**arseniclullaby X-mas Bomb Shelter is Open***
***STARTING FRIDAY…THE 2ND ANNUAL COLORING CONTEST, GET YOUR CRAYONS READY!***
Yeah, I bet you wanna know what you’ll be coloring? I’ll show you…in a minute…because I just knocked a dozen eggs on the floor. Just now, like just before spell checking this blog (the blog that originally started several paragraphs down.). A whole carton, splat. of course every single egg broke, and of course it spilled open so I couldn’t even just carefully pick up the container, pour the mess into a bowl, pick out the shell chips and try to make scrambled eggs…as if I would have bothered doing that. Eh, I might have started out trying to do that and just said F” it. Actually I would have started out doing that, made a giant mess, and ended up with a sleeve full of egg goo and been more pissed off than I am now. So it’s better this way, but it would have been nice to have the option…have a little hope. Also that would have at least meant the eggs stayed in the carton instead of in a giant gooey puddle on my kitchen floor. Damn it. This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to anybody. I know that’s not true but right now I believe it, because Life is often about expectations.
Like I said this egg disaster JUST happened…I hit “save draft” which for some reason takes forever, and got up to get something to eat. Opened the fridge and remembered I had all the ingredients for a sausage egg and cheese sandwich. I love those, I rarely have all the ingredients at once…or at once and not past expiration date…they need to start selling HALF loaves of bread. Seriously, what single person manages to finish a whole loaf of bread before it has green fur on it? Not me. So this was going to be a real treat! …no…no it wasn’t.
And of course this is laundry day so I don’t have one single clean towel to clean up the f8ckin egg mess.
So…I said screw you eggs and sat back down here and typed this out. What? What’s wrong with that? the eggs ain’t going anywhere, I’ll clean them up when I am done and have come to terms with eating a hot dog for breakfast….from the gas station…like a PATHETIC SINGLE LOSER…but hey at least there will be all sorts of Christmas music on when I go there to remind me that some people would HAVE to clean up the eggs immediately because the have kids running around…and I don’t…because i am alone…I AM ALONE, I can’t get the damn webpage to load in HTML, I have been fighting with the same damn Krampus illustration for a week and a half, and all I WANTED OUT OF LIFE WAS A F*CKING EGG AND CHEESE SANDWICH! sigh….okay, I feel better now. I’ll go clean the eggs…soon. Hey, when you are stuck on an illustration or have writers block what do people tell you to do? They tell you to walk away for a little while….well, that’s what I did with the eggs. What’s the problem? and now…after having walked away I realize this “why do I need a CLEAN towel to wipe up splattered eggs?” I don’t. I can use a dirty towel, which is about to go into the wash anyway, and get the rest with the dollar store mop that has about one use left in the sponge.
I don’t need a clean towel for this..this is quite an epiphany, like when the government decided we all needed to start using those dumbass cork screw looking light bulbs to save energy. The light bulbs cost more and I don’t believe they last longer, and even if they did, most of the time I have to get a new light bulb it’s not because it burned out. It’s because I knocked the lamp over on accident. (I knock stuff over a lot, my elbows are like magnets to any object on the edge of a table) So I was forlorn over the lightbulb thing for that reason but also because you can’t just throw them out. You have to …recycle them or something…I dunno exactly what but something inside them ain’t supposed to go in the regular garbage. Like batteries and stuff, they don’t want it in the landfill. So I was annoyed, the I realized…what difference does it make? I’m not going to do that anyhow. I’m just going to throw it out when it’s done. When I have a dead battery I just throw it out. We’ve been throwing every f*cking thing from lead paint to mercury into the landfills for a hundred years, they expect me to give a sh*t about a light bulb? No. They’re lucky I don’t grind it up and pour it down the sink. Separate a f*ckin light bulb from the rest of the trash…give me a break. THEY decided we have to use these, THEY can come and get it.
Don’t look at me like that, none of you are going to do it either. Are you going to lie to me and say that You’re going to take your single light bulb…walk it to the car…drive it to…
actually hold on…I’ll look and see what we’re supposed to do…
see this mess?
this should have been a simple tune up of a thumbnail sketch before going onto a finished Krampus illustration.
It seemed so simple. In fact last year I did two Krampuses with no trouble or much rethinking at all. Quick sketch, went over a few things…bam onto the finished piece. This f*cking one, I’ve been fighting with it for over a week. Should there be more kids? Should this kid shift over? Should that kid be bigger? What the hell is wrong with the vanishing points? The problem usually comes in where a quick sketch has all the life and energy and composition dead nuts..and then when you try to polish things up, like say make the fireplace the size it should be or give the hardwood floors the correct vanishing point, all the original flow gest jacked up. Then you are caught in a downward spiral of frustration , rethinking, and working the life right out of the bastard. AND drawing the same image 2 dozen time with variations so slight that a week later you don’t remember which one was correct anyway. f*cking maddening.
Oh and then there is a “simple” tooth fairy illustration I started in like JUNE. I work on it, get frustrated, move on, come back to it, get frustrated…repeat. the original sketch/composition was so spot on, simple, interesting, a lot of life to it..
all I needed to do was get the drawing of the f*cking fairy right.
no…that’s not right…look again, her arms are too short, her torso is too long, something is wrong with the hips. i REALLY think this could be a great poster too, plus when you get a great composition like that just fall onto your sketchpad you have to make the most of it. Inspiration mussint be wasted.
So…the fairy…
Well, I haven’t taken a life drawing class since high school, and we didn’t have any models hanging from the ceiling, so exactly how the posture would be was a f*cking mystery that refused to be solved or even look a little correct. I got to the point of going to my cousins and having her dangle from a nylon harness. ….a makeshift nylon harness, held up by another cousin, while a third cousin looked on in amusement. at that point I got the posture figured out and thought I would be home free…
NOPE, because just what the wings would look like became the next spiral of regretting even picking up a pencil. these are things that seem like someone who’s been at this as long as I have should be easy. They probably should, but they ain’t. Sure I know what wings look like, and pictures of butterflies are easy to come by, and I have pics of my cousin in the correct posture, but finding a butterfly at the same angle? so the wings and the human body seem to be attracted and along the same vanishing point? good luck.
I will freely admit to spending too much time on peripheral things in a drawing, but this is not one of those times. The wings are central to the composition. The shape of the blood splatters mimic them to add to the feeling of movement (PRO TIP- repeated lines and shapes imply movement to the brain. In comic books they use speed lines and such, that why. The More repetition, more movement is perceived. You can do it with speed lines or even the three curved lines from where the punch starts to where it ends…or you can do it more subtly like in this fairy illustration ). The wings are important, and it’s important they are believably attached to the fairy, and exist on the same vanishing points.
68 tries later and the wings still seemed off.
eventually figuring the wings out came down to this.
Gluing wings to a f*cking G.I. Joe.
This is what I do to… I glue wings to toys to draw a tooth fairy stealing teeth. Who needs a drink?
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