A quick catch-up post

Heya! I’m still alive. Still working on things, still dreaming of others, still discovering new obsessions. These days I’m at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, doing grad work in their Library and Information Science program. I have a fellowship for this semester, which means I do not have to work but can instead spend my four-day weekends lolling around playing Pokemon or playing The Whispered World (a gorgeous point-and-click 3rd-person adventure game; more on this later, perhaps).

This is the first apartment I’ve had on my own, in a city where the only person I know is my childhood friend Jessica. It’s still strange and weird and scary, and I’ve had a few breakdowns in which I’ve been convinced that I’m meant to die a hermit. I have no idea how to make friends, truthfully. I’ll have to work on that.

In the meantime, I’ve kept in touch with Liz, Vince, and Dan in Des Moines. I’m working on initiating conversations instead of believing myself a nuisance. I’m keeping busy with homework and artwork, and I spend my nights working through X-Files and Supernatural. I cook; I take care of bills and laundry; I practice 3-point perspective. Besides the whole “making friends” thing, I’ve done a lot, and I’m proud of myself.

I’ve come to a few conclusions, and I have some news about Multiversed and a few other open projects, but those can wait. For now, I wanted to share Dan’s long-overdue birthday present:

(DA)

There are lots of problems with it, I know. Perspective, for one thing. But I still like it, mainly for the adorable Dan-chibi. This was trace-inked with nib pens over a makeshift lightbox. I gave this version to Dan and kept the original sketch. This process means that there are no pencil/eraser marks on the above version, and I got to keep a physical copy. However, the tracing introduced a few of the errors (e.g. the way Dragonite’s wing mysteriously matches Arcanine’s fur), so unless I can get/make a better lightbox, I won’t be doing that again.

I’m currently working on Sarah’s gift (overdue since Christmas). Then I’ll work on one for Vince (just a week late, but promises to be longer :/ ). There are more things to show off, but I’ll leave this post as is. More next week!

MSW: Robin Toboz, destroyer of worlds

I will be busy the entire weekend, yipee. If I keep up today’s productivity, though, the stress will be worth it.

Today’s offering: another illustration for Mad Scientist Wars Chapter 15! For Professor Zobot, whose illustrated post may be found here.

Robin Toboz was only a small part of the success of Zobot’s chapter. She was nutty even for a Mad, and unpredictable and child-like creepy. I wish I’d been able to capture that sheer insanity without being given spoilers. *sighs*

SBE: Half-naked men!

For the last day of Should Be Embarrassed Week, I have doodles of half-naked men! I’m getting better at drawing guys, but I still dislike doing so. No curves, and an entirely new basic set of lines to learn. But! Half-naked man doodles. Get ‘em.

***

I’m still feeling oddly reflective, but I think I’ll attribute that to the fact that I’m leaving Chicago again tonight. I’ll be in Ames tomorrow, and finally back in Des Moines on Sunday. I don’t know… Chicago feels like home base, and Des Moines feels like home, and I feel like I don’t deserve to feel that way about either of them. Strange.

Days go by

I’ve been thinking about what I have left to show on this blog. It’s not much right now – a few quick sketches, and some art. Most of my work has gone into things I can’t show yet, for differing reasons.

Something else has come to my attention – next post will be my 100th on this blog. To celebrate, I’ll be posting once a day for 5-7 days (depending on how much I can dredge up). The theme? ‘Embarrassment.’ As in ‘I should be embarrassed of these but I’m not really’. I have some artwork that shows how strange my mind can be. I also have some that are vaguely NSFW. They aren’t smexy-bad, or violent-bad, but my own prudishness will never allow them in my DeviantArt account. In fact, after I post them I may pretend they don’t exist, we’ll see. Regardless, the posts should be amusing for other people (and quite possibly agonizing for me).

I have to be away from my laptop for a few days, so posting will begin Monday.

In the meantime, have an old Psychonauts-inspired doodle.

With a “Heavy” heart, or, Team Fortress-ian Gothic

Does it count as fanart if you draw it for the fan of an enterprise you are unfamiliar with? I vote yes, but it is a tentative yes.

I drew this Team Fortress/American Gothic ripoff as part of Dan’s Valentine’s Day card. So I used two beefy guys and a very – *coughcough*ahem - very large gun. Er. It made sense at the time, I swear! I could spend a paragraph reiterating everything Dan’s told me about the Heavy/Medic classes’ relationship, but I won’t. Suffice to say they work very well together.

Seriously, this turned out pretty well. Considering I drew and inked it in 45 minutes, with very few good references. ^^

***

Life stuff: Still not-ish working out. Every time I think “I’ve got this,” either things go sour, or I spend a lot of energy to ensure everything goes hunky-dory. Bleh. I will keep trying.

Cuteness KILLS

I… like this, I really do. Nice mixture of art styles and inking methods. Pretty decent contrast. But… where in my brain did this come from?!

I know it began as a warm-up sketch with a Potemayo-style chibi. In the Mad Scientist Wars, Professor Tinker’s character Frederic has a similar form, so I wanted some practice before I have to draw those line-up pics (and fanart). That was the intent. So where do a wet-haired woman in a kimono and an evil shadow enter the picture? WTF, brain. WTF.

…oh god no. “Caramelldansen” just started playing. My immediate thought: “Hey, I should do a MSW-Caramelldansen animation.” Despite the fact that I can’t animate drawings yet. Despite all the other projects that need to be done first, MSW fanart and otherwise. What the heck is my brain smoking?!  O.o

Current projects: one more MSW seasonal fanart, and then I have to buckle down and draw “Breaking the Fourth Wall 2008.” Trouble is, I don’t know which of the five MSW ideas to draw first. Also, I have no desire to start “4th Wall ’08.” I’m afraid to, for some reason. I know my art has grown leaps and bounds since 2007 – heck, it improved drastically just in the last few months, what with all the guys in the MSW profiles. So why don’t I want to show that off? Eesh.

Red Lantern Ashvatar

This post is being written on Saturday. I leave for Des Moines on Sunday, but I’ve heard that the internet has been cut at my apartment. It falls to me to sort it all out, which makes me nervous as all hell. (On the brighter side, Liz is moving in tomorrow! I am so happy to be living with her again.) If there’s no internet on Monday, at least I don’t have to worry about making a post on top of everything else. And if there is internet… well, there’s probably other stuff to do. Fresh post on Wednesday, same Bat-channel.

I doodled this last-minute. It’s an “Ashvatar” – one of my avatars. I was thinking about the whole angel-devil on the shoulder bit, and the way Narbonic and Comedity used multiple aspects of personality instead. So there’d be a character’s Angel and Devil, but also a Nerd, a Social Life… etc. My planned “Live! From My Brain” comics will do something similar.

But I was thinking: For an agnostic, I sure follow a lot of Judeo-Christian assumptions/cliches. Why use Angel/Devil duality, which assumes black and white morality? Why use Angel/Devil when I can indulge my Inner Fangirl and use the Lantern Corps?

According to “The Blackest Night” run of “Green Lantern,” there are seven lantern corps of different colors, drawing upon different parts of the emotional spectrum:

• Green: willpower
• Yellow: fear
• Violet: love
• Red: hate
• Indigo: compassion
• Orange: avarice
• Blue: hope

The above is the Red Lantern Ashley. Not particularly strong in me, but still the most obvious choice for a representative of the dark side. I might draw more of these and round out the corps. Might take awhile, though, there’s other projects that need doing.

MSW: SiB & Chicgeek profiles

So there you are: profiles of the Mad Scientist Wars’ So It Begins and Chicgeek. Chic’s surprised me. Until it was colored, I didn’t think her hair was that great. Passable, but not great. I like it now, though. ‘S pretty. Not much to say about SiB’s profile. The stiffness of that one arm bugs me a bit, but now I just imagine that he’s about to poke at the profile frame. ^^

It’s unlikely there will be more art on Friday. I am pulling an all-nighter to get stuff done, and when I’m not doing homework or panicking over finals I’ll probably be sleeping. I’ll probably sleep through Friday too. Just because I’m still sick, and every waking moment is another moment of coughing, breathing problems, and a stuffed nose. *sigh* Thursday’s not gonna be fun at all.

I’ll save my rants for Friday, in case there’s nothing else to post.

Enter the calendar

I crashed from my NaNo high on Wednesday night. It was, oddly enough, by choice. I felt too damn free; with finals coming up I knew I had to kick myself into productivity again. So I sat down, and created three lists of things I need to do: homework-wise, creativity-wise, and in general. Then I created a three-week calendar and plotted out due dates. And plotted out when I should start working on things. I soon realized that my ‘freedom’ was indeed an illusion. There is still a lot to do. A lot more than I expected.

Of course, the calendar is already delicately balanced. If something doesn’t go right, there’s little room to make it up elsewhere. If people want to hang out for extended periods of time, I’ll have to factor it in and try to work out allowances and try not to panic.

Speaking of sociality, I was asked out on a date tonight (last night? ah, but I haven’t been to bed yet). I think I’m panicking about that too. Dates are… outside my protocol? But… Oh jeez, there’s backstory and explanations tangled up in this, none of which I really want to go into here. Suffice to say that Dan is a nice guy, and I may be one odd fish, but so is he and each one of us seems to believe that the other is more normal. I do believe I’m panicking about nothing in this case.

…I lost track of my train of thought. Oh right. The calendar.

So! The art dump last month was deliberate. I got a lot of the dumber, older art out of the way, but left just enough art to allow me to finish out NaNoWriMo. This will be the last post of old material. If I want to post something on Monday, it will have to be freshly drawn. Same for every day after that.

My calendar has a creative project listed almost every day for the next few weeks. You can expect to see:

• Breaking the Fourth Wall 2008
• wallpaper for next year’s NaNo attempt
• Tao of Geek fanart
• and oodles of Mad Scientist Wars fanart, beginning profiles like this one:

When I said I had tons of fanart ideas? I was not kidding. But they are surprises. I am admitting them to nobody. I believe firmly in the advice Deanna Raybourne gave in her NaNo pep talk last month: “you only have one chance to tell your story for the very first time.“ 

It’s tempting, though. Really, really tempting.

NaNo 2008: The Epilogue

This post is late. Can you believe it? It’s been roughly 17 hours since National Novel Writing Month ended here in good ol’ Des Moines Iowa, and I posted nary an update here. Which is particularly odd, considering that I WON!

I failed twice, but this was indeed my year. 50,103 words written by December 1st, midnight. And now I feel infinite, like Charlie in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I read the entirity of yesterday. (It was good, but let’s talk NaNo.) This weekend was almost as bad as I expected. My parents were upset with my decision to NaNo, and I could almost hear my mother crying, “OMG UR DOING IT WRONG.” If it weren’t for Sarah, I might have drowned myself in webcomics or anime right then and there and stopped writing altogether. But I didn’t. And you know what? It was worth the hardship to get here. I know I can do it now. And knowing is my anti-drug, man. ^^

I still have a few thousand left to write to wrap up the story itself, and I need to have it edited and semi-presentable for the Novella class by… well tonight, but that’s not happening. Soon. Very soon.

Doodled on Friday.

I feel the need to drop some thank yous.  It’s no dedication, but without the following “Spyder, Spyder” would not exist as it is today:

• Sarah, for telling me that she understood why I needed to do this, and that it was okay for me to write.
• Anne, who didn’t convince me that I was epic win, but managed to stop me thinking I was epic fail.
• Josh, who listened to me ramble about my two magic systems for a few hours.
• Liz, for writing with me that one day.
• Shannon, Briana, and Dan, who gave me pep talks.
• Everyone else who wished me luck, or expressed an interest in my progress.
• All the NaNo forumgoers.  Next time I will lurk less.

I’d also like to thank the word “look,” which apparently was the word I used most (besides the usual suspects – “the,” “and,” “said”). I listened to “Clint Eastwood,” “Weapon of Choice,” “I Must Be Dreaming,” and “Mitternacht” over and over again. Also, “One-Winged Angel” and “The Howling” became my unofficial theme songs for The Final Scene (which actually formed the last third of the story). Thanks go to SiB of the Mad Scientist Wars for “One-Winged Angel,” by the way. It ended up fitting really well.

What do I do now? Well, I planned a couple days of rest. I need to catch up on webcomics, and I own “Requiem from the Darkness” now, so I can rewatch it. But there’s other things that need doing. It’s December, the end of yet another year, and I haven’t done a Breaking the Fourth Wall cartoon yet. Fanart for MSW and Tao of Geek. The Graphics project that I haven’t really started yet. There’s still plenty to do, but at least I can enjoy the ride, right? I did it. I won. I proved myself to myself. The world will follow. ^^