“Fleet of Worlds” by Larry Niven and Edward Lerner is probably not a great book by any means. But for someone who devoured Niven's Known Space books at the age of eight, it's total comfort food. Hi, Nessus. Hi, General Products hulls. Hi, Puppeteer civilization fleeing away from the exploding galactic core. Hi, teleport booths.
Hi, working around holes that Niven never saw in his logic back in the early 70s.
I ate it up and picked up the second volume.
I feel like the stuff I’ve been drawing lately is coming out super-fast. Most of it I don’t even bother with a linear sketch for; I just draw major shapes rapidly, with something like the correct layering, then go back in and add some shadows to show where one part overlaps another. Maybe separate bits off onto their own layer, if the drawing merits it. Maybe don’t bother. It depends on how complex the character is and how much I want to get into the shading.
I’m pretty sure spending four years working in super-limited three-color palettes helped make this happen quickly. My visual cortex spent four years thinking about pretty much nothing but delineating things via shading. And now it can do that so quickly that the only real speed limit is how quickly I can whip out the paths. Which is pretty quickly. Being able to just say “this thing is PINK so it’ll be pink”, then add some translucent shadows or highlights in whatever color of light I want, feels like such a luxury.
I drew this yesterday when someone asked for tips on drawing action. There are lots more things I could have said, lots more rules of thumb I could have mentioned. But these are the ones I thought of before I decided I was done drawing and went back to trying to kill the Shadow of Yharnham so I can progress in Bloodborne’s story. Which I still have not done.
As if Bloodborne isn’t hard enough, I have gravitated to running around in a ball gown, wielding a sabre. Which is also a gun, because this is Bloodborne. The ball gown has next to no armor value. The sabre is immensely technical to use and I still haven’t really gotten the hang of it.
And yet I’m having a great time.
Because, hey, I get to wander through an abandoned castle full of ghosts and vampires, climb to the top, wander carefully across its roofs, and pose dramatically in the snow before crossing an invisible line that wakes up an ancient skeleton sitting in a throne in the middle of the roof, and get killed by it.
I’d spent a few hours roaming around other areas beforehand. Kept not quite managing to best an evil nurse in a duel atop a sweeping staircase. Died a lot, didn’t end up keeping a single blood dollar with which to upgrade my character. I didn’t care. I was running around trying to figure out how to really use that sabre-gun and putting experience points in me.
I may never finish a single playthrough of this game. But I don’t care. Because I get to be goth as fuck.
I like to draw my dragon self around my birthday. Since I have ended up starting pole dance again, I ended up drawing her doing the kind of split I will probably never be able to do in reality.
Also I found this [NSFW: latex catsuit dragon]in my working directory in like a 90% complete state last night and finished it so I could use it as a non sequitur image with a Tumblr ask.
Someday when I have a fully replaceable robot body I want to spend a couple years being like four and a half or five feet tall. Maybe with extensible legs so I can still get stuff off the top shelves. I bet everyone would interact with me very differently.
Probably in some ways i would like, and in some ways I would not like.
One of those shower thoughts, you know?
Well that was NOT A GOOD DREAM. I was lying in a small room in a resort somewhere trying to cope with my mom having just died, and Nick having died a couple of days later. I went outside and was informed by Jason that MJ’s funeral was that afternoon. And I knew that I’d shortly have to go to Nick’s funeral too.
Then I woke up and was very very glad that was not the case. Nick has really been a big help in me staying sane through this.
Meet Pushy Garnet. She is old enough to be your mom, and completely approves of whatever impossible fantasy gets your motor running. For the right price she’ll draw it.
I have decided that now that I’m a forty-something lady who will probably never try to get “a real job” ever again, I can come clean about how much of a total pervert furry I am sometimes. A while back I spent much of a year drawing crazy cartoon porn commissions as Pushy, and could have made that pay the bills if I’d wanted to. And now you can see most of what I drew as her right here on my website.
I learnt a lot as Pushy. I learnt a few things about building an audience; I learnt a lot about drawing quickly. I wouldn’t be drawing a comic directly in Illustrator if not for the time I spent knocking out weird, sloppy erotica with a bottle of raspberry lambic (Pushy’s favorite drink) at my side. I learnt something about empathy; Pushy’s job was to figure out why someone’s weird kink was hot to them, and feel that enough herself to make a joyously hot drawing. I kinda picked up a couple more absurd fantasy kinks doing that.
I still sign some of my experiments with her name. Because drawing something sexy is easy, and it provides a nice base to try new techniques on top of.
I dreamt that I was wandering around the back yard of the place I grew up in. It was a bit unkempt and messy, with a lot more stuff in it than there was when I was growing up.
On the door to the shed was a note from my mother, responding ever so politely to a note from a neighbor who was offended by her posting a comic critical of Bush’s policies on there. Why this was the place for such a discourse I wasn’t sure but there it was – ineffably polite but unyielding in her disagreement. It was nicely typeset.
