Illustrator, 3.5h.
Initial sketch, plus photo-ref. The horse was sketched out over a photo as well but I didn’t include it here.
As you can tell I pushed a lot of stuff around from my initial sketch, the horse’s pose is much more exaggerated than my original.
aoc riding bernie horse – here’s a PDF if you want to print it out and bring it to a protest or something.
also you can get shirts/stickers/laptop skins/etc over here, assuming redbubble doesn’t take it down
Get up. Take a shower. Stare in the morning and try to convince the universe you are beautiful, powerful, and successful. And also a super-horny human-taur with giant titties because that’s a good way to put a little passion into that desire, I guess? Why not. Aim for the stars and
Just a thumbnail because this is pretty NSFW. Full image under the cut. Continue reading
Commission. Dana and her spouse spent like a decade living in Santa Barbara, and are moving back to Seattle soon. This is to help them remember the good times in the sun.
It’s always a good feeling when another artist commissions you and realizes they don’t have a model sheet of their fursona, and want you to draw something for them badly enough to knock one out.
Big epic fantasy commission for Cordite. This one took a while and I stopped being able to tell if it was any good by the time it was done.I worked on this in fits and starts over about three months.
There’s a lot going on here. Enough that Illustrator crashes when I try to find out how many paths are in this file.
Very early rough, with crude colors to help the client make some sense of my messy lines, and to begin to think about the overall color scheme.
At the beginning of the month, this popped into my head. I did a quick doodle and posted it, asking if I should finish it; the responses were unanimously “yes”.
Illustrator, 4.5h, about one of which was making those buttons by tracing sigils from Denning & Phillips’ Planetary Magick, which I’ve been working with lately. Making a serious go at its rites has definitely caused some interesting sensations.
Patrons can get the Illustrator source here. And if you want prints, t-shirts. stickers, etc, they’re on Redbubble.
Last week it snowed here in New Orleans. A record-setting, once-in-a-lifetime snow: the predictions were for five inches at most but we got like ten. Which probably sounds like nothing to someone living in a place where it snows regularly, and the houses are built to retain heat, and people have snow chains, and cities have snowplows, and the residents have the slightest idea of how to deal with snow. Down here in the tropics we have none of that.
There’s five cats who live under our house, and mostly wander in and out of our part of it as they please. We tried to persuade all of them to come in during the freeze. But one of them refused. Sneejers (aka CJ, aka Curly Joe – cat names migrate over time) has always been the most feral of the clan of cats living under our house, and has rarely been in. He was starting to be a little more curious about inside lately but we really didn’t expect him to be too happy with this prospect. So we wrapped an old blanket around the crate we use to take the cats to the vet, and put it in the back shed along with some food. They like to lounge in it sometimes so we figured it smelled like Family.
Someone seems to have used it, some of the cedar chips we lined it with got kicked out, but we don’t know who. We never managed to see it in use and found a few handpaw-looking prints in it, maybe the local possum used it and I guess I’m okay with that too. But we haven’t seen Sneejers since before the storm. It’s been a week now since his last sighting at feeding time; yesterday and today there’s been a new young grey-white cat hanging around who sure has some “hi I heard you have a vacancy, would you like to consider me for employment as your local Dude” vibes. We’ve seen other cats who live across the street and visit occasionally, but no Sneej.
Sneej was small, with a scraggly coat, so we are kind of assuming the worst. Rest in peace, kid, I hope that we generally made your life better with our bumbling attempts to care for a cat who mostly didn’t want that, and I wish you the best of luck on your next ride through this world, whether as another cat, or something else.
What did I do this year?
I watched parts of my professional life that were working stop working.
Patreon used to be a pretty good system for me to make comics, but they killed off the funding model I was using. It worked great as an incentive for me to crank out art when I got paid based on how many things I posted per month but when they forced everyone to switch to “your supporters just pay a fixed cost every month regardless of what you do” then my finances got reset to a place where spending the month doing comics is not paying enough for me to make ends meet, period, unless I double the amount of people supporting me. And on top of that the comics project I was working on started developing technical issues, my files have gotten huge and unwieldy and super slow to work with. Which is a recurring issue, this was part of what killed the last project, it has been a decade since I had a book-sized thing and this sucks.
I had a side gig doing paid avatars for Reddit that was real nice for a year and a half but they rapidly expanded the market for it and now it’s not worth anywhere near the time it takes to draw these things.
I keep on thinking I need to stop using Illustrator for a bunch of reasons and I just cannot make myself exert the energy to try and make sense of alternatives. Plus doing commissions with it is what pays my bills now. Spending a while being absolutely shit at art because I’m still figuring out a new tool is the exact opposite of appealing.
Also I got married.
I am out of shape and I can’t seem to get myself to return to being a person who gets up and exercises. I could be in much worse physical shape, keeping my main transportation as bicycling means I’m not slowly turning into a sphere, but I’ve sure been in much better shape.
Maybe making an art retrospective image will make me feel better and show me how much amazing stuff I did this year that I’ve forgotten?
hahaha no, I took an entire year to get about 3/4 of the way through the prologue and first chapter of the new comic, which I am feeling very low ebb about overall. I flailed uselessly at animation tools a couple of times. I spent a couple months on Reddit avatars that sold increasingly poorly – the ones I released in October took a month to make and only made me like $370; I’m not sure I even made minimum wage off of those. I think that’s definitely done. It was a nice paycheck at first, the ones from 2023 covered my rent for most of a year. I should really write something about the whole story of that thing sometime, I did it under another name because they involved NFTs when people still had opinions about those.
There’s far too many unfinished things in my folder for this past year. Way too many half-assed porn doodles that got finished enough to wank to but not finished enough to post. Half-finished portfolios and cover letters I haven’t done anything with. Aborted attempts at getting the hang of new art tools. There’s some obvious ideas for new year’s resolutions here, aren’t there. Maybe I’ll make some.
I wonder how the version of me who moved to Los Angeles back in 2019 instead of New Orleans is doing. Is she happy? Is she getting work? Did she get married to her version of Nick? Have any cats wandered into her life?
Anyway it looks like I am signing up for a tour at the co-working space at the Contemporary Arts Center and seriously considering signing up for at least a month of working there. Also I have decided today is a good day to dye my hair. Right now it’s covered in bleach; it’s been way too long since I had my hair bright red. I just lost the habit after moving.
Oh also if you read this far and have money to burn, my patreon still exists.
I just found my pencil case again. It’s been missing since shortly after I moved back to New Orleans in 2019. I thought it went missing in the move but it’s actually been sitting in a purse that I was using on a regular basis for a while until it got swiped during the pandemic. I recovered the purse but just kinda quit using it after that and it’s been sitting in a pile of stuff since then.
The rest of this post is something I wrote on Livejournal back in 2010. I dug it up today because I was missing this pencil case. Maybe that helped me think of where it was. Maybe not. It still describes the connection this simple little artifact has to my history.
I have this little metal tin I bought in 2000 or 2001. It’s flaked aluminum and has Pochacco on it; I bought it at the Hello Kitty store because it was cute and I liked the font on it. And because I wanted something better than an old cardboard box or whatever. The fact that it totally queered my classmates out was a bonus (remember, I was still a boy back in 2000). It’s got room for 7-10 pens or pencils (depending on if one of them is a thick black marker), a little sharpener, and a plastic eraser. It looked cute sticking out of my jeans pocket when that was my primary means of transport, and it fits nicely in my purse nowadays as well.
At this point the only way I’ll replace it is if it gets lost, or if it falls out of my purse and gets run over by a car or something. It’s been dented and I’ve bent its rounded lid back into shape. It’s gone to cons and been my entire toolkit for doing table sketchbooks. At some point in the next few years I will meet an emerging artist who is younger than my pencil case and I will feel terribly, terribly old. And also strangely proud; with all the chaos I’ve been through in the past decade, this simple little object is kind of a connection to my past. I went to the Griffith Park Zoo I don’t know how many times with this and a sketchbook; it’s gone to friends’ places and been invaluable during late-night sessions of watching TV, chatting, and doodling. The exact contents vary over time as different pens come and go, but it probably won’t be anything exotic – the demise of the Blackwing cured my tool fetishism.
Some people have giant boxes that can store every tool they might ever need, and haul that to cons. Me? I just carry around this tiny selection of stuff. I have a lot more at home to play with – paint, colored pencils, and of course the computer – but this is all I really need. Less stuff = less superfluous decisions = one less thing to keep me from focusing.
Here in 2024 it’s looking a lot more battered than it was back in 2010. I think I need to add “rusts into uselessness” to the list of reasons I’ll ever replace it. I was real close to ordering a cheap, undecorated pencil tin off of Jetpens before I found this today. If Sanrio still made pencil tins I’d probably have ordered one but all their pencil cases are plastic or fabric now.
Sometimes, especially when you are working in a simple style with a limited palette, you run into problems: you want to put a thing in front of something the same color, and have it still read.
Like this lady, who I drew in the same palette I used for Decrypting Rita, as an example for someone who was asking this sort of question.
Well. What I like to do is to make a new layer between the subject and background, and splatter in some shapes that create contrast around part of the subject. Once the composition works, then turn them into part of the background:
Blam, now she pops off the background. There’s still some ambiguity, I could add some more shadows to her body and clear up the arms some:
…and doodle in some other details, and I could just keep going with adding stuff here but I spent about a half an hour on this so far and it’s probably good enough to make my point.
well okay I can have a little a screentone on the background as a treat I guess
and a few more minutes touching up the city background I drew and deleted in the first version of this post
I looked at this and said “this needs clouds behind her” and then it started to feel like the character select screen of a video game so I spent a while turning it into that.
The multicolored type would probably be color cycling if this was an actual video game, and of course it would be scrolling up into the sky and giving you the usual attract mode stuff – enemy point values, copyright info, maybe even a couple more sentences of story, stuff like that. There is a token straight cis character but the text probably still reads “trans witch powers”, you just get to borrow them after saving a trans witch or something. It’s an indy game, we don’t have the budget for changing that! We most assuredly do have the budget to make sure all the text gets everyone’s pronouns right (because of course there’s a transmasc warlock or two, and maybe an enby).
brb, gonna go learn 3d and godot or unreal or something
