Boy howdy, the things you do for a reference.

Work has cut hours again, yet despite this it's somehow been more stressful than ever before, mostly because going there for less than four hours each day is like sticking your head in a burning building to see what part is on fire the most so you can throw a bucket of water before ducking back out. To top it off, apparently unemployment gets cut off next week unless the feds can get their heads together and extend it (they probably won't) so there's that to look forward to.

With all that, I've been considering for a while opening up to commissions, but of course if I do that I'd probably have to make a couple of drawings featuring people wearing clothing. I imagine my commissions would be the most narrowly-scoped things one could think of.

Video essay is about 17 minutes into an hour-long presentation. Takes about an hour to do a minute's worth of visuals, so it's still going to be a while. Fun though, and at least unlike SPNATI there's a clear end goal with no shifting bar to worry about.

I also haven't forgotten about the book project.

This has been quite a frustrating experience, all the more exacerbated I'm sure due to the fact that the other half of this piece is already done and waiting to be shown. It's hard when you feel like all the time you've put into something still amounts to little when in the face of a new challenge. You think you know something well, but you don't.

It also doesn't help when half the tutorials you look up have a very "draw the rest of the fucking owl" approach to them.

The fireworks have finally stopped.

I drew a figure and wanted her to interact with something, then I had the idea of adding a giant, ancient robot of sorts. Juxtaposition and all that. I got about this far into the sketch when I realized I know fuck-all about drawing robots, and the journey to try and figure that out has thus far been a rather frustrating one. Unfortunately, usually when I get stuck on something my mind goes into fight-or-flight mode and starts rapidly turning this way and that in a desperate attempt to "do the thing". This then spills over into other activities, because I have to do something correctly, but I'm so preoccupied with succeeding at something that I wind up floundering at everything I'm doing. Even while writing this my mind is racing this way and that. Very impatient. Maybe it's a dopamine thing.

Anyway... I'm tempted to isolate the figure and treat it as its own piece so that I feel more relaxed about taking the time to learn how to draw robots properly, but I also think this composition works well and I don't want to put out half an idea. So I'll probably just shelve it for the time being.

Video essay is still going at a decent pace, but the audio alone is an hour long and it takes about an hour just to do the visuals for one minute of the video. So it'll be a while before that gets completed as well.

We're moving into more long-term projects. I think that's having an effect on my mind as well, since most of the stuff I've done this year is quick and simple. I need to learn to be more patient.

Progress.

I wanted to try and do an actual background this time but I don't think it complements the main figure very well, also I don't have as much experience so it's taking some time. I'll take another whack at it tomorrow and see if I can't get something better.

Tonight I tried experimenting with colored lighting, but in the end it just looked like I had drug the slider on the hue adjustment. Fortunately it was easy enough to then use the hue adjustment to bring it back, so no harm done.

This isn't quite turning out how I want it to. Maybe if I had inked it beforehand so I had a little more wiggle room when shading. But by this point I'll probably just use the watercolor method since by this point it's tried and true, and also super fast in comparison. Ready to have this finished so I can get back to the longer-term projects.

I've been trying to use different media besides watercolor with these past couple of pieces. Though this one was supposed to be like oil paint, I realized it's basically my old rendering method. Not bad, but very time consuming, and I'm fighting the sketch and the white of the canvas rather than using them. Still, gives a decent result in the end.

Sure has been a hot minute. Not that the past two weeks haven't been productive, they just haven't had anything to do with drawing and/or the book. But finally this weekend I sat down and did some actual art again. Not much, but still felt nice.

The project I'm working on now is another medium-term one that I'm hoping to have finished in the next few weeks, then it's back to the book.

Draft 2: Neck Edition is underway. Watercolor is out, chalk is in.

Still binging Terraria, but I've been a good little artist.