Where did I go? Am I back?

There is a cruel irony to this post. I was ready to really start pounding away at the keyboard and manning the sketchbooks— I wanted to show you my working process as I started work on several projects. I even managed to pull this off with a portrait I had done for my friend. Then… silence for nearly two months.

What happened? Well, first on the list of hobby-crippling events: I moved into a new apartment with my brother and old roommate from college. This happened right at the end of July and carried through into the first half of August. Needless to say, there was a good bit of unpacking and cleaning to do; the previous tenants left us the absolutely lovely gift of an under-sink cabinet encrusted in black mold.

Yeah, my brother and roommate did a much better job of cleaning that up.

In addition to the woes of moving — nothing ground-breaking there — I visited my parents a couple of times. While that did not inherently prevent me from drawing, it did take me away from my set-up. Actually, I just forgot to bring my clipboard, heh… That and their scanner has a little story of its own, below.

It looked a bit different from this, but I'll spare you the details.

The real issue came shortly after I finished the final sketch, below. I was having some major problems regarding my lower digestive-tract. So severe were they, in fact, that I ended up missing three days of work and going on medical leave. Yay! Time away from work that I can spend making art! Right? Unfortunately, given the nature of the illness, I was… precluded… from any of my hobbies. I’ll leave that to you’re imagination. It ended up being chronic, which is also fun.

That leave lasted about a month — the last half of August, and the first half of September — which brings us to now. I finally got that old drawing uploaded, and I managed to get something done while I was out. I’ll let you see them, below!

You can find this on my DeviantArt, here.

I am a nerd. There is no avoiding that fact, I’m afraid. And, being the nerd that I am, I joined an online role-playing site. Essentially, I can play D&D with random strangers without having to worry about coordinating a sit-down game. My character is a tribal ranger, and her companion is a large hound. I drew the dog first, using a mastiff for the pose — I wanted a monstrous-looking form — and worked in the fur of a bearded collie. A big point for me was to have the braided fur along his sides.  It's a tribal thing.  The style is pretty rough and sketchy, but I think it might be alright for a graphic novel — provided I can work out the problems with the cross-hatching.

You can also find this on my DeviantArt, here.

And here is my character, herself. I stayed up a little too late working on this one and am still trying to turn my sleep-cycle around, heh. I wanted to mix my detailed shading with heavy outlines to make the drawing a bit more “stylized,” I suppose the word would be. That’s a topic I’d like to cover some day; I have what you might call an unpopular opinion of it. Mostly, I am happy to have had more portrait practice, and D&D characters always make interesting subjects.

I should also thank my mother, as she provided me with the materials necessary to draw those pictures above. I didn’t have my truck, nor did I feel well enough to drive out to buy anything. I am blessed to have a family that cares so much about me, as well as friends and acquaintances that are all concerned with my well-being. I’m not sure if any of you will read this, but if you do, thank you.

This brings me back to the issue of the scanner. My parents use a Kodak ESP 7 All-in-One printer and scanner. As I’m sure every artist knows: printers and scanners are some of the most frustrating pieces of technology ever devised. This is doubly true for printers and triply true for all-in-ones. Further aggravating the issue, I exclusively use Linux for anything productive, and Kodak is not a decent enough company to provide drivers for the operating system. It took about three hours of work, but I got the open-source ones working — to a better standard than the proprietary Kodak photo-center-thing, might I add (smug smile) — and could finally scan things from my parents' house. Oddly, the scanner refused to function when directly connected via USB to the computer, and only worked over my home network… This is particularly befuddling because one would think scanning over a network would be the harder of the two methods. Oh well.

I’m definitely going to do a post one day about my experiences as an artist that uses Linux instead of Microsoft’s Windows, or Apple’s macOS (I think that’s what they’re calling it now). Most have actually been quite pleasant, and I would never consider returning to either of the others — particularly not Mac. No one should use Mac. It is objectively inferior both in terms of software and hardware to essentially any other offering. Needless to say, it saddens me to see that the company has entrenched its grossly over-priced products in the art community — a community that is certainly not known for its ability to accumulate wealth. I’ll stop here before the rant takes off, and I’ll share the details about why I feel this way in a later post.

This as well, here.

And finally, we get to that drawing I’ve been wanting to show you for the past two months. I was finally able to scan it and upload it after returning home. It only took about two hours to draw and finally gave me a passable result with cross-hatching. I should clarify: I can crosshatch with pen a lot better than I can with pencil. That’s not to say that I’m good at it… in fact, I think cross-hatching is still one of the weakest of my skills. But finally, I am not completely unhappy with the result. The saddest part of this entire story is that the drawing’s really nothing special. It certainly wasn’t worth waiting two months for.

That’s about it. I’m afraid. Sorry about the long post, but I felt a bit of explanation was in order. Looking ahead, there doesn’t appear to be much of anything in the way of my old, regular schedule. However, I have learned my lesson about optimism and I am not going to jinx it! Suffice it to say, I am hoping my luck holds out.

No.  It says "no."  It always says "no" unless a "yes" would be more damaging.