Possibly Because You're Learning: In The Time It Takes To Process And Post Your Work, You've Already

Capoeira is really fun to draw.

Dangit, Robert, stop scaring small children with your face. Seriously. Put that away.

Prelim concept for another comic character. Robert Granger is a HR manager on the space station where James lives. He's a yappy yuppie puppy, a little too enthusiastic, and way too over-caffeinated. His outfit is a hybrid of business suit and jumpsuit, I'm gonna have to play with that some more.

This is loaded with fail... that's what I get for inking an unfinished design. Except for the scaring-small-children-face. That's a keeper.

Quick little study of my hand, 5-10 mins. Hands seem to put most artists on guard, but I love drawing 'em. Well, maybe more of a love-hate thing. I wasted half my time in high-school drawing my left hand.

Sweet Celestia in a bucket... when I sketch, I just fling lead everywhere, don't I? Tho, some of that is actually hair on my knuckles. I'm kinda scruffy.

Does that mean this counts as furry art? Guh.

This is one of my favourite poems. ^_^

Happy Hallow' indeed!

Happy Halloween, folks!

WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

Yay, spambot.

My earliest memory is watching my brother play Super Mario Bros. on a rented NES, and he keeps "throwing" the controller to make Mario jump farther.

Straight out of high-school, he got a job coding browser games at nearly twenty bucks an hour. He got laid off and re-hired twice, and he's currently writing fiction. I've spent the last seven years trying to drag myself out of an addiction to gaming.

So it's my birthday. I drew myself a gift for it.

It's lazy, but I feel like being lazy right now. No jubilant celebrations or anything, just a quiet day to myself.

reblogging to my art tumblr, since photography counts for that sorta thing. Sorry for the redundancy.

So, on our daily walk to the McDonalds today, my brother and I took a detour through the waterfowl park, and came across not one, but two geese in the middle of the path, each with a little bundle of baby goslings. I apologize for the picture quality, but all I had on me was my iPod touch, and nothing to brace it on. Also: we didn’t want to get too close, since geese can be very protective, territorial, and irritable. We stood around for at least twenty minutes, and they held up any foot traffic coming through. Every now and then, one of the adults would stand up straight, stretch their neck upward, look around, and hiss at anything they didn’t like the look of. After a time, one bundle of goslings made their way across the path, one at a time, and snuggled in with the other bundle. Occasionally, one of the adults would check out the little ones, and get jumped on, or pick through the grass looking for edibles. Not gonna lie, it was pretty adorable.

We didn’t see any ducklings, but did spot plenty of ducks swimming around in pairs, so you know they’re on the way. X3

Quick observation: publishers like Marvel/DC put out a 32 page comic every month... those books have like twenty people working on them: pencillers, inkers, colourists, typesetters, cleanup artists, etc... 

re: artists working themselves to death and why the HECK is this the standard

the entire thing about the death of an animator in japan due to overwork is exactly why i am completing chapter 1 of 1989nk in months, not weeks.

this has been one of my biggest fears getting this project off the ground. the standard for work output by artists is set so fucking high nowadays. we’re ALL expected to perform at the level of the outlier. (This was apparent to me as early as in Art School, when we were all treated like we were absolutely fucking useless for not being able to do an entire 5 minute 3D animated film all by ourselves like that one guy in our program.) Artists who overwork themselves and overachieve (whether by perceived necessity or choice) unfortunately create an illusion to consumers and employers that their level of performance should be the standard. It creates a nasty cycle, because more artists start trying to adhere to that standard and it gets passed on and on and on.

i’m honestly fully expecting my deadline for chapter one to be too long of a wait for some people. “This other artist got their 30-40 page comic done in 6-8 weeks, why is yours going to take 6-8 months?”

listen, its because i don’t want to not be able to draw for the rest of my life at 30. I dont want to destroy my wrist and make myself ill and make the quality of the comic suffer because i have to live up to the vicious overwork cycle that’s completely blanketed the digital art/media/comics scene. If another artist takes only a few weeks to do their comic? Fine, but you know, theyre most likely suffering BADLY for it, and even THEY shouldn’t have to do that. They really, really shouldn’t. Overwork and over achievement frankly needs to stop being praised and heralded, because its not only extremely damaging to the artist themselves, but it also creates that cycle i mentioned.

Trying to keep up with the immense production quantity and speed that other artists seem to be doing has never, ever been possible for me and I’ve occasionally tried, only to seriously break myself. Even the amount of work I do is considered a lot by some, so then how is it that to me, it always feels like chicken scratch? It feels like i’m STILL not doing enough, ever. Even with the amount of work I do, I still feel like a lazy sack of shit and feel crippling guilt when I’m taking a break to do anything else but draw. I constantly feel like I’m losing the race. That isn’t right. That isn’t fair.

i just really, really hope that people don’t see my production time for 1989nk and go “that’s too long, artists don’t take THAT long to do work” because. well. honestly, they should.

More charcoal stuff.  Perspective is fun.

I might work on it a little more yet, who knows.

Edit: tumblr shrunk the image, and it looked crappy, so I reuploaded with one that I shrunk myself.

A bunch of quick and loose drawings. I do these as warmups whenever I'm having a hard time getting started and when I need to play around with poses for comics. No refs, just a heap of sticks and spheres.

I can't remember how long it took to do them... maybe three minutes per figure, though I usually go back and spend a few minutes cleaning up the ones that I like.