They each have their own charm. #drawing #xmen #Trigun pic.twitter.com/OOTgAAroYS

— Jason Jones (@Jkjones2185) February 19, 2022

Comics

I went into the week feeling apprehensive about the Comixology update. Two days into the new status quo, I’m a little less irritated about my personal experience with the app, but I know that’s because I’ve been reading primarily on my tablet for over a year now, and that’s obviously the experience Amazon wants to push people towards. The biggest loss I’m personally experiencing is with the storefront. For series that I know about, the search functionality works fine, but I feel that I’m going to miss a lot of less prominent stuff that I might pick up on a whim while browsing the weekly releases. More abstractly, my Twitter feed has been full of comics people pointing out ways the update has been absolutely catastrophic for the indie and small press wings of the industry. It’s not great!

In actual comics reading, I thoroughly enjoyed this week’s X-Men issue with MODOK. It’s worth the price just for the panel where MODOK dropkicks a rage zombie while shouting “…for SCIENCE!” I’m also really enjoying the ongoing plot in Home Sick Pilots, a series that I initially felt kind of ambivalent about until the second arc got going. It’s settled into its groove as a punk/creepypasta action-horror story, and I’m finding the whole thing delightful. I think I wrote earlier this year that I need to just re-read the whole series to see how it hangs together, and I still intend to do that at some point.

Books

I finished reading The Nobody People this week, and while I really enjoyed it, I was definitely irritated that the relationship between it and its sequel is less “duology” and more “one novel that was too long to publish in a single volume.” I would describe this book as hitting its resolution about fifty pages early and then taking the rest of the time to explain to you in excruciating detail how actually that just made everything worse. I already have The Somebody People lined up to read next because a story that pauses at prison camps, impending war, and mass coercive recruitment of child soldiers feels a bit too unresolved for my tastes. Stepping back from that one mild critique, I think what I enjoyed best about the book is that while it’s obviously an X-Men pastiche, there’s very little in the book that’s feels like it belongs on the page of a superhero book. I don’t think I ever reach a point while reading where I thought, “this should have been done as a comic.” No one runs around in colorful costumes, and the application of powers, while occasionally told in a way that would be really appealing if given a visual treatment, is much more focused on their personal significance to their users, which is a kind of internality that I think prose especially excels at doing.

Video Games

I finally finished Going Under, which ended up being about twice as long as I originally anticipated. It was cute! I wonder if the studio that made it is unionized.

Media

Rachael and I started watching In the Heights last night, but we had to stop because it was late and we apparently still had 75 minutes left. What we’ve seen so far is very charming and very much in keeping with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical style. Ironically, we’re finding that Tick,Tick…Boom! was much more engaging as a film that Miranda directed versus In the Heights as an adaptation of one of his own shows. In stupider fare, we’ve started watching the second batch of Love is Blind season 2 episodes, and we continue to be baffled at just how bonkers the plot lines in this season are. It’s much more palatable as a show when you think of it as a series of contrived stories that the producers cast real people to act out rather than any kind of realistic depiction of developing romantic relationships. I hope that’s the case at least, because no one on the cast seems to be okay.

Pandemic

The dominant thought about the pandemic for me these days is that it’s going to be great when the end of Oregon’s statewide mask mandate coincides with the return to school from spring break at the end of March. Really looking forward to another COVID wave in the early part of April.

Seriously, I hope that I’m wrong and everything will be fine. Doesn’t mean I intend to stop masking myself in public for the rest of the school year.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week. The weather’s pretty nice, so maybe we’ll go get lunch from the outdoor food carts this weekend? That would be nice.

Weekly Upload 02/12/22

It’s a very full weekend, so I don’t think this update will be too extensive. My work week was rough for reasons I can’t get into on the internet. It’s nothing terrible, just one of those unique aggravations that teachers deal with and which I find myself personally very poorly equipped to handle. It’s been a lot of negative feelings to sift through.

Art

I finished the second page of my second comic story early this week, and that was a big relief. I find that I generally enjoy the process of writing and drawing the comic, but the time investment gets draining when I reach the end, publish the results, and get very little response. I have to constantly coach myself not to expect anyone else to care much about my esoteric pet project, but it’s definitely a little deflating to go, “Here’s the thing!” and get no feedback on social media. That whole mess of feelings plus the work frustration left me wanting to draw my feelings, so I did a portrait of Cyclops being uncharacteristically visibly upset about the way he has to keep himself under control all the time. It is definitely projection on my part. Aside from that therapeutic exercise, I also encountered a comic artist’s work that I found really engaging this week and gave myself permission to just enjoy copying some of his line work. The results are nothing worth sharing because, well, they look like I copied someone else’s work, but it was a really relaxing exercise and fun to spend some time analyzing how another artist uses shapes to build their faces. I’d really like to learn to loosen up in my own composition process so that my finished line work doesn’t look quite so stiff, and this felt like a productive way to practice. I could be entirely wrong; I don’t know.

Week 6 Art Output
I finished a two page story for my fancomic and also did a sad/angry portrait of Cyclops. #drawing #xmen #comics pic.twitter.com/muYPmUrQkq

— Jason Jones (@Jkjones2185) February 12, 2022

Comics

New Mutants is a book that comes out slowly enough that I tend to completely forget that it’s an ongoing series, and then a new issue drops and I am emotionally wrecked. First Vita Ayala made me pity Amal Farouk in #23 last month, and now in #24 they give contemplations on trauma and forgiveness and the complicated ways we imperfectly try to be there for our loved ones. Also Danilo Beyruth is the artist I’ve been low key obsessing over for a couple days. The rest of the week’s pulls were fine? I’m having a hard time connecting with the Wolverine event that’s happening right now, even though I do find the Moira plot genuinely interesting. The Secret X-Men one-shot was a lot of fun, which is high praise given my general ambivalence about space nonsense and the centering of Sam and Beto. Their bromance never clicked for me when Hickman wrote them, but Tini Howard actually succeeds in giving Beto a bit of heart inside his relentless braggadocio, so I was down with the silliness. I might even care about further space adventures whenever this subplot pops back up in one of the ongoing series.

Media

We watched Encanto last weekend, and it was a sheer delight. We will probably watch it again this weekend, because it was that good. I was fully prepared for Maribel’s arc to be explicitly related to her talent as a maker, but it ended up being much more subtle than expected. Also, I think the implication of the ending was supposed to be that the grandmother’s Gift was to literally hold up a wall around the community? It’s not that important. We also watched Tick, tick… Boom! last night, and it’s a really delightful musical. I’ve only ever seen the film adaptation of Rent, which is… not great, so I didn’t have much in the way of expectations for a story about the guy who wrote Rent in the first place. I’d been vaguely aware of his story, but I didn’t know about this strange little show he did before he died about feeling like he was running out of time to achieve his dreams. As a story about trying to be an artist in general and being a writer in particular, it was a blast. Rachael couldn’t stop cackling over the scene where Jonathan’s trying to write a song and all he has is the word you’re on his computer screen and then he shortens it to you. It got to some real feelings about the creative process. Other notable things from this week include a docuseries on Netflix about video journalists who chase down incidents that happen in Los Angeles to sell to morning news shows (it was way more compelling than we expected, although there’s an absurd amount of copaganda sprinkled throughout the whole thing), and the second season of Love Is Blind, which we are gleefully hate watching because we love to pick apart the seams of a glossy reality TV show.

Pandemic

People are starting to talk about the fact that the statewide mask mandate in Oregon is set to expire at the end of March, and it continues to feel relentlessly weird as a topic of conversation. I was chatting with one of my co-teachers about it, and we genuinely don’t know if our district will keep a mask policy in place or let it lapse. Either way, we agreed we’re unlikely to go to work without masking for the rest of the school year. I also vaguely heard that there’s been another delay in the approval of the vaccine for 5-and-under kids, which I’m sure is causing lots of anguish for parents of the really little ones.

Coffee Shops

I have not been to a coffee shop this week, although it was very pretty out and I did consider going to the outdoor food pods yesterday afternoon. That ultimately did not happen.

Weekly Upload 01/14/22

Getting this post together a little early since I get to work from home today. It’s kind of wild how quickly things can turn from one direction to another in terms of mood. I was feeling pretty good last weekend after the first week back to work, but now there’s a little bit more ambient anxiety. I am mostly managing my own stress fine, although the motivation to buckle down with dayjob work is not very high these days.

Art

My art output this week was a little less than last week, but that’s primarily because I focused a lot of energy on the project I decided to do for myself this year: a comic. I know, this is probably not that big of a surprise; I like stories and art, and comics are stories with art, so of course that’s what I was working on. Am working on? I set for myself the goal of making one finished page this year because I wasn’t sure how long it would take. Apparently the answer for me is about two weeks. I posted the page on Twitter, which is where I post pretty much everything, so there’s that. The other piece I completed this week was a campaign poster for a character in the #XMenVote event that happened this week. I have thoughts and feelings about that whole thing, which I’ll get into a little later. Other small things of note: I did a little bit of tweaking on a piece I drew for the upcoming Mutant Pizza card set that Scott Modrzynski (@mojoswork on Twitter) is organizing among a group of fan artists. I’m excited about being part of the project, although I have regular attacks of impostor syndrome when I see the stuff other artists are turning out for the set. I’ve only been seriously practicing for a little over three years, and I’m still developing my style so that things I did even a couple months ago often look not great to me now.

So this was a labor of love. I wanted to do a page of comics this year, and I did it in the first two weeks! Now to start thinking about page 2… #Xtwitter #xmen #comics #ArtistOnTwitter #KrakoanCounseling pic.twitter.com/fGDciqcJ0B

— Jason Jones (@Jkjones2185) January 12, 2022

Comics

It was a weird week in the comics world from my perspective. Marvel repeated their gimmick election from last year where they posted a slate of characters and had fans vote for one to join the X-Men roster in the flagship book. I vaguely remember being really grumpy about the whole thing last year, and I was not disappointed to find myself growing more discontent as the event went on. A lot of it is likely connected to some general saltiness that the character I backed didn’t end up in the top two, but there was also just the general sense of mania that infected X-Twitter the last few days. I’m old enough to see at a distance that these kind of marketing stunts are a trap, and yet I still got sucked into it because on the first day it felt fun. Five days later, I’m glad it’s over; elections are stressful, even when they’re about fictional characters. I wonder (rather idly) if this is just the nature of the thing or if there’s an element of trauma response because we’ve been through so many high stakes elections in the last few years. I don’t have any real answers about that.

Media

I watched my first movie of the year the other night: The Suicide Squad. It was fun! After seeing the thoroughly mediocre first movie of the series, I was really pleased with this entry. I think that on the balance I liked Birds of Prey better, but I don’t have any real complaints with a thoroughly stupid movie that owns its stupidity. We’re continuing to make out way through Arcane (one episode left), and it’s still a lot of fun, although I laughed at the absurdity of the main scientist character suddenly jumping into an action scene with a giant magical hammer like he’s always been a fighting badass. Rachael and I are also rewatching Maniac, which continues to be a great series. I wish Netflix would make more stuff with that tone.

Pandemic

Omicron has hit my workplace pretty hard this week (no real surprise there). There are a lot of teachers who are staying home, and many students as well, and it feels really weird to continue to be at the building during the day despite the obvious staffing shortages. My district’s opted to offer what amounts to double pay to teachers who cover classes on their prep periods because we don’t have enough substitutes available as well as sending district level staff to school buildings to provide extra coverage. It’s certainly a way to respond to the wave. We do have a bit of relief in the form of a few extra non-student days that have been added to the schedule (hence why I’m working from home). I know there is a plan to switch to distance learning if things get too severe, but it’s not really clear to me what triggers the changeover. That’s all way above my pay grade though; for now I’m just trying to keep my head down and my mask on.

Coffee Shop

I have not been to a coffee shop this week.

Coming Up From the Baconalia

So New Year’s happened and then I kind of went radio silent for a few weeks on here, which might feel awkward if I hadn’t resolved after the first week to just not beat myself up about the level of activity on the blog.  I’ve jumped pretty heavily into playing with my new art materials, especially the markers that I got, and so a lot of my creative energy has been focused on producing visual art over doing a lot of writing.

When I look at the backlog of comics I have to read, I mostly just feel a bit of despair at the prospect of diving into all that material and devoting brain cells to unpacking it.  I have the entire run of Pretty Deadly: The Rat to look at (I bought it monthly and just stowed the issues until the whole thing was out so I could read it in one go), and my brain just spins when I think about trying to analyze it; Kelly Sue DeConnick produces some really excellent stuff, but I always feel under equipped to tackle her work.  Slightly less daunting but still worthy of sighs of aggravation are the outstanding issues on the Life is Strange series as well as Die #10 which really does deserve some deep thought that I just have not had the bandwidth for lately.

I think the sense of overwhelm is coming from a combination of low-level exhaustion from the end of the holidays (I spent two weeks unclenching from work, and now I’m back to work while needing time to unclench from celebrations) and the general ennui that tends to pervade January.  It’s legitimately the worst time of year as the days are still extremely short, the holidays are done, and also at work we’re all scrambling to drag students over the finish line of first semester.  It’s terrible, and the sense that I should be doing more with my free time is this low-grade buzz in the back of my head that always assails me around the end of the work week as I look at the weekend and wonder if this will be the time that I jump back on the blogging treadmill.  I’m working on this post on a quiet Saturday night at the end of the month, and I honestly don’t know if I’m going to feel like writing more once this update is done.

The saving grace here is that Rachael and I have discussed this general malaise, and we agree that a lot of it just seasonal.  Eventually things will improve (I suspect that I’ll feel better right around the time I get grades finalized and hammer out some lesson plans for the start of February), but in the mean time, it’s okay to accept that this is a sort of Baconalia (that is, a festival of sluggishness that is embodied by our Bacon plushie who just sits on the couch all day).  It’s okay to take breaks from making stuff, especially when making stuff is something you really enjoy doing.  Of course, I then have to remind myself that I haven’t stopped making stuff exactly; I’ve just shifted my focus to something that’s not well suited to a blog format.  I’m posting artwork on my Twitter account almost daily, and that’s been really fun, although the eternal gnawing views monster is never happy with the modest but genuine engagements I get through that outlet.  It’s the worst to make a thing that I find generally satisfying for myself and then have the satisfaction tarnished as I wait hopefully for someone to like or share my work.  The refrain that you should always make art for yourself first is cold comfort when you don’t receive frequent external reinforcement that the art is actually good.

Anyway, here’s some stuff that I’ve made in the last few weeks.  I like a lot of it, even as I wonder how I could have executed it better.  In the mean time, I’m going to go back to doodles and television and reading comics just for fun and thinking about tabletop games that may or may not happen.

This was fun as an experiment in playing with extreme highlights.  I liked the effect on the head when it was half colored, so I decided to lean into that concept of the character’s energy blast being so bright that it whites out parts of his body.  It’s fun, though these kinds of pictures often emphasize to me how basic my grasp of muscular anatomy is.  I was really irritated that I had to keep redrawing the hand; you can see the erasure marks on the paper from where the graphite got ground in after I overworked it.  While the coloring is okay, I actually think this image is kind of boring and static; the pose feels stiff when I look at it.  I think something’s off with the perspective, like I didn’t foreshorten the torso enough in comparison to the legs to give a strong sense of the character moving towards the viewer, and as a result he just looks like he has stubby legs while he’s moving parallel to the camera.

I was playing around again with foreshortening in the torso here, and again I think I whiffed the execution.  The figure definitely reads as leaning over, but he just seems top heavy in comparison to his legs.  I didn’t get the position of the hand right, so he’s posed in the middle of sitting up instead of looking like he’s resting his weight on his elbow.

The more I look at this one the more I see problems with it.  There are still a lot of quirks to coloring with markers that I haven’t adapted to, and it’s especially obvious here where I made mistakes.  I was experimenting some with how to draw eyes here, and while I liked the effect okay before it was colored, now it looks really off.  I’m constantly having to relearn that every line on a comics-styled face ages it dramatically.  That’s pretty clear here.  Also, I think this was the picture I did in the last few weeks that made me realize I am fascinated with drawing hoods, but I have no idea how to proportion them so they look right in comparison to a figure’s head.

I am obsessed with making my full-body figures look dynamic, and I was pretty proud of how this one turned out.  There are some elements in the execution that I don’t love (that back foot swinging around looks rough in comparison with the rest of the legs, and the shoulder on the forward arm looks dislocated to me), but overall I think it’s a good piece.  I am very gradually learning how to use speed lines to imply motion.

This portrait was a lot of fun for a couple different reasons.  The first one is that because the character is a humanoid chicken, I didn’t feel as much pressure to avoid shy away from extra detailing.  He’s supposed to look a little grotesque, which is actually a very freeing effect to go for.  Also, because he has a beak instead of a fully functional primate mouth, I was forced to think through how the eyes and eyebrows should work together to communicate emotion.  I wanted him to look happy, and I think I fell short on that; he seems more surprised than anything (chickens always look surprised though).  Fuzzy eyebrows were a fun detail.

There is so much junk on the hand in the drawing; I hated doing it.  On the flip side, I like the effect and I feel like the texture of the bits on the hand do a good job of giving it a sense of volume despite the two-tone coloring.  The face came out great; that slight raise of the eyebrow like he’s a little embarrassed to be noticed is delightful.

It’s a Star Wars pastiche with X-Men characters.  I don’t feel like explaining it.  The coloring took three days of work off and on, and in the end it came out pretty decent.  I’m eventually going to have to learn a lot more about how color schemes work so I can simulate different kinds of light.  The clash between the sunset tones of the background city and the foreground characters being in apparently white light bothers me now that it’s finished.  Part of that was lack of planning, but it was mostly just my limited understanding of how to use colors.

This one was a ton of fun to draw, even if I did have to redo each hand two or three times to get their proportions with the rest of the body right.  I particularly like the way the hair turned out here.  The face is pretty good, but I think the mouth should have been slightly bigger, and I should have reduced the size of the shine on the pupils a lot.  As it is, there’s a magical girl vibe to the face that doesn’t really mesh with the rest of the body.

I’m going to brag on myself for a moment here (because sometimes it’s good to acknowledge what you do well) and say that I am getting pretty good at visualizing interesting poses.  It’s all covered up in the finished drawing, but I spent a fair bit of time puzzling out the placement of the legs to make sure I knew how the entire figure would fit together.  This whole drawing probably took significantly less time than some of the other ones I’ve done in the last couple weeks, but it feels like a way more interesting piece of art.  I’m a little bugged that I didn’t account for drag when I drew the wings though; it makes no sense that they’d be extended that way.

This doodle came together in about an hour from concept to final colors.  It was really fast work.  The proportions are a little weird (I have a tendency to over extend torsos when I’m working on a flat surface because my perspective squishes the image slightly).  I am weirdly proud of the way the sweat pants look though.  I’ve been trying to figure out how you give texture to non-fitted clothing for a while, and I finally had some success here.  The weirdly shaped hoodie makes another appearance here as well.

All The Drawings

While I continue to cast around for something else to call my drawing posts (Learning Sketchbook was great!), here’s a big post with all the stuff that I finished at the end of the year plus a few things I’ve been working on since after New Year’s.

I didn’t feel like coloring this one.  Drawing skeletons is exhausting.

Rictor and Shatterstar are very good boys who really enjoy their Saturday mornings together.

I got a bunch of Prismacolor pencils for Christmas, so I drew a Psylocke (the new one, not Captain Britain; I know it gets confusing).  The skin tone pencils are a lot of fun to work with, even though I tend to be really shy about applying a lot of color.

Finished out my sketchbook with a picture of Illyana that’s done with the same pose I drew her in back in June.  The difference in my style between the two pictures is super striking.

I also got some markers.  They are fun (again, especially the skin tones).

Apparently having markers makes me way more ambitious.  By this point, coloring takes the majority of my time when I’m working on a piece.  Part of it is definitely learning to work with a new medium, but also my drawing style is still relatively simple so that I just don’t know how to spend more time on a piece before I move on from pencils.

The inset panels are mostly okay, but I think I nailed the profile of the face in this one.  There’s a lot of experimentation in this one with how to apply markers for coloring, which I think comes across most strongly in the texture contrast between the black section and the pink.

My 2019 In Review

Let’s go ahead and get the typical boilerplate stuff out of the way: as an educator I don’t usually spend too much time dwelling on the end of the calendar year because it falls halfway through my annual project of teaching some kids some stuff and hoping that they at least retain the bits about being kind to one another and maybe how stories and language work a little.  This is an exercise I engage in because everyone else is doing the same thing, which makes it timely content.  The actual act of reflection is sometimes difficult for me, not because it’s painful but because it’s just not a regular frame of mind for me.  The whole point of keeping a blog is for me to fire and forget my thoughts.

Okay, I think that’s shaken the cynical cobwebs out, so let’s talk about the year and (I guess) the decade.  Again, it’s an entirely arbitrary benchmark that I don’t put much stock in, but folks are doing it, so let’s just try to go with the flow.

I suppose the proverbial elephant in the room regarding my year is the fact that Mom died back in May.  That was a massively disruptive event in the short term, and I had a lot of really complex feelings about the act of grieving and my perception of the social expectations surrounding it.  I went to counseling over the summer to help me process a lot of that stuff (that was good) and I recently realized that much of what I internalized as the appropriate way to grieve was directly received from my mother.  She was much older than I was when her own mother died, but it was pretty formative event in her own life.  I was still very young when it happened, but I think years of observing her building so much of her identity around the relationship with her mom put this unexpressed image in my head of appropriate grief for a parent.  It’s supposed to utterly wreck you, and the mere mention of the deceased should bring you to the brink of tears for years after they’ve passed.  It should feel like a gaping wound that everyone can see just by looking at you.  You’re definitely not supposed to be able to keep it together at the funeral.

Instead, I’ve been mostly fine.  To be sure, I miss her, and there’s definitely some sadness whenever something reminds me of her, but it’s just not the overwhelming psychic devastation that I’d been led to believe it would be.  I still feel a little uneasy discussing these thoughts because they seem so utterly alien.  Questions of whether I appear to be a bad son occasionally float around, but then I remind myself that anyone who would think that is not worth worrying about.  I’m really fortunate to have always felt totally secure in my parents’ love for me, and the distance that emerged between us as I got older isn’t unusual, let alone something for which I should feel ashamed.

So yeah, that happened this year.

Turning to more positive things, I learned how to draw this year!  I’m okay at it!  This is a skill that I completely lacked a little over a year ago, and now I have a decent working knowledge of human figures and faces.  I’ve definitely gravitated more towards a comic book style as I’ve practiced more, mostly because I enjoy comic books and that visual language is the one with which I’m most familiar.  There’s still a lot that I need to learn, obviously, but I feel way more confident after a year of regular practice.  My personal project of sharing almost everything that I’ve drawn this year has been so much fun, and it’s left me with a great visual record of my progress.  I didn’t meet my goal of completely filling out my first sketchbook this year (I have three blank pages left on New Year’s Eve, and I just don’t have the stamina to do three drawings before midnight), but I’m so happy with the artifact I’ve made for myself.  If anyone who knows me in meatspace ever wants to see a thing that I think is super cool, I’ll be happy to pull it out and show it off in the future.  I eagerly await the indeterminate moment in the future when I want to cringe at the results of my first year of serious practice.  For now, it’s probably best to let it belong to the rest of the blog: finish it and move forward to new projects.

On the blog itself, I’ve had an incredibly productive year in terms of output.  Participating in Inktober and doing my extremely on-brand obsessive completion of every day’s prompt without pause went a long way towards helping me maintain momentum through the fall when I typically get tired with the added work load of a new school year.  My output on the blog took a distinct turn away from personal topics (outside of a few reflections related to Mom’s passing) towards comics and movie criticism.  If I were to go back through this year’s posts, I would probably find remarkably little about myself explicitly on display, but there is a wealth of thinking and reaction to the things that delighted and irritated me this year.  At the risk of sounding pretentious, I find the mental grinding that accompanies engagement with someone else’s creative output really pleasant most of the time.  Occasionally it feels like work, but so does everything else.

If there’s a thing I’ve internalized over the last decade (and there are many), satisfaction with things done is a far more reliable metric of contentment than frequency of moments of delight.  This is a tangent, but I have never mastered the art of unabashed expressions of enthusiasm, and I think this is the thing that leaves me feeling most alienated from other members of various fandoms that I want to interact with.  You think this thing is cool!  I think it’s cool too!  Also, I am extremely uncomfortable with being enthusiastic about anything, so we’re probably not going to get much farther than that.

The reason I point this thing out is the stubborn desire I have for people to notice who I am based on the things I keep in my life.  My blog’s a running account of where my mind is focusing its attention, and I hope vaguely for someone to say, “I like that thing too!”

One thing which I have not discussed on the blog this year is the fact that I experimented with a thing tracker in 2019.  I’m not sure of a better name for it because it’s just a spreadsheet where I logged things that I encountered this year.  You can see what mattered to me based on the categories I maintained.

• Comic Books – 147 trades read (I’ve not tracked most of the individual issues I’ve been reading this year, so the actual number’s probably slightly higher)
• Books – 15 read (I have always felt I wasn’t a prolific reader, but I think I just enjoy books with pictures more)
• Video Games – 18 finished (the vast majority of these are games that can be completed in a weekend; there are probably four or five that have play times that approach sixty hours)
• Minutes Exercised – I quit tracking this when around halfway through the year.  I know I spent over a thousand minutes working out in that time, but my workout schedule got disrupted in the second half of the year with the move.
• TV Shows – 51 seasons watched
• Movies – 40 watched
• Words Written – 132,428 (This applies only to words that have been put on the blog, but I’ve barely done any other kind of writing this year, so it’s pretty accurate)

The most fun aspect of keeping my things tracker has been the ability to look back and recall what I’ve seen this year and when.  A lot of the television and movies happened over the summer when I spent two weeks living like a bachelor while Rachael was at a novel writing workshop.  We watched all of Schitt’s Creek in this calendar year.  There was a glut of movies that we saw in December, mostly because of all the celebrating over the winter break.  I spent New Year’s Day 2019 watching the My Little Pony movie and playing Bandersnatch on Netflix.  The comics I read tended to be parts of long running series that I picked up when they were on sale.  I have read a lot of Star Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Runaways this year.

The one caveat to my logs is that I only noted new stuff that I encountered this year; there was a fair bit of revisiting familiar stories, but I didn’t make note of any of that.

Going into 2020, I’m not sure what I want to accomplish.  I think I will do the tracker again, but I’m going to have to recalibrate a little bit with what goals I want to set for myself.  There were definitely categories of things that I lost interest in tracking early on, and I haven’t bothered to note them here because there’s just no data to pour over.  Others I way underestimated what I could accomplish in a year.  Back in January I thought it’d be ambitious to read twenty comic book trades this year.  I passed that benchmark in a month.  The trick there is that I don’t know if this sort of pace will be replicable in 2020.  I read a lot of comics because there were a lot of things I wanted to read; who knows whether that will be true going forward?

On a more public level, I think my primary goal for this year is going to be resisting the temptation to obsess over national politics.  The last presidential campaign was an incredibly stressful thing, and I already have all the information I need to cast my vote in November.  The current embarrassment has got to go, and I’ll vote for whoever Democrats put forward as the candidate.  I have preferences like anyone else, but the bottom line is that there will not be a worse choice than what we already have.  Obsessing over the horse race is only going to cause anxiety about things beyond my control.

I think that’s everything to wrap up 2019.  Let’s get on with another year then.

(And for the decade stuff, whatever.  I got into my dream career, started a blog, and moved across the country to a place where I’ve never been happier.  Next question.)

Learning Sketchbook 21

There are phases where you plateau when you’re developing a new skill, and then there are phases where it feels like you’re just taking off.  After last week’s relatively low output of two drawings (to be fair to myself, the one I spent the most time on did have two figures who are interacting with each other), I upped it to six.  A couple of them are definitely the result of quick drawing sessions, but the last four have felt significantly more dynamic and visually interesting than anything else I’ve done in a while (and I didn’t use photo reference for them either).

After doing a few figure drawings, I find that I like to reset with a portrait.  It’s fun to work on a face in detail and try to draw out the parts that convey more subtle emotions.  For this week’s portrait I drew Rogue, and I used a photo reference to get the basic shape and expression, but then I elaborated on it with her traditional trappings, like the big wavy hair with the skunk stripe and the green accents.  It’s pretty obvious to me that I rushed this one (from roughs to colors, I did the whole thing in under an hour), and I feel like with some more care it could have turned out much better than it did.

This minimalist sketch of Daken was another rush.  It’s probably my least favorite of the set, but I think I did a decent job with the musculature on the back.  Drawing his tattoo was fun, especially because its abstractness and intricacy means that there’s no real set way to do it.  Much of my drawing time was spent just looking for good reference panels of his back, which are harder to find than you’d think.  I feel like the proportions of the arm are slightly off, like if he were to lower it down by his side it’d be far too long in comparison to his torso.  Oh well.

Here’s where my drawing week started to get really good.  The character is Tempus, who I drew during Inktober this year, so I wanted to try to do something different with her.  I think it’s really fun to draw characters having fun instead of just fighting, so I imagined what sort of outfit she might wear for a night out dancing.  There are elements that are still recognizably Tempus, from the tennis skirt to the purple and white vertical stripes on her top, but it’s generally a far more casual look.  I didn’t use any reference for this pose, so I’m actually very pleased with how it turned out.  If I look at it long enough, I think I’m probably subconsciously mimicking the finishing pose from Yuri’s short routine in Yuri!!! On Ice.  I just realized that; no wonder it looks good!  My primary complaint with this piece is that I didn’t really get the angle of the head right, so the silhouette of the nose feels off.  Tempus is white, but I think I ended up making her look more East Asian in the end.  Still, I feel like the gestures are really strong here, from the arm across the stomach to the set of the shoulders (I don’t think I typically do good shoulders).

This is the high point of the week.  It’s a real delight to periodically draw a character who’s relatively famous in X-Men fandom, and to have such a clear vision from the beginning of what I wanted to do with the picture.  Rachel Grey as Phoenix has gone through a lot of iterations since she first appeared in the ’80s, but I thought it’d be fun to go with one of her less prominent looks.  There was a brief period just before she got written out of the ongoing plot in the late ’80s where she fully embraced Phoenix as her legacy identity (I think this might have been the first time she actually adopted a genuine costume too) where she had this really rad, super simple outfit that was basically a workout leotard with a gold bodice and red limbs and just a hint of styling on the neckline with the stylized raptor head.  She wore gold gloves in the original look, but I’ve always liked the look of long sleeves hooked over the thumb, so I streamlined a little bit.  The pose is probably inspired by stuff like the double page spread in All-Star Superman where Superman’s flying towards the sun.  I think what I’m happiest about is the deeply androgynous look about Rachel here; she was always a gawky looking character before Alan Davis redesigned her for Excalibur, and I appreciated that nonstandard look.  The Phoenix in the background probably could have been done with more care, but I reached a point in working where I was just ready to be done so I could move on to something else.  I still like it a lot (and the shot works in both portrait and landscape orientation!)

While Phoenix was the highlight of the week, it wasn’t the last thing I did.  This picture of Juggernaut feels very classic to me; I didn’t play with the costume design at all, and I went for a pretty straightforward action pose, but it generally works.  The eyes are too wide set, but there are some range of motion issues with the Juggernaut’s design that can be hard to contend with when you think about him in action rather than as static images.  It was a lot of fun to draw someone with super bulky muscles though; the proportions feel way more forgiving than on someone who is supposed to be thin.

I really like everything I did with this picture of Wind Dancer (her power is that she can manipulate the wind; it’s very what it says on the tin), but after I finished it I realized that I really need some kind of background to give context.  She’s supposed to be flying, hence the back bend and the arched foot, but because there’s no background there’s the problem of the picture reading like she’s just doing a really bad en pointe (or whatever you call that ballet position).  I tweaked her costume a little bit, but she’s such a minor character in the broad X-Universe that most folks wouldn’t notice.

I have space for thirteen more drawings in my sketchbook, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to fill them before New Year’s (especially because the holidays are going to be so busy with Dad coming to visit).  I’m trying to take a laissez-faire approach to it to it, but I also know myself, and there is definitely the possibility I’m going to mildly fixate on it as we do our usual celebrations.

Learning Sketchbook 20

After last week, where I felt like I was underachieving with four finished drawings, I managed to hit an even lower completion count this week with a whopping two, one of which I definitely did not feel lived up to my expectations.  The other one turned out pretty well, and I spent some time on Twitter discussing how my process went while working on it because I tried to be a little more deliberate in deciding what I was doing at various stages of completion.  If you missed that thread it’s okay, because I’ll be recapping it pretty thoroughly (with a few more thoughts probably) here.  So let’s look at some pictures.

How hard is it to draw a guy flying headfirst towards a brick wall while angled away from the viewer?  Kind of hard, it turns out.  I started on this one the day after Thanksgiving, but then I had to set it aside because the long weekend filled up with holiday chores.  When I got back to it, I found that I really wasn’t feeling it very much.  The angle of the arms really bothered me, and the scale I’d settled on left me with minimal room to do any interesting detailing on the figure.  I think I colored it in about half an hour just so I could call it done and move on to something new.  It’s a shame, because the idea of Cannonball being so happy that he’s turned in mid flight while careening towards a second wall tickled me a lot when I came up with it.  Someday I’ll revisit the concept, but today is not that day.

My primary artwork this week has been focused on a piece with Cyclops and Emma Frost.  I’m participating in an X-Men fanfic exchange at the end of the month (I did this last year and somehow decided it’d be fun to do again), and I got really excited at the idea of doing some fanart to accompany the fic that I end up writing.  This is obviously putting the cart before the horse because I’ve only had the prompts for a week now, and I’m just barely beginning to piece together an idea for the characters I want to work with.  I don’t have a keystone scene in mind, let alone a plot at this point.  What I do know is that folks love romance, and if I can figure out an angle on a specific pairing then I should be able to put together something at least a little satisfying.  In the meantime, I wanted to practice some romantic couples poses, and I figured that Scott and Emma are just as good as any to play around with.

Image source: Lindsay Adler Photography (click picture for link)

This is obviously not a drawing; I decided that it may be helpful to find a reference for a romantic couple, and this was the image I settled on when I was Googling.  Most of the pictures I saw were focused more on the soft romance, but I wanted to use something that was less cuddly and more smoldering.  My conception of Scott and Emma as a couple is that they don’t hug, even in private; there’s no way they’d pose that way for a picture.

From that photo, I sketched out to the basic figures with a few tweaks.  Scott appears a little more tentative than the reference guy because there’s more distance between him and Emma and he’s not leaning his head so far down to meet hers.  Emma’s maintaining a bit of distance from Scott instead of leaning into him the way the reference woman leans into her partner.  There’s an impression more of Emma leading Scott rather than them embracing, which works great for me.  Once I had the poses in order, I did some rough detailing on their costumes, but I kept shading with the pencil to a minimum since I knew I’d be coloring everything later (the place where it’s most obvious I was adding texture with my pencil was with the hair).

Once I was happy with the roughs, I went back over all my graphite lines with a black colored pencil to make sure the line definition didn’t disappear when I started coloring.  The effect is very similar to how inked lines look, but it has the advantage of not having as severe bleed through in my sketchbook.  The big downside is that colored pencils are not designed for extensive line work, and I have to frequently adjust how I’m holding the pencil to make sure I don’t have a blunt edge making the lines look blurry.  At this point, I noticed some slightly wonky things with the pose, specifically with Scott’s hand on Emma’s waist.  The palm looks a little short for it to be fully extended, which is why there’s a heavy line at the wrist; I was trying to create an effect where it appears that the hand is bending sharply towards the viewer.

When I color, I typically begin with accents, shift to colors intended for really large spaces, and finish with skin tones. Here I did the gold trim on Scott’s costume first along with both figures’ hair.  Because his costume is all blue, I took considerable time on Scott.  I managed to get some pretty good muscle definition particularly on his arm and torso at this point, although I did find myself sort of taken with the all white costume with gold trim.  I’m even kind of partial to the white pants with blue shirt look that I got when I stopped to take this progress photo.  For Emma, because she wears nearly all white, I left her coloring for after I was done with Scott.  I did go ahead and shade the inside of her cape though, because I wanted to make sure I didn’t get confused about the blobby space between her and Scott.  It’s really interesting to look at the image here and see how much more depth the left hand figure appears to have compared to the right hand one.

Here I’ve finished coloring Scott’s costume, and again you can see just how flat Emma looks in comparison without any extra color.  Also, I can honestly say that I have never spent this much time thinking about a character’s crotch as when I was considering how to color Scott here.

And here’s the finished drawing!  Because Emma typically wears stark whites, I decided to shade with the black colored pencil (in some other recent drawings I’ve used light blue, but it didn’t feel like it would give the right look for this costume).  There’s only a bit of light shading along the edges of masses to convey roundness and in areas of depression like the crease along the hip.  It’s pretty wild to me how Emma’s pelvis shifts from being a sort of uncanny blob before the shading to suddenly looking like there’s a working skeleton underneath there.  For the skin, I very gently applied a red pencil to Emma.  There are some spots on her face that are still totally white, which I’m not sure was the right decision.  I think the effect is to make her face look a little shiny, which seems to me as someone who doesn’t play with makeup like not what she would actually want.  The alternative was to make her look vaguely pink, and I really just need to get some skin tone pencils.  For Scott I used a red-orange, which still  weirds me out; who knew that red-orange colored pencil consistently gives a pretty good approximation of semi-tanned white skin?

Learning Sketchbook 19

Last week was Thanksgiving, so I was actually way busier than normal (stupid holidays).  Given that, this week’s sketchbook update is a little sparse compared with what I wanted to get done.  I only have four finished sketches, which is less impressive given that I’m currently at a point where I finish one from concept to colors in around three hours.  A couple of them turned out really well, and one I ended up abandoning before I finished the coloring because I just didn’t like the concept enough to keep working.  Let’s get to it!

I’ve drawn Spiral, the six-armed villain from Mojoworld before during Inktober, but this time I decided I wanted to do something a little more interesting than just a straightforward full figure pose.  Spiral’s standard design is full of fiddly bits from her samurai styled helmet to her mixture of partially cybernetic arms to the simple fact that she has six arms, so I wanted to simplify the look enough that I could just focus on some figure and perspective work.  The design here heavily borrows from the Spiral of the Ultimate universe, who is just a mutant with six arms rather than the stupidly complex creature of the 616.  It was fun playing with the proportions of the arms to give a better sense of depth to the picture, although I question some of my choices with what to have the hands doing.  Spiral’s always portrayed dancing, but I don’t have a good mental reference library for hand positions, so that’s why she’s making the Wolf Pack sign from circa 1997.  I was really hesitant to color this picture because the lines came out looking super clean after I was done with the pencils, and I’ve learned that any color at all will instantly make graphite look washed out.  In the past I’ve played around with using black colored pencil to make lines pop in areas that have low contrast colors, and so I just decided to trace all the pencils with colored pencil on this one to keep the definition.  I’m not happy with how fuzzy the lines look, but at least you can see them.  For the rest of the coloring, I worked in two stages, beginning with just light blue pencil to do low lights on the hair as well as coloring the clothes.  It was kind of a cool effect to have the monochrome coloring, but I ultimately decided I wanted to practice doing skin tone as well.  I think coloring skin is the most anxiety inducing part of working on a picture, and I’m glad to realize that the more I just do it the better I get at understanding how different colors in my palette are going to look.  The last thing I want to pat myself on the back for is the fact that I made Spiral look super buff; I feel like anyone who has that many arms and swings a bunch of weapons around all the time should have some good definition in their arms.

Another repeat from Inktober, Husk is a character who gets really underserved in the comics but who has an interesting concept and character profile.  Her power involves being able to slough off her epidermis to reveal a new layer of skin that’s taken on the properties of pretty much whatever material she wants.  She’s basically super gross deluxe Colossus.  With this one I knew that I wanted to do something besides a generic action pose (everyone draws Husk ripping her skin off), so I decided to highlight the fact that she’s generally just a sweet kid who wants to do really well at mutant school.  Her eventual arc in the comics is to realize she’s not cut out for superheroing and go to school to become a counselor, so it seemed best not to dwell on the punchy parts of her concept.  Where the Spiral drawing was all about sticking to cool colors and was nearly monochrome, I wanted to really emphasize the warm colors in Husk’s costume.  There’s a ton of yellow on the page with a lot of orange low-lights worked in for some depth.  The skin looks a little washed out in comparison, but I’m still struggling to figure out how to get better saturation on skin without running over into unnatural looking colors (also, I need to scan my drawings instead of taking phone photos; the lighting conditions impact the look of the photo so much compared with what I see when I’m drawing).  There’s something slightly uncanny about Husk’s face here; for portraits like this I don’t use reference, and I can tell when I compare it with my reference practice that there’s definitely something off in my proportions that just doesn’t stand out to me while I’m working.  It feels connected to that common problem in comics art where any given artist’s faces tend to look very samey.

I did do a little coloring on this one, but I didn’t like it enough to bother with a picture, so all I have are the rough pencils.  The concept was Iceman sliding by a boardwalk and making flirty eyes at a cute guy.  The background irritated me because the perspective felt super off.  Someday I’ll practice drawing environments; today is not that day.

The week’s finished work ends with this figure drawing of Emma Frost.  Emma’s a really compelling character with a lot of complexities that are worth exploring, but the one thing that often gets overlooked because comics are very much biased towards the straight male gaze is that Emma should be doing more with her wardrobe than just being eye candy.  The artists on the Dawn of X relaunch tend to be a little better about this, so I borrowed from the design that Pepe Larraz used in one of the House of X issues.  I’m still very much a novice at clothing, so I don’t think there’s anything particularly spectacular about this drawing (ugh, feet and double ugh, feet in heels).  The figure is slightly elongated through the torso, which is a consistent problem I have when I draw female coded figures in this three quarter perspective.  The texture of the fur coat is okay though, and I really like what I did with the coloring.  I decided to cheat a bit and color Emma as though she’s in her diamond form, which allowed me to stick to mostly white.  It was fun thinking through how to differentiate the shading on her body and her clothes though.

And that’s it for this week!  Now that we’re moving into the major holiday season, we’ll see how well I can keep up with this level of drawing output on top of everything else I’m trying to do.  Is it normal to feel pre-tired a month ahead of Christmas?