Revitalize: An Update

Despite my complete and utter disbelief at the speedy passage of time, it is now June. Month 6. Which means we’re at the halfway point of Sarah 2018 Draw-A-Palooza. Which means I feel more obligated than I usually do to make a blog post.

But it’s awkward, because I haven’t posted in like 2 months.

Soooooo…here we are.

This project.

Let me just preface this by assuring you that I haven’t stopped drawing. Seriously. I haven’t. I have, however, slacked a bit in the do-it-nearly-every-day department.

Here’s the thing. I have to 1) work 2) cook 3) train for runs 4) write 5) draw 6) pet my cats (yes, plural, because Freya now has a sister we’ve basically all-but-signed-the-papers-for adopted) 7) interact with my fiance and 8) obsess over fictional characters. But see, drawing is in that list of daily 8 activites I HAVE to do. Well, okay, #8 isn’t a HAVE to but golly I cannot. Stop. Thinking. About. Them.

Basically, I have 8 necessary things and only 16 hours a day to do them (because sleep). Work takes 9 hours, so now we’re down to 7. Cooking takes at least 1:30, depending on how complicated the recipe is. That’s 5:30. If I gym (which I do at least 3 times a week), that’s at least an hour. 4:30. Cat time? 30 minutes. I love them, okay? They demand snuggles. I can’t refuse. 3 hours. Fiance time? 30 minutes. I love him, okay? He demands snuggles. I can’t refuse. 2:30 hours. Also I need to shower at some point & prepare for bed. 2 hours. ALSO I need to sit down and stare blankly at a wall or Bravo TV for a minute because decompression is good. 1:30hrs. If not less.

If I am not brain-dead after work, and if I eat leftovers, don’t go to the gym, and don’t touch the TV remote, I’m left with a solid 5 hours of creative time. Cool. But most days of the week I don’t have leftovers, and going to the gym makes me feel good and needs to happen if I want to keep running (which I do), and my brain hurts after working all day. So worst case scenario is that I only have 1:30 to be creative. Oh, also, I have friends. Sometimes I need to hang out with them, because I like them and I require socializing in order to be a fully-functioning human. Hanging out with friends automatically reduces my availability to 0 hours.

For a couple of months, drawing took a back seat to being a social person and running training and my various other needs. And I was…honestly okay with that. Sometimes you have to make priorities and I had to prioritize being a social person (because extrovert) and making sure I wouldn’t die while running 13.1 miles.

Proof that I didn’t die. My friend didn’t die, either!

But then May came ‘round, as it does, and I was in a fuege of creativity (fueled by my continuously Not Great coping skills during the month of deathiversaries). Coincidentally, out of nowhere, my obsession with Maggie Stiefvater’s the Raven Cycle reignited into a mother-trucking BONFIRE. For months prior, I’d had artistic visions of my two faves from that series, but hadn’t thought I had the materials nor skills to make them a reality. My practice and newfound desire to learn how to use the wacom tablet, however, suddenly sent me into a fanart spiral. I decided that ENOUGH was ENOUGH of keeping these ideas locked in my head to drive me nuts. If I could just EXORCISE these visions from my body, then maybe I can resume being a normal human able to function in society. My 1:30-5 hours worth of potential creative time was funneled into fan art in an attempt to just get it out and be done with it.

Spoiler alert: the opposite happened.

I spent HOURS completing this piece that had been torturing my imagination every time I heard this song (which was often because I like it). And then I finished it, put it online (because why the heck not), and then….it just….took off? 

For context: the most notes I had ever gotten on anything I’d ever posted to tumblr (or any social media, for that matter) was maybe, like, 10 notes. MAYBE.

This piece is at over 800. And it keeps getting more!!! What. In. The. Fresh. Hell. Is. This.  

So yeah. High on the fact that people actually responded to this piece and that this thing I spent so much time on WASN’T absolute garbage (thanks to that darn tablet….how was I so against it for so long????), I was suddenly full of inspiration. The problem? It was inspiration for The Raven Cycle and The Raven Cycle ONLY. So I followed it, and drew more things. Like this:

And I wish I had more to show for this obsession but these both took, like, over 20 hours each because I’m a perfectionist and slow and so really this doens’t seem like much BUT IT IS. 

Like, I broke down and bought Adobe Photoshop to do these drawings. THAT’S how intense this is (also ClipStudio Paint was hella glitchy and I wanted something more reliable, but still…)

Now I have 28732702 other ideas, but have 0% inspiration for anything else. And because I’m spending hours of time on these pieces, it’s draining my creativity to be able to do other things. Like redrawing (that project is not forgotten. Trust me, the guilt I feel for not working on it is way more than it should be.)

So I am still drawing. It’s just mostly exclusively tablet-drawing fanart.

OH I did do some drawings for the summer camp at which I used to work. They needed coloring pages, and since digital art lends itself super well to line art drawings, I happily obliged.

I now see that those circles are different sizes and widths……that’s embarrassing.

Anyways. TL;DR: life and fan art swallowed me (and the wacom tablet) whole, so that’s where I’ve been for the past few months.

I will say, though, that my obsession is taking a chill pill (I can FEEL it happening), and I have until September before the next half marathon, AND all of my friends are 4th year vet students so they’re all in clinics now which means I have no social life when they’re gone/busy (which is most of the time)….so hopefully I can pull myself out of this fandom/life quicksand and get back to redrawing.

In the meantime, I’m pushing myself to 1) do a 6-month check in, 2) finally do a sketchbook C wrap up, 3) scan in the collection of loose drawings I found in my childhood bookshelf, 4) start drawing other things on the tablet, and 5) keep practicing outside of this fanart craze I’ve been suckered back into.

Fingers crossed I’ll be back this weekend with some progress.

No Good Title: Revitalize Week 17

I’ve spent hours trying to think of a snappy introduction (and title for that matter), and I’ve got nothing. So.

I’m thinking this was inspired by Disney’s Atlantis, but I have no memory of seeing it when I was this young. I very well may have, because when I watched it as a college student I knew what was going to happen and who the characters were and all that jazz. But I can’t say for sure. Regardless, this person looks like she was inspired by that movie (but whitewashed because I’m problematic).

This is one of those drawings that was surprisingly good. Like, okay, her proportions aren’t great, but they’re far better than other examples in this sketchbook. Like her breasts! They’re round and not, like, overdrawn! She has a belly button! And a nose! Hair that looks kinda like hair! And that book she’s holding!! Look at Baby Sarah learning how to draw perspective!! (I feel like I need to support Baby Sarah after last week’s blog post, because my mom sent be a text telling me to stop being mean to her [hi mom……]).

So I was struggling with this redraw. When I first sketched out the pose, I drew it too big and it didn’t fit the sketchbook page (hilarious given that, as we’ll see in the old sketchbooks, I used to draw things super-duper tiny and couldn’t draw full-page things to save my life). I re-positioned and redrew her left (our right) arm like 20 times until I was happy with it. You can see the smudges where all 174691512 variations of her arm didn’t quite erase. I struggled with her face shape and features and expression. I got it to a point where I was okay with it. Then I went to dinner and came back and was like “this is Not Good”. I was going to just accept it and post it anyways, but it bugged me too much and I started to fix her hand and then I just went through and fixed everything else too.

Long story long, it ended up being pretty good. Not my best, but definitely far from my worst. Still whitewashed, though. I tried to give her a less-tribal vibe because, y’know…”tribal” is not an appropriate theme for any white person.

The major success of this redraw was her left hand. I DREW THAT FORESHORTENED HAND ALL BY MYSELF, NO REFERENCE PICTURE. #ProudOfMe

Her crown was inspired by Beyoncé’s. Important.

It was also really important that I properly draw a fat body. The art world (the comic world/anime world, specifically, aka where I learned how to draw) is just as discriminatory towards bodies above size 2 as fashion/TV/movies/books/etc are. I’ve never tried to draw anything other than skinny people. And you can’t just ADD random bulges to a skinny body. You have to make sure the fat moves properly and falls with gravity and folds in a way that makes sense and is in the right places. I used more references for that than I did for the pose, because I wanted it to be right. I’m sure it’s not perfect, because my sense of anatomy isn’t perfect, and fat is anatomy. It’s something I need to work on.

Anyways. Don’t have much else to saaaaay. This wasn’t a very funny pooooost. I’m feeling guilty that it wasn’t entertaining but at least it was shooort?????

Ending the awkward and signing off for now.

See ya!