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.

Tablets Are Hard: Revitalize Week 22

I broke my rule.

Although, I guess I never really set rules for this thing. I’ve just been working under a set of undetermined, arbitrary guidelines because when only your mom and two friends (never the same two, mind you)* following a project you don’t really need to, like, transparently structure anything.

But I did what I didn’t think I would ever do, which is go backwards.

I assumed, when I started this, that once I finished a sketchbook I was done with it. Thus far, I haven’t moved on from a sketchbook because I’ve redrawn absolutely everything. More like, I no longer find any of the old drawings inspiring, so I move on to new things instead of forcing myself to draw something I’m not connecting with. Stupidly, I didn’t think what’s calling to me would change.

I was skimming through my files from Sketchbooks A & B, and, as true shocker to my naive self, was inspired to redraw a few of them. “But I can’t do that!!” I protested. “I finished Sketchbook A 2 years ago!!”

Well, of course I want to redraw different things now than I did. It’s been two years! Holy cow, it’s been two years…..

Anyways, so I was like, insistent that I couldn’t just go backwards in sketchbooks, that I was done with Sketchbook A and that was that. But if I make the rules, then why can’t I just…oh, I don’t know…change them? Or, just like…not follow them since I never really laid out rules to begin with.

The moral of the story is: I do what I want, and I make the rules. Or, lackthereof.

 

Knowing that the original is from Sketchbook A makes me far more impressed than I would be otherwise. This ain’t half bad. There’s perspective, some sense of proportion….detail in the kimono…all around a solid attempt. There’s no face, obviously….because faces are hard. It wasn’t me trying to make something scary. I just…probably didn’t know what her face should look like and liked the drawing enough as-is that I was worried about screwing it up (not much has changed).

The redraw is alright. I don’t know. I was inspired to redraw this one, but then actually did the redraw and was like ehhhhh. I really didn’t want to do the stereotypical woman-in-a-kimono drawing. You know what I’m talking about: draped off the shoulder, cherry blossoms floating all over the place, porcelain doll face, etc, etc, etc. Nah. Didn’t want to do that. So I drew a static pose instead. And it’s…not great. Her hand is a hot mess. I also didn’t get the stiffness of the fabric right, so her boob looks way too saggy.

So it was already Not Great, and then I tried to color it.

I don’t know why I thought that would be a good idea. I’m not particularly great with colored pencils in even the best of circumstances. I guess I hoped that I could combat the not-greatness of the drawing with pretty colors. So I tried to color it in. Except….where I had sketched her legs beneath the skirt, despite being erased, left ruts in the page. So the colored pencil was going everywhere EXCEPT in the ruts, so it looked like the skirt was see-through. Then I tried to use a sharpie. That worked, except it bled through the back of the page (which I assumed was going to happen; had I liked the drawing on the back of the page I wouldn’t have even tried).

So now it’s both ugly and a mess. And I could have posted it like that, but I didn’t want to. The only way to fix it without having to start from scratch? The tablet.

AGES ago, Sharkboy bought a Wacom tablet. I tried using it when he first got it and, despite knowing better, I gave up almost immediately because it was so hard. But this time I didn’t care about the drawing enough to care if it got ruined, so MIGHT AS WELL.

I struggled for the first bit. Then, it started getting easier. Obviously. We all knew that would be the case. I’m just chronically impatient. So now that I’ve gotten over the first hump of the struggle bus, I’m more willing to keep practicing. Although I may wait until I get a new computer; my current laptop has one foot on a banana peel and the other in a grave, so installing any kind of new software would be a very bad idea.

The clothes turned out poorly enough that I didn’t feel anywhere remotely confident to do the hand/arm/face so….pretend that black & white is an Intentional Artistic Choice. I also went overboard with the flowers. And used a very stereotypical cherry blossom petal brush. AND the obi/obiage is not shaded well at all. Whatever. It’s not worse than it was so there’s that. 

NOW it’s time for the Sketchbook C wrap-up. That’ll be coming this weekend. Hopefully. Lord only knows; I have no sense of a schedule for this thing anymore.

See y’all.

 
*To the two friends reading this today: Hello! Thanks for reading!

Also, yes, Sharkboy doesn’t even read this. Apparently the sanctity of engagement doesn’t require him to support my attempt to be internet famous.

At least my mom reads it though. So there’s that (hi mom.)