Sketch Dump (Patreon)

There are piles & piles of metaphorical sketches that I never post, because they seem like garbage to me.  It's very difficult for some artists to share this sort of thing, but sometimes you end up with so many failures that you don't have any actual content.  Failed experiments are just part of being an artist, trying to learn.  I am largely self taught because most of America doesn't take art seriously, so the teaching of it is lacking almost everywhere.  I also came up in a time when teachers were terrified of the oncoming digital age & how it was going to leave them behind.  So I didn't have access to resources until I was well into actually making my comic, learning as I went.  The problem with that is that it made me focus on very specific skills & gave me very little time to expand my range.  I basically started learning to draw, almost from scratch, at 30.  Drawing on a tablet is not totally unlike paper, but it's just enough unlike it that you have to learn differently.  Not as much now, but ten years ago it was so different it may as well have been a completely different skill set.  My original tablet wasn't a screen, but more like a mouse pad.  It had a drawing area roughly the size of a postcard.  So I was looking at a screen, basically using a modified mouse to draw, which was a huge disconnect.  The range of movement was also so restrictive it made it insanely difficult to get the motion you learn with actual pencils or pens.  That's why a lot of the early pages are so cut and paste.  Once I drew something right once I didn't want to do it again unless I had to.  Of course that sort of thing was incredibly common even in traditional comics.  Tracing, cut & paste, or just outright reuse of panels is something most people will not notice unless you call attention to it.  Basically my style now is a frankenstein of my original style and every time saving trick I learned before I got an actual screen to draw on.  It's weird and stilted and I'm perpetually fighting with it.  Getting the Surfaces made it much more like traditional drawing, but of course I had spent a week in the hospital & fallen behind, so I wasn't able to capitalize on the upgrade.  Then it happened again.  It's like running on a wheel where someone throws shit at you to mess you up, but the wheel doesn't stop if you do.  You just roll along until you get your feet under you again.  Sometimes I get overwhelmed to the point of near breakdown, but I never do because I'm so acclimated to disaster at this point.  It has been rough, & it's going to get worse at some near time in the future.  My maternal grandparents are reaching the end of their lives & when they do it will be... Utter.  My father is also in his 70s now &, as we all know, tomorrow is not promised to you.  I probably shouldn't be talking about this here, but I can't talk about it just out in the open because my family is hyper alert to everything now.  I dunno...  It's almost 3 AM & I wanted the feeling of safety I briefly get when I post something here.  The idea that I'm offering more & what I do is of value helps me sleep.  

Like, these specific images are just a set of eyes for in case I need to draw other expressions.  They rarely come up but I'm always trying to make the eyes look better.  The next one is drawing characters in a wildy different style.  Doing stuff like that makes you have to work to understand what makes a character look like themselves.  It's easier with Carol because she has a very basic face, but Thomas requires a lot more fiddling around with.  That last two are something else.  I didn't set out to draw Jo, but I gave the sketch her face kind of on accident.  But when I tried to ink it with those porportions my brain rebelled completely.  It was like no, no, no.  Don't do that, that's not right.  Which doesn't happen if I set out to break the rules.  Something about this time as an accident was incorrect.  All I really needed to do was just change the head & it would've stopped I expect.  I was just going to show the inked part, but I think the saga has some merit in the tell.  It's not like I don't break the rules of my characters all the time, but the context in which I do it matters to me.  Is it silly to be that way?  I don't know.  I am that way though & I have to live within the boundaries of that reality.  

I should go to sleep now, but I probably won't.  Not right away.  I'm feeling uneasy & it's going to take a while, even after this, to wind that down.  So here is a collection of things for you to use to know me better.