Year: 2018

Dumping a Dragon, Manga, Writing Journey

on the DL graphic novel proj

mary v.

I’ve spent the last 2.5 weeks working tirelessly – truly, tirelessly – on the graphic novelization of To Trust a Dragon – which, as a graphic novel, is probably more suitably titled Dumping a Dragon. Or something. I suck at titles.

Anyway, it’s been a LOT of fun to work on, and the pages look great, and super professional. Everything Cadence struggled to be what with my conflict between digital and traditional. In this project’s case, my Cintiq is doing literally everything it should be. Its drivers have been cooperating, so rather than like it had been over the summer where I would start my computer up, try to start my tablet, and then various things were broken that required 2-3 computer restarts, it’s been a lot more plug and play.

And I don’t know if I’m just really stupid happy with the character design for my kids (Siv and Noelia…finally added the A to her name; I tried so long to go with Noeli, and I tried to rename her, but nothing fit. So I added an A and voila…she feels real) or what, but I literally love drawing their faces over and over. The biggest tell will be when I switch Siv from adorable expressive tooth-scar man with the foof of colored hair to being his true dragony self. I will fully admit I’m scared that’s gonna put a damper on my retelling. Like I’ve got all this momentum and I’ll get like 20 pages in and get to the bulk of the story and then be like fuh I don’t wanna color 70 more pages of dragons smoking and shit. But like, at the same time, I’ve been going so nice and easy on myself that if I need to change Siv’s dragon design from one page to the next for any reason, hell, I will. But I also haven’t been stressing about saving my pages as JPEGs, because that’s so final and makes it harder to reliably go back and change things if/when I want to, so the idea of changing a character design so I can draw it more fluently isn’t super terrible.

Nothing is technically stopping me from setting up a blog for this either, but I feel like that would tie me down to this project in a way that’ll potentially scare me off from it. So, for the time being, I will make my husband help me with it, and make myself happy, and that’s about it.

Anyway, I’ve gotten 10 pages done in 2 weeks. I don’t think 5 or so pages a week is a bad rate by any means. 

And without further ado, I’m testing WordPress’s new gallery block and hoping it won’t fuck everything up!

Snaps from “Dumping a Dragon”

  • Noelia’s hipster (like herbal tea, thrift store job hipster) lil sister Adriana, being dubious
  • Aww bbs, this is from the first page and I can’t believe how different my lineart looked!
  • Raging chibi Noelia, so kawaii, 11/10 would squee
  • I take my art ssssoooooo seriously
  • Some slicy intimate panels
  • Sivarthis no
  • lololol my TRACED minneapolis institute of art, FUCK ARCHITECTURE

And last but not least, my personal favorite, my avatar for whenever I am driving/dealing with annoying people/dealing with my computer being difficult/having to convince myself not to have Dairy Queen after dinner every day…

Art!, Dumping a Dragon, Emotia, Manga, Original Characters, Ryan & Me, To Trust a Dragon

of markers and endeavors

mary v.

and also scary new wordpress editors

Well I would say in the last few weeks I have officially begun getting the hang of my new alcohol markers…but the problem I have discovered today is that my poor old flatbed scanner is not. a. fan. 

I never knew that losing saturation would be a problem for me in my unsaturated, blues and reds world. But it was super sad and I still don’t think the scan does my latest drawing justice.

I had always wanted to do a real, thorough Snowbelle personified drawing and so I fixed in on what she would look like NOW as a person…which would be stumpy, and chubby, still mildly terrified of everyone, but always eating mom’s favorite foods.

So I gave her some cute love handles and gray track pants and some FUCKING DELICIOUS looking ramen, and voila. It looks like I know what I’m doing with color sometimes.

Snowbelle <3

So this one immediately went up on my ever-changing art wall over my desk and even now looking at it it’s confusing because the bottom corners color of pink is actually called “Light Violet,” which is alarming as it turned out on the computer more like a light violet than it did on the paper, haha. What? Okay. Whatever.

Other marker practices include this random fire girl, and a cute drawing of me and my nerd.

Kinda hate her. Didn’t really know what I was doing yet. Should have finished with some lineart but I am 100000% moved on from its mediocrity. Her hair is pretty though.
Ryan’s hair shading turned out better than literally anything else in this. And any of the shading I did well honestly just kinda died when I scanned it in. :/

Andnndndnndnd two other pieces of news.

Emotia News

One, I’m very slowly working on a new Emotia painting. I’ve been trying to synthesize myself a bit and figure out where I’m at, and where I’m about to be going, what with starting grad school (again) in a few weeks, and settling into my new less direct care role at work. In some ways I haven’t really changed all that much since my last Emotia, so I think that’s why I did this fabulous paint sketch of my new one and then kinda screeched to a halt, because I’m not positive yet if it’s time for a new one, even though I could just do it anyway. There’s something about this series in particular that has profundity that I really don’t ever want to damage, and part of keeping it sacred may be knowing when not to make one, if when I want to it feels too trivial.

Very very very tentative new project news

Very very very tentative because as per usual, my whims are capricious and difficult to pin down, so I may put two hours of work into this over the next few days before pretending like I never said anything about it – anyway, I was trying to force myself to finish the book I’m reading, a less compelling sequel to Seraphina, and reading about other people’s dragons made me pick up To Trust a Dragon again and then I thought about how all these scenes are like, SUPER VISUAL, and then I was like…*steeples fingers* DO I WANT TO DO THIS? Well, I always do have good timing for shit like this, so yeah MAYBE! We’ll see; I did some preliminary sketches of Noeli and Siv in dragon form since I realized he would spend most of the story as a dragon, and I think they would be really, really neat characters to work on. Noeli would literally be the only human I’d be drawing until she gets to Adriana, so I have to make sure her model is compelling, which I kind of already knew it was.

So, now that I’m done blogging and settling into my art space I was gonna go see what I can do on this. Wish me and my cranky technology luck.

Art!, Myoku Needs a Tag, Nikkei

marker drawings of old people

mary v.

And by old, of course, I mean my old-ass Nikkei characters. Last night as I was sketching out ideas for full digital drawings, I suddenly decided to draw Myoku and Nikkei together. Then, I went on Amazon and bought a huge set of alcohol-based Copic marker knockoffs for $40. So I purposely held out on blogging until tonight so I could color my Nikkei and Myo drawing with my new markers!

I llooooooveee how it turned out. These colors are so vivid it’s actually the first time I didn’t have to adjust the color levels after I scanned it. Obviously figuring out if or how I can shade will be a bit of a trial period but other than that I was able to achieve all the wacky colors these guys have always been using only markers. I think these markers would be great too with a larger-scale surface that would benefit from getting the chisel tip into larger but more detailed spaces. The possibilities are endless!

I’m working hard to try to push my way through some creative roadblocks for the last project I started writing a while ago. I may not be producing much but I’ll never give up on trying.

 

OH yeah the only other noteworthy art I’ve done is on my flight home from California, actually.

The week I was in California with my friends was the longest I’d been away from me and Ryan’s cats since before I ever met him. I desperately, painfully missed my Snowball cuddles – it was kind of pathetic. By the time we were flying home, I’d spent all week drawing whatever I could think of; I’d listened to all my music too many times; and I’d read too much of my books to want to do any of those things for the 3.5 hours on the plane. So I decided I had to draw something that would be as time-consuming as it possibly could. That ended up being a full shaded sketch followed by a full shaded BALLPOINT PEN drawing. And sadly it still only took me maybe just over 30 minutes. The amount of attention I got for this was, as usual, ranging from hilarious to annoying. At one point I accidentally flipped my pen out of my hand and the mini-Ryan sitting next to him had to pick it up for me because Ryan had had no idea what’d happened. Then the flight attendant was all omg I can only draw stick figures and I’m like -____- stop with that line everybody, holy crap, sorry you haven’t tried.
And, the best part about this is that this is in fact exactly what happened approximately 5 minutes after I climbed into bed when we got home from the airport. ^_^ I love my crazy cat lady life.

Art!

creatively sapped

mary v.

In this last month my husband has found himself unemployed, and I have been getting ready to transition into a less patient focused role at my hospital. I have come home from work eager to shut off my brain in every way. I put probably 50 hours into God of War, and recently finished the very compelling storyline missions. I’ve been very glacially chipping away at a complicated new story idea that probably will take off, in due time.

So today on a day off before my last 5 shifts at work (god I just wish they were all in a row) I forced myself to sit down and draw some pastel princess fluff.

Enjoy. Literally no comments on it.

Art!, Ryan & Me

always interrupt me for that

mary v.

Yesterday after reading about Kamala Khan’s first kiss in the latest issue of Ms. Marvel (announced today IT WILL BE MADE INTO A FILM, WHAT THE EVER LOVING FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU), I was feeling kinda sappy.

And after being too lazy to come upstairs and get on my laptop to peruse my own illustrated kisses of the past, I decided to draw me and my dude. I ended up using and just cleaning up the lineart digitally rather than redoing it, which ultimately is hilarious in that I had talked myself into doing this digitally with the battle cry of, “fuck the rules! I’m gonna make bold messy lineart if I wanna make bold messy lineart!” and then I proceeded to keep the delicate af lineart from the original. Ah, irony.

This pose is a frequent occurrence in my household whether it’s a paintbrush or a Wacom pen. My husband always makes sure to walk by and kiss me no matter how immersed I am in my work.

And to think how important it is that I’ve gotten to the point over 5 years where I *can* get immersed in my work around him.

All this is is, again, so surprising considering I am home after work and expected to be a fat lump on the couch for most of the night.

Art!, Original Characters

mood

mary v.

So recently when I got super cranky about social plans changing on me at the last minute, I decided I wanted to draw a dragon lady. The idea ended up evolving into a full-scale, a bit risque dragon lady digital painting. I worked on it over the course of 4 days or so after I figured out I can make my tablet and my laptop into a dual monitor situation, so I could binge watch Jane the Virgin on my laptop screen while I painted in front of it on my tablet. Hooray for 21st century arting! This was after I also rearranged my whole giant art desk so the left side can be a more or less permanent home for my laptop and tablet now that I have a little Chromebook for everyday computer use.

So without further ado, enjoy my suggestive illustration of a glamorous dragon lady that I kind of want to write a story about.

Still debating whether to do a version where she’s “clothed” so I can post it on Facebook. But I’ve been dragging my feet on finishing this up, so for now, nudie it is. Besides, what reason would a dragon lady need to wear clothes?

 

Art!, Other Peoples' Work!

tablet time

mary v.

I got a little touchscreen Chromebook last week in preparation to start grad school this fall, and finally cracked out some “real” a

rt on it today. Weirdly I was inspired by Emily Blunt’s emo grungy look in Sunshine Cleaning. Which is especially fun after just having seen her years later in A Quiet Place (fave movie of 2018 hands down.)

Then one of my former students wanted a drawing so I finally did one for her today of a happy cat eating a sandwich!! Whee.

Art!, Ryan & Me

of nothing at all

mary v.

Originally a follow-up to a digital attempt to make an image of me and my husband out of the Walk the Moon One Step lyrics, this kind of just morphed into a celestial space adventure painting that’s all purples and washes.

Definitely didn’t notice till I pulled it up on here that I lazily did not line up the right top piece with the rest of the scans but…whatever, not crucial image there.

I love the see through shirt and the depth of the wash down by Ryan’s feet. And I love our faces, they’re so cute. Because my arms looked so pure and shit I didn’t end up adding my tattoos; they probably would have gotten blurry and gross.

 

Art!, Sun-Walking, Writing!

beg

mary v.

 

The rewrites of Sun-Walking have been going well. ^_^

 

There are a few awkward places here and there, so far mostly in Wind-Running, where I’m not sure if I should take pieces totally out or rework them entirely still, but Wind-Running is definitely better than it was at its birth.

This was a new addition to a scene in there that I’ve been really stuck on since then today.

 

I just finished “Daughters of the Storm” by Kim Wilkins and it was the best book I’ve read in ages. Unfortunately, much like the last few books I’ve read except for “The Hazel Wood,” it hit me with a surprise THIS IS THE FIRST IN A SERIES! in about the last 20 pages. I just don’t like being tricked. It wasn’t indicated anywhere on it that it was going to be a series. Most things wrapped up except for two arcs so I was like sweet okay and then it slams me with a “AND NOW IT’S TIME TO DO THIS” and “AND NOW THIS DRAMA” and I’m like ………………….. at what point do I just have to accept that series are a part of fantasy and I need to just read them anyway. Probably at the point when I get a new bookshelf. :/

Sun-Walking, Writing Journey, Writing!

i saw your face & hands covered in sun

mary v.

I resolved while talking to some patients a few days ago that I would take some time off from video games to focus on producing art. It helped that on Sunday I got to buy 3 books for my birthday on a trip out with my parents and husband. So all I’ve been doing on my “weekend” is reading, creating, sleeping, and chores. Good times. The only shame is that I’m not into coffee right now. *tear*

Anyway, so Sunday night on my way home from work I got seriously into “Don’t Take the Money” by Bleachers, and as I was sitting at my art desk Monday morning wondering what to draw, I got a vision from the line

Till I saw your face and hands covered in sun and then
I think I understand

and I was like OOH what if I did shafts of sun/shadow on LUCY BECAUSE LIGHT AND STUFF

Needless to say, when I tried the “shafts” part it looked very harsh, bruise-like, and stupid, so it evolved into a more straightfoward light source but with some still fabulous, layered shading and tone transitions. I had her have like this shawl thing draped over one shoulder originally that the more I tried to work with the more I was like -___- I hate, so eventually I was like … this piece is nothing except risk after risk, so I sliced off her whole shoulder and went for some good ol’ fashioned taping a fresh sheet of paper under the rip. I ended up loooving the kind of abstract, sunset shape of her shoulder in the new part.

I find myself very stuck on Sun-Walking. Lucienne feels like my quiet, best friend of a conscience, making me brave and anchored. I put myself to sleep by drifting off into Helios and Agaar. It’s peaceful, it’s centered. It’s a whole world, with a fearsome, loving couple at its helm. I wish I knew what to do with my persistent passion for this project. I keep rereading the manuscript. It’s good. It’s really solid. It’s worth coming back to again and again, and at this point it doesn’t even need any major revisions. So like, at what point do I just gather myself and send off some queries again? I don’t know. The world has become so sacred to me I almost don’t dare to try to push it into the public eye. I don’t want it violated by anyone. At the moment then I suppose I’m just very happy to have Helios and Lucienne to slip away with in the middle of the night, and to be able to continue to draw inspiration from all the themes of the book.