Just to be clear – I’m not this calm, cool and collected. I also don’t glow.

Balancing work time with everything else time is something all artists have to hammer out for themselves. Well, other than perhaps the independently wealthy artists with no family obligations and a particular gift for benign self-absorption, but I digress.

My balance is a work in progress. I have two part time jobs that are not art related, and one that is. None of this includes ‘just for fun’ projects, i.e. stuff that is not directly related to making money. Like, say, this blog. There’s also life, of course: Car payments and Thanksgiving dinner with the inlaws and watching the Perseids.

I do alright at leaving the work I do at a remote location where it belongs, but I run into trouble with work I do at home. Chainmail and some drawings are ‘work’, but they are also fun, which complicates matters. Sometimes, I want to make chainmail, as it is genuinely relaxing. And sometimes I have a show coming up, so I feel like I have to make as much chainmail as possible before the deadline, then I work myself into a slightly tarnished and blistered bag of twitch.

My problem is saying no in a rational way that also allows me to get done what I need to get done. If chainmail is fun, I shouldn’t balk at doing it a lot, right? But then I’m ‘working’ in my relaxation time. And if I only ‘work’ when it’s fun, then I’m not treating it like a job, which is the level of dedication that it deserves, and that my taxes sort of imply I should devote.

…

Oh, I’m sorry, did you want a conclusion? As I said, it’s a work in progress.

Well the Virginia Rennaissance Faire is over- for me anyway. It’s still going on,  but I’ll be attending two weddings in the next two weeks, so I couldn’t vend for the full run. (Updates may be spotty until July, as sometime in the next month I’m also supposed to be moving!) Since the ‘make chainmail 24-7′ pressure is off for a little while, I’m getting back on the horse with one of my naked ladies.

…

On second thought, it’s probably best to stay away from Ungulate metaphors when discussing nude women.

In the words of Randall Munroe: “You’re a kitty!”

I used to draw a LOT of horses.

For about four years, I drew practically nothing but horses, dogs, and dragons. Understandably I got good at drawing horses, dogs, and dragons. But when I reached the end of that stage and developed an interest in drawing people, I suddenly hit a wall. Though I’d developed a great anatomical understanding of animals, little of it applied to people. (Look, I think that people are animals. But there’s a big difference in musculature and movement between a digitigrade quadruped and a plantigrade biped.) It was like I’d lost about a year’s worth of gains in drawing skill just because I switched subjects.

That was a bit depressing, as you might imagine. But I kept drawing people and anything else that I was in the mood to draw, and I got better at it. As I got a bit older and a bit more varied in my drawing diet, horses gradually dropped out of my regular drawing rotation.

Ten years on, and now I’m on the other side of the same wall. I’m now much better at drawing people than I am at drawing horses, and it’s a bit depressing. When I sat down to draw this horse, it was sort of like my hand contracted a sudden case of terminally stupid.

Le sigh. Tortured artist is tortured, I suppose.

Welp, I’ve gone and dug myself a hole again.

See, I have in mind to do a little project. I self-published *coughKINKOScough* two trades of a comic in college, but I haven’t done much with the form since then. Of course now I’ve got a comic idea in my brain, and it’s not letting go. Unfortunately, this idea is relatively specific about the drawing style it wants.  And it’s not a style currently in my repertoire.  Dammit.

So I’m going to expand my repertoire. (And yes, that does hurt, even if you go slow.) I’m going to accomplish this by the time-honored tradition of copying until I understand how the hell the artist does whatever it is they do.

Today, I’m embarrassing both him and myself by attempting to learn the ways of Mike Mignola. Well,  Fritz Leiber as done by Mignola, anyway.

Even though it’s at least four years old, this picture still captures something. At the time I was doing a lot of ‘darkened room’ type pictures, ( Moonlight and Stonework were also from that period.) basically teaching myself to think in terms of negative space rather than positive. Thinking that way doesn’t look very different at the sketching stage, but it prepared me to deal with the concept of layers in Photoshop. Plus I can’t imagine making my black and white WoW drawings without being about to toggle back and forth between negative space drawing and positive space drawing.

Okay, so what’s all this ‘negative and positive space’ crap about, you ask?

Most simply: are you drawing black lines on white paper, or white lines on black paper?

No, I’m not fucking with you. This is a deep question for an artist. Okay, so most of the time the actual paper or canvas is white anyway, but I’m speaking about conceptualization here. Whether you’re dealing in positive or negative space matters an awful lot to the eventual mood and focus of the drawing.

Sure, it gets more complicated when you’re talking about color pictures, but there are some obvious examples: Rembrant and Carravagio are mainly dealing in negative space (white on black) while Monet is a pretty strict positive space (black on white) guy.

Most casual draw-ers don’t even realize thinking in negative space is an option. This is partially because most of us are as young children given a white piece of paper, a dark marking utensil, and are carefully coached to draw the outlines of an object. (Even ‘coloring in the lines’ supports this way of thinking, as it’s a solid darkish form on a white background, hardly ever is it the background you’re ’supposed’ to be coloring.) I clearly remember the first time I was expected to deal with negative space in an art class. We were doing batiking, in which you mask part of a bit of cloth with wax, dye it, boil the wax off, and repeat. I got so frustrated I about cried in class, in highschool no less. I blame this partially on the teacher, who was so used to me quickly grasping the concepts that she didn’t really spend the time to explain the process to me, but also on my own stubborn refusal to let go of the first premise of my artistic pursuits up until that point, which was that everything begins with black lines on white paper.

Breaking in a new tablet. I always seem to have to go through four or five pages of crapish sketches before I get something decent, no matter how ‘warmed up’ I am. It’s similar to the intimidation of the blank page- just with more pages.

Speaking of more pages: perhaps the single most helpful piece of advice I can give someone trying to learn to draw is to use up a lot of paper. I almost wish it was more complicated, but it’s simple, and hard. Start sketching. When something feels frustrating or stale, get a new sheet of paper.  ( Don’t throw out the old ones, reworking partial ideas is often a great warm-up.) But if you’re sketching, momentum is more important than trying to make a complete picture on your first or fifteenth try.

Sometimes, my fiance and I WoW together. These are our mains, gettin’ down with their funky selves.

I think I’m getting a closer handle on a consistent ‘WoW’ style, but this one is still a ranging shot. While I like it, particularly the poses, it’s too busy. I expected the shading to help direct the viewer’s eye more than it actually does. I was being too cautious about contrast…again. (Can I just hire someone to hit me with a wiffle bat inscribed with ‘too subtle’ when I do this? Please post resumes in the comments.)

This is also the capstone to my Valentine’s Day self promotion week! So if anybody wants to commission an illustration or a piece of jewelry for their significant other, drop me a line.

This was for my brother’s wedding invitations. My brother has for all of his adult life had very long hair, and well, 98.5% of your typical depictions of a groom just weren’t going to cut it.

Originally this was just a pretty drawing. Then one of my friends saw it, and exclaimed ‘Oh, that looks just like [me and my significant other]!’ As I’m a pretty firm believer in letting my art be what other people think it is instead of trying to keep a stranglehold on meaning, (plus it did sort of look like them) I said ’sure’.

Years later I digitally inked it, and now the person in the suit sort of looks like a crossdressing lady.

Sure.