Vlog! - Career Zine Inks and Panini Woes (Patreon)

Another vlog, this time I recorded my process of inking the Career Zine and speak a bit about managing depression and quarantine. To be honest this one is a bit of a downer, so if you're feeling fragile please take care of yourself and maybe watch it on mute <3 I looked inside and I just don't have anything else to say, so I wanted to honour my truth of the moment. Take care everyone!

**Transcript**

Hey everyone, time for another little vlog update! This has been a surprisingly difficult month. I’ve been suffering the effects of depression a lot more acutely in the last few weeks, it kind of snuck up on me. I’ve been trying to figure out what happened, and as it usually is with mental health, it’s a combination of things. On the one side, a few “whoops, this is urgent” things popped up in my personal life that took energy I hadn’t planned for, and as a result I wasn’t able to do my usual “sanity maintenance” work. On the other side, I think I’m psychologically reacting to the change in seasons.  I was braced for winter to be really, really hard… and it was!... so when it started to look and feel like “spring” my brain had a funny release kinda reaction to it. Like, finally I can release all this tension I was holding.

The second thing that has really been getting me down is that we’ve entered what I’ve called the “Doublethink Days” -- especially here in Canada, where we’re bombarded with US News and Media. For those who maybe aren’t up to speed with the Canadian situation - we’re all still in lockdown pretty much across the board, and due to not having domestic vaccine manufacturing, we haven’t been able to get enough doses here yet. Best anyone is willing to promise is “September” with some vague notion of “mmmmaybe July” for most of us younger normies getting our first shot. So that meant (up to) another 6 months of lockdown. But then today it just got bumped up to “May/June” for me so who knows.

Meanwhile the tone of our news (and US news) has shifted to this super-optimistic positive kind of vibe about the vaccine and how great it is. I’m so so happy that my friends and family in the US are getting the vaccine - I’ve been worried as heck about y’all - but holding onto “wow they got the vax, that’s great” and “hm I’m locked in for 6 more months” at the same time is what has me getting that Doublethink feeling. Materially nothing has changed for me, and I still don’t know when it might. It’s as hard as it has ever been to endure quarantine, it affects me just as much, and if anything it’s even MORE dangerous than ever out there because of the caseload and variants.

On top of this is a kind of lingering dread about “going back to a normal”. I have this fear that suddenly expectations are going to “snap back” to where they were, and we’ll be given zero chance to process and recover from losing a whole year of our lives. It already feels like the world’s patience is eroding, and expectations are starting to stack up again. Not to mention that we’ll be going back to a “normal” that was already really hard (at least for me). We have lots of other issues to contend with that still need to be addressed, and the effects of the pandemic are going to linger for a long time (whether society acknowledges it or not).

So yeah. Going through the Pandemic Anniversary has me fixating on everything that has been lost or changed. What I missed, what I may or may not have access to in the future (and when). Having still so much uncertainty and absolutely ZERO control over the most important factor in my health and options (getting vaccinated) has made me feel very disempowered.

As a result I put a lot of energy this week into taking back control over whatever I COULD affect. Cleaning up, getting my Sanity Maintenance activities back up to snuff. Making progress on endless paperwork.

So then, art. A lot of this activity and listlessness displaced art and I feel like I haven’t been able to make a ton of progress this month. Even this vlog is a bit late because I just couldn’t function well last weekend (when I ought to have been putting this together). Despite this I’m feeling fairly optimistic about where I’m at art-wise. I have a good spate of projects that I’ve been steadily moving forward bit by bit, and starting to release little tid-bits here and there has been really nice.

In this video hopefully you’ll be seeing some result of my learning about Clip’s vector inking tools. Whenever you see a green highlighter, that’s me using something called “thicken path”. I used to spend literally hours painstakingly adjusting lineweights so it would be proper and consistent throughout a page, and now what was a really tedious process I can do at least twice the speed. The other tool I’ve started using from time to time is called “vector erase” which magically deletes a path wherever it crosses with another segment. This opens up a lot of really fluid intersecting lines with nice tapered weights… it’s hard to explain in words, but getting lines to cleanly intersect like this used to (again) involve a lot of tedious detail work that was exciting for no one. It’s something that’s not even possible with physical inking, either, so it’s nice to leverage the software in this way.

I’m loving digital inking, which is a miracle because it’s my favourite part of the process and it took me so long to learn how to adapt my process to the cintiq. I’m grateful that I invested in new tools, upgraded hardware and software, I think it’s really starting to pay off.

Other projects I’ve been working on I’m starting to get anxious about finishing “in time” for lockdown to end. I have about ten sketchbooks left to thin out and re-bind, I haven’t finished sorting through old photos, but at least I feel like I’ve made some progress on my yoga practice.

Are there any projects you’ve done this last year that you’re really glad you had time to dig into? Are there any that you’re worried you won’t be able to wrap up in time? I don’t think anyone should feel anxiety or regret over what they did or didn’t do -- surviving is enough -- but I think it’ll still be interesting to see what everyone got up to during this weird time.