Hey, Look. I Drew Some Keywork 'cuz I Was Bored. Then I Inked It, Really Really Badly.

Hokay: after the Imp sitting on his own arm, and the carbuncle sitting on his own belly, I’m pretty sure the post colonic subtitle for the comic would be Perceptionality: an X sitting on their own Y. X3

So here we have a lady sitting on her own hair. Not much to say here, except that I wish I could have been more aggressive with removing the page shadow, but I would have lost too much of the pencil lines in the process.

I’ve mentioned previously that there are numerous people in the world of Perceptionality that are almost, though not quite entirely human. Whelp, this is another one of them. Prehensile hair can be very useful, when you need an extra hand to hold something, or a seat I guess. It’s also worth noting that in any tabletop RP that I get the chance to play with prehensile hair, I will do so without hesitation. It’s great.

Reblog to my mud blug, incase you weren’t following Percep... which you should be, if you like my stuff. Even though it hasn’t really started updating yet. It will, I swear. Some time soon. No really. Any day now.

Sketch dump to end all sketch dumps.

So: I made a deal with one of my good artist friends a while ago, ‘cuz I was whining that I’d be more inclined to post if I got more comments on my work… Now, I spend about eight hours a day with my nose to the sketchbook, but I don’t post 95% of my material because sketches just don’t seem worth bothering with. It is literally more work to scan, edit, and process the drawings than it is to actually draw them. (ten minutes of drawing, an hour to process… ten more minutes of inking on paper brings that down to about fifteen minutes of processing), so I’m much more likely to post a quickly inked drawing than a pencil drawing I spent two hours on). Well, anyway, said artist friend went through all my posts and did a great big commentary, at least mentioning everything I’d posted thus far. I won’t lie: I have some of the best friends anyone could ask for. So, it’s time to put my currency where my vocalization orifice is: I’m only gonna do this once, ‘cuz after this it’s gonna be nigh impossible to keep track of what artwork has and hasn’t already been posted.

Now, I have 8 sketchbooks full of material that hasn’t been posted, coming out to sixteen hundred pages of art in total, at 100 pages per book, x2 since I draw on both sides of a page. Not gonna post all of that, tho: I don’t mind posting bad art, of which there is quite a lot, but I gotta maintain some standards… it’s gotta be visually legible at least. A lot of it is redundant too, since I had to draw dozens of sketches for each character just to relearn how to draw them after my hospital stay. I think I filled 200 pages just figuring out Spooks head. So I’m not gonna do all 1600 pages. Just the highlights. Maybe 1 or 2 percent. Still: tl;dr, there’s a whole lotta messy ink and or pencil art is on the way.

Most of the posts will be accompanied by a writeup of some sort, so if you like the world building in percep. so far, you should enjoy this. I’m deliberating over how much I want to reveal outside of the comic itself, but if you liked the write ups for the worldshaper and Cthonians, you should enjoy some of the stuff I have queued up.

Possibly because you're learning: in the time it takes to process and post your work, you've already figured out multiple ways to improve it.

Alternatively: maybe you spent a few hours working on it, so you're already sick and tired of it before it's even posted.

The only reason artists ever post things is that once you display something publicly, it's finished: it's like putting the final nail in the coffin... no take-backs, no do-overs. If you don't post something, you end up fussing with it forever. Once you post, you can put it behind you and move on.

Since artists learn by doing, by the time you're done, you're a better artist than when you started: as such, the features of the work you did at the beginning aren't as good as what you're capable of by the time it's done. So, of course it looks wrong in retrospect: hindsight is 20/40.

Why do I get the urge to delete all my art from the Internet the day after I post it? Am I tired of looking at it already????

UGGG.

Suggestions for Art to Livestream?

After two months of going without, I'm finally getting set up with internet service at home (no more mooching off of various fast-food establishments and public libraries with free wi-fi!).

First thing I plan to doing is Livestreams of art stuff. However, Perceptionality is a B/W, traditional-media comic, and the only digital work required is clean-up, typesetting, and graphic design elements. Not particularly fun to watch, I wouldn't think.

So: If anyone has suggestions or requests, let me hear 'em! I'll draw whichever ones seem like the most fun or interesting. Once I'm set up for the livestreamin's (hopefully not more than a couple of days from now), y'all can watch me clean and colour the stuff. And listen to me ramble about stuff non-stop. There will probably be music too. I guess.

I won't be drawing extreme violence or porn (though I will draw tasteful nudity) but aside from that, anything goes. I'm not kidding. Fan art, OC's, art styles ranging from anime to realistic to pre-raphaelite, sci-fi or fantasy or modern day, scenery and backgrounds are cool, whatever you can think of.

(This is gonna be a catastrophe, I just know it.)

(...I'm okay with that: should be fun)

This little guy is a carbuncle: a lizard about five inches long when he’s not all curled up. He has a gemstone inside his head that, if extracted and correctly processed can be used to create a potion that grants the imbiber... I dunno, eternal life, or the ability to perceive the essential nature of reality, or something like that. Removing the gem kills the carbuncle, so this one is having a little quiet time sitting on his own belly, ‘cuz poachers got most of his family.

Wow: this one looked so much better as a pencil sketch than it does on screen. Especially that hind leg, jeez.

My third second birthday

Whelp: those of you who’ve known me for a while are aware that three years ago yesterday, (Nov. 28), on my daily walk from my apartment to the McDonalds where I would sit and draw all day, I suffered a stroke. Today I got to meet the ambulance crew who picked me up, and I found out a few interesting things:

That thing you see in all the hospital dramas+crime shows where the paramedics shine a little flashlight into someone’s eye and use the dilation reaction to check for concussion? They really do actually do that. Relevant to me because I’m been blind in my right eye (Nothing to do with the stroke, had a bout of Diabetic retinopathy some 10 years ago now: that’s a whole ‘nother story), and as a result my right eye is permanently dilated, so i’ve always been a little paranoid that someone would do the flashlight thing and incorrectly assume I’d had a concussion due to the resulting lack of response in that eye. Wasn’t a problem when they picked me up three years ago, but I need to get an updated Medic Alert pendant. X3

You know how people will complain about having to wait like 45 minutes for an ambulance? Chances are, quite often, that’s probably because the ambulance has to drive out from the next town over. An ambulance centre covers an entire region, not just one metropolitan area. When I had my stroke, the ambulance centre was literally about a block away, so they got there in a matter of minutes. (Stroke of Luck #1).

When it happened, I had been walking down the street, someone saw me keel over on a lawn, and called 911... stroke of luck #2: If I had stayed at home that day, no one would have found me till my brother got home from work several hours later... if whoever had made the call hadn’t seen me keel over, but rather had simply seen me lying there, they might have assumed I was just passed out drunk on the lawn or something. For that matter, I’m lucky they decided to call an ambulance at all.

Second thing I found out on my visit: once the ambulance crew drops you off at the hospital, they don’t hear anything about what happens to you after that. I would have thought that one of the major payoffs to being an ambulance crew member is the satisfaction of helping to save peoples lives, but once the hospital takes you in (if you make it there, that is), doctor patient confidentiality takes over, and the ambulance team doesn’t hear anything unless it makes the papers... which it usually doesn’t, unless the news is bad, which, all too often, it is.

So, when I showed up to meet the guys who’d scraped me off somebodys lawn and spent 45 minutes trying to resuscitate  me right there on the street (keep in mind: 10 minutes without oxygen is long enough to cause brain death, tho CPR will keep the air pumping into your system, so, stroke of luck #3, I’m really lucky they got to me so quickly and didn’t just give up and call it after 20 or 30 mins), they were pretty happy to see me up and about, hale and hearty.

Details of the Stroke itself below the break.

Anyway: once I landed in the hospital, They thought I’d suffered a heart attack, and treated me as such (technically a correct assumption, since the stroke had immediately caused a heart attack). Stroke of Luck #4: everything they did in the first 24 hours to treat me was the exact same thing they would have done if they’d known at the time that it had been a stroke.

So: after a bit of time in the hospital (and notifying my parents et al), the cardiologist, Stroke of luck #4, asked the staff Neurologist, who wasn’t even supposed to be in that day, #4.1, and asked him to take a look at me. The neurologist saw something on my EKG chart that he had heard about at a conference he’d been to that very weekend, which suggested that I’d suffered a stroke rather than simply a heart attack, #4.2

Anyway, after that all got straightened out, I went through 2 months of rehab in the hospital (Including daily physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, and Speech Therapy). Stroke of Luck #5, I had an amazing team of people taking care of me (Including, coincidentally, no less than 5 therapists/doctors named Michelle, and I think a nurse or two as well). Turns out, my town has basically the best rehab team/facilities in the region. Stroke of Luck #6, the costs for whole thing, top to bottom, from the ambulance ride, to the therapy and hospital stay itself, to the bucketload of pills I was proscribed, down to the gas my parents burn driving me to and from doctors appointments, is totally covered by Canadian social assistance, since I’m on medical disability (Have been since even before the stroke: my diabetes and ADD make a very nasty combination).

So, that was three years ago... during the 2 months in the hospital I did very little drawing, and virtually no writing, and my skills basically rusted away to almost nothing nor does it help that apparently I suffer a neurological right side neglect, which has an interesting impact on my drawing (i’ll draw a figure that looks pretty decent overall, but their left side will look like I phoned it in... interiestingly, not the right side of the drawing, the figures right side). I’ve basically spent the last three years trying to regain my prior skill, and there’s a loooot of rust to brush off for the 10 years of independent study and practice I’ve done in comic art and writing. (when I dedicate my entire life to something, I don’t take half measures).

The hospital stay did have one side benefit; with a whole team of nurses handling my blood tests, insulin shots, and meal records (none of which I was ever able to manage on my own). The diabetic specialists were able to sort out a management system for my diabetes as a whole! I was first diagnosed as diabetic when I was 6, 27 years ago now. Back then the insulins available weren’t nearly as effective as what they have now, so I was never able to keep my management on track. Bad management meant bad blood sugar levels, which was painfully discouraging, so I sort of just let my management as a whole slide. Since I wasn’t getting tests regularly or keeping records, my specialists couldn’t even advise me without any data to work with. Which only made my blod sugar levels worse. But,  over the course of my hospital stay, the nurses handled all my tests/shots/pills. With that information, the specialists sorted out a management plan, which I’m happy to say has working quite well for me these days. I’ve been doing pretty well following it. Every stormcloud has a silver lightning.

At any rate: I ramble. Back to the sketchbook for me.

I got an early Christmas present... a set of charcoal pencils and sticks, and a pad of paper suitable for them. Lucked out really: charcoal was the last thing on my list of things to play around with that I hadn't yet acquired the materials for. Pretty well the only thing missing was a tortillion, of which I already had a few.

I spent an afternoon playing around, getting a feel for them, but this is the first drawing I've taken the time to sit down and put some effort into.

The process was pretty straight forward: I sketched the figure with an HB charcoal pencil, then darkened the lines and filled in the shade with a 4B. After that, it was a steady cycle of blending with a tortillion, lightening patches with a light application of 4mm eraser stick or kneaded eraser, laying down more charcoal where needed, and back to blending again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Man, I love this stuff! It's much better for heavy shade than graphite, and it doesn't make as much of a mess as I thought it would. Charcoal doesn't compare to india ink for pure, solid black, I don't think anything could, but the charcoal is so much more workable. I don't mind the time and effort it takes to build up a ton of hatching with a nib pen, but all you can do is build up. Being able to lay down, blend, and erase charcoal was an utter delight. 

I might do a few more pages of that steampunk comic I worked on a while back, just for something to do in charcoal.

*’m L*lling at this harder than * really should be.

*IoI. X3

if you c*nsor anything in a post you are l*gally required to put all of the omitted v*wels at the end as a footn*te

*eeoo

Went to the zoo.

Got to feed alpacas.

Totally worth it.

I just realized something.

Mirrors don't flip something left to right. They flip things front to back.

This is, officially, blowing my mind.