#014

Listening Music.

As I write this, I listen to the words of Pink Floyd, and everything’s cool as a Minnesotan lake. This week was another week, full of life. I received a haircut, enjoyed the company of friends, and celebrated the new year. 2024 was a good year, I feel, and I will look back on it with fondness down the road. 2025, on the other hand, is hidden behind the mist of the future, mysterious and unknown. I intend to celebrate the first birthday of this blog, and to continue into future years, bringing art to the block. Hopefully I won’t run out of old art to give you when I haven’t had the time for something new.

The Art

For the art, I present a short, four-page comic I made for an online comic-making course. It was okay, and I enjoyed the idea, but it was tedious work. Incidentally, this course was taught by Albert Monteys, the artist and writer of Universe!, a collection of short science fiction stories, who soon came to be a favorite artist of mine. On this project I discovered that I prefer analogue to digital when it comes to drawing and inking the comics, how to scan the art into the computer and onto my iPad, and that coloring is boring. I had better get used to it. I had fun designing my characters, especially the main bot, but perhaps could have done more for the background. As I look back, I see how much my style has developed since then. For instance, I prefer a marker to a brush tip; at once I get both more control and more chaos. This was sketched with a photo-blue pencil, which is just an expensive light blue colored pencil. Then I inked using brush-tipped markers, and colored on procreate. Not a bad job for a first time.

The Notebook

For a secret Santa gift exchange I received a leather-bound notebook, free of ruled lines and made of quality paper. With it came a fountain pen and two brush markers, metallic green and blue. Over my many years spent writing in notebooks, I have discovered that if I attempt to dedicate one notebook to one purpose, that very collection of lined paper bound by metal spiral will wind up collecting dust in a drawer somewhere. I have over half a dozen as I write doing just that. This is mostly universal. One handmade leather journal is full of dreams, recalled and written down over months, another half full waiting for more dreams to make the roster. Another is reserved for when the toils and worries of life become too much, I inscribe the coffee-stained paper with my woes until they woe me not. As it stands, that one is only half full as well. For this newest addition, I will not assign any one duty, but allow it to be a catch-all for ideas, DM plotting, and diary. There is nothing quite like a fresh new book, ready for the pages to marred with my messy writing. The feeling is exhilarating.

Fare Thee Well

As we embark into the new year, I pray that all five of you currently reading this would get off your patooties and tell your friends about this blog. Honestly, I also need to get off my respective patootie and get to work advertising, or this isn’t going anywhere. I hope you all have a wonderful week, and enjoy the art given above.