Art, Heart & Words
Worth publishing, but incomplete – I was working on this blog entry and scanning a large painting with my newer scanning software, paused for dinner, and then after dinner, my waters broke and I went to the hospital to have a baby! So…a bit distracting, the whole week is gone now!
Ryan and I became parents on August 27 at 3:30 in the afternoon to our magical boy Ronan Mylo. The three days since then have been quite a roller coaster. I obviously haven’t been doing any art, but I’m gearing up! :3
I am 37 weeks pregnant! That means our little boy might be joining us any day now and we’ll welcome him with all our love and cuddles and it’s gonna be CRAZY. On my drive home today (I seem to do a lot of art planning on the way home from work) I decided I needed to do kind of a “last drawing” of us before we’re parents.
I think it captures the sentiment I’ve held for most of this pregnancy (ugh mostly), and Ryan’s sheer “I can’t fix it but I know you’re miserable” support.
I was also working on a Micah painting but it slowed down a lot since I started it last weekend so I decided to just save and post the incomplete sketch/painting. His face was turning out a bit weird anyway. It’s really that extended hand that made me even work on it for as long as I had. Perfection.
The slice of yellow was gonna be a highlighter but I redid his whole shirt and hadn’t gotten back to it yet haha.
Last weekend at work I was so bored I grabbed some 8×14 paper and did some pen drawings that I’ve been meaning to scan since they turned out pretty cool. But I have to scan them in and, lazy.
I mean honestly Ryan and I were in our best friends’ wedding this last weekend and that made all last week pretty fucking busy.
I’m also being cut a $3900 check from my insurance company for hail damage to my car, so Ryan and I are gonna both upgrade our computers! It’s just a matter of whether we can make our choices and get the check soon enough to have them before our son comes, haha.
State Fair on Friday – then baby can come!
On my husband’s birthday my Timehop was like 4 years in a row of fanart of the two of us and then when I was on my laptop working on his toast card, I fell down the rabbit hole of our whole folder of fanart and found this gem.
You can always tell how far along we were in our relationship based in part on how many tattoos we had, and definitely on the tone of the drawing. Am I still trying to impress him with being all cutesy but also, fancy pro art? We were probably actually really struggling at the time so I’m going to write encouraging things on art for us in hopes we will somehow be led to believe it? Yes, this one was probably the latter, haha. And without really knowing to what extent I would get into it, I decided this particular one needed a reprise.
And…voila.
I think I ended up spending two or three days on this one? I really really love it, except in the earlier draft I was snoozing with a little o mouth and that was why my eyes were closed. Now I look much more peaceful than I am, but we can pretend it’s general exhaustion, which is usually accurate.
I think my favorite part is the tiny kitty prints in my belly. And also Ryan’s silky smooth looking skin.
In other news, today marks 100 days until the due date for our little dude! Whether he comes that day, or hopefully before, or hopefully not after, 100 days until the day we were told about months ago when we really weren’t sure what to expect on this pregnancy journey (we’re still not).
After my semester ended and my daily digital drawings project came to a close, I felt a little void and wanted some new motivation to keep doing art regularly. So Ryan suggested another 100 days project like before our wedding, only this one would be up until our baby (should be) born. Since it’s following a fairly specific and limited project from the semester, I decided my only rule for this project is that I do a drawing more or less daily. Whether it’s an ongoing painting, a doodle in the margins of my school notes, or an unrelated cat comic like today, I’m marking the days until this baby is due by just being creative. I think I want to write the baby a note each day, but I don’t know if I’ve figured out how to document that quite yet. I’ll write today’s note, and then figure out how to tack it to the drawing when I have a full day off tomorrow.
That’s all I got! The cat comic I did today is posted on my art Insta account!
You know it’s really hard going into it to wrap your head around what you can expect throughout the whole course of being pregnant. 40 weeks is a long time. You grow a baby over the course of most of a year. And since I got pregnant right before the new year, it really is the cornerstone of the whole year of 2019 for me.
There’s a lot of moments to enjoy, and it’s great having so many people surrounding me to support me and listen and take care of me (usually anyway). My husband has been amazing x infinity hands down, patiently yelling at me when I complain about my daily changing body, planning activities for us after our son is born, and not giving me too much shit when I want to eat disgusting amounts of food (this week’s legacy was a double cheeseburger with a large shake – from a SECOND fast food restaurant).
But there are also lots of moments, more so right now that I’m looking pregnant, I’m feeling my son move everyday, and the summer is quickly flying by to where my son is coming in just about 3 months…where I’m just pretty scared.
Things should be feeling MORE real by now, and they probably honestly are…which is what makes them so scary. With the internet, and just…people giving you unsolicited opinions literally at all times in all situations, there are just a lot of big scary things that can happen to a baby. They probably WON’T, but when all you’re doing is waiting and waiting, it’s hard not to imagine many worst case scenarios sprinkled into the good daydreaming.
Obviously you can’t spend nine months in a state of perpetual excitement and optimism. Obviously there are days when I feel sorry for myself for gaining weight, or being sore, or having an anterior placenta. Unfortunately, those have been most days for me at the moment. I can’t help it. I’m naturally anxious when I’m waiting for things, and when people ask me how I am I feel guilty that I’m basically perfectly normal right now honestly. We got a lot of preparation for baby out of the way a month or more ago, and a lot of it is going to wait a month or so until the baby showers start happening.
The good news, and always, always, always the bottom line is that the only person I’m really in this together with is my husband. Always just him. Nothing else, or anybody else really matters, ultimately.
And luckily for me, my husband is AWESOME. He patiently yells at me when my self-esteem gets low (it’s almost always low right now), he doesn’t judge me when I get whiny, and he is so totally up for being a dad. What it comes down to is just putting one foot in front of the other, doing life together on the days when everything feels normal, and fighting through the days that feel terrible and scary because all I can do is wait and I’m hormonal and scared and frustrated.
I can only hope our little boy grows up with my husband’s calm in his head, and his deeply loving nature.
k, /endsap
Hooray! My surgery is over – it’s been 6 days already! – and baby is sounding as sturdy as ever in me. I’m 14 weeks and 1 day today! We bought our first onesie over the weekend (my blessed mom gave me a boxful of baby things at 5 weeks when we told them. I’m looking forward to investigating that again now that I’m not dreading the wait to a “safe” time).
And Saturday afternoon, we finally became social media official!
I would say sadly the image itself went a little under-appreciated. I could have posted a onesie with a cat in the picture and people would have given it the same attention. But it’s fine, I think it turned out super cute. And I actually totally redid it; I had a draft done for weeks and then restarted on Thursday. Understandably this turned out wwaaaayyyy better. I’m getting some airbrush shading practice in after avoiding it for most of the beginning of my digital art days. Between this, and buying some stuff, I’m finally starting to believe this is all real!
And the last, but certainly not least dramatic thing…my cyst is out. I lost 10lbs. I look pretty different (except when baby starts to get me all bloated). The more I’ve thought about, the more I realize I’m not “shocked” per se because, like, there was a part of my brain I think this whole time that knew something was wrong with my stomach, and knew this is what I was always supposed to look like. When I pined after a body type, it wasn’t stick thin or big boobs it was just…me, minus the cyst. Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t think I have fully conceptualized what I look like. I’ve gotten no photos and I can’t wear anything tight yet because it hurts my incisions. And tomorrow I have to take the steri strips off it; that’s like phase 3 (the last phase) of healing and I’m sure it’ll result in a new type of discomfort for a day or a few.
As expected, the most difficult part to figure out about, honestly, a lot of it is the combination of baby vs. cyst. I just hit the 2nd trimester and any time now baby’s gonna be popping out of my pelvis. So, what’s left of my belly, is it baby? Is it flab? Is it, as my husband insists, leftover skin from the sudden absence of a 10lb, foot-long cyst? I’m not gonna know for pretty much a year. I’m glad the cyst is gone, but it’s bittersweet that I don’t know how to enjoy how I look now or how long I’ll even look this way.
A little more burst of creativity today! Had to honor me and my amazing husband who is literally my rock and my best friend and keeps getting more and more amazing the longer we’re together.
With some Fall Out Boy lyrics of course! This is one of the songs I got him obsessed with, too.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I have definitely ghosted a bit on my art life. I have had some serious holiday blues this year and it’s made it really hard to focus on any creative projects. Basically every day for the past two months or so I have been trying to come up with a creative story idea to either do as a graphic novel or a normal novel and literally just nothing has come of it. None of my themes ring true and any serious soul searching themes I have are honestly just a bit too heavy to get into yet as they are all just kind of still happening and I’m not ready to confront them. So I’ll keep trying every day till something bursts forth basically.
My digital art has been really really dry. I feel like I keep drawing the same person with the same colors over and over. It doesn’t mean anything or make me feel anything so usually what I do is save it as a lame sketch and move on unaffected. This is kind of the issue I guess with not having a story. I feel so inspired when I’m writing about new people doing whimsical things. When I’m not I feel dishonest when I draw some random person doing something mundane usually with a coffee cup. But the inspiration literally just doesn’t come right now.
Naturally in times of trial I turn towards Ryan for inspiration, so I ended up painting us a Christmas card and I think it’s pretty cute.
Here’s some uninspired hand sketches.
Half a drawing called “When there’s only the dark side.”
A sketchy painting from work.
A sketch from showers time at work.
