Okay, I lied. Actually I just wanted to see if I could do this. I like to say that I have five “hands” that I can manipulate things with. Basically, that would be my two hands, my two feet, and my mouth. I can open doors and pick up stuff with all of them, but can I use them to draw? Well looky here.

Kinda?

Right hand – Plain Vanilla, basically.

Left Hand – Like the right… only crappier!  I was kind of afraid to drag my hand through the ink, though.

Mouth – I like font that my mouth draws.  It’s all like rounded but angular.  But the drawing just kind of sucks.

Right Foot – In which the ear beomes a nose and people resemble evil sheep-elves.

My mouth tastes funny now.  I did the mouth picture directly after the foot picture.  Maybe I should have washed the pen off first.

I did a drawing today. It came out fairly decent, but I’m not going to ink it because that would ruin it. The inspiration was a manhwa called Peter Panda, which I would recommend if you’re looking for a coming of age series that starts out fairly normally and then quickly goes completely insane. It had some excellent characters in it, though. Plus, a concept behind the Peters was very similar as one of my characters that never saw fruition.

If you think you know who this character is, you are mistaken, unless you’ve read through my sketchbooks, which is unlikely.  It’s not Ki.  It’s Match, who is like Ki except he doesn’t technically exist outside of one character’s mind’s imagination.  Not the character’s imagination, the imagination of character’s mind.  Which totally would make sense at least half-way if I explained it throughly, but I don’t feel like it.  I will say that he’s the only character of mine that I would term as Consistently and Disturbingly Insane.

I also am planning on remaking something I made in Middle School.  It was something I called a body pillow, but was really just an huge mattress stuffed with fiber-fil.  It was my favorite thing to sleep on until my mother decided to burn it because it was impossible to wash.  This time I’m making it more carefully, and will be making a washable cover for it as well.  I have dubbed the project as Body Pillow Futon Mk II.

I’m tempted to get rid of my bed if this works out well.  I think the bed takes up too much space.  I could totally fit a couple of bookshelves on that side of the room if I didn’t have it there.  The Body Pillow Futon Mk II is designed to be rolled or folded up when not in use, so it won’t take up much space at all, despite being larger than my bed is now.

I bought the fabric for the main pillow part today along with some batting.  I got them locally too.  I paid a quite a bit for them, but the fabric extra wide and I recieved a piece of graph paper that was covered in scribbles and had a red glitter heart stuck to it as a gift.  The shop owner’s four year-old daughter insisted it was for me.  Apparently I don’t scare kids anymore.  Go me!

My hero and role model is Don Quixote. There is no one in the world that I would rather aspire to be like than the Ingenious Hidalgo himself. His character taught me that if you look at life in a different, more optimistic perspective, see the good in people (even if you have to make it up slightly), and believe yourself to be significant, you are bound to be happy no matter what you do.

I’ll admit that it helps to keep a more Aldonza-ish degree of skepticism around at times, but only to keep yourself slightly grounded in reality. But not too much, because reality seems to be a total downer, judging by the way most “realistic” people act about it.

The picture was done with brush and ink, and took about three hours to complete. Sustenance during that time frame was provided by Pepsi and vanilla wafers. I own every piece of clothing shown, even the hat. Especially the hat.

Yesterday I was informed that I have a lot of spare time.  It was heavily implied that I had great gobs of it in fact.  Obviously, this must be true since I work in retail instead of an office.  Yes sir, I may be working a job that deals personally with customers, involves heavy lifting, and frequently consistently involves working five to six days a week and double shifts on weekends, but since I don’t work in an office management position that somehow allows me to take two ten-day vacations within three months, I must have it pretty easy.  Or someone’s bitter.  Either or.

Excuse me.  Continuous back-handed insults tend to miff me somewhat.

Anyway, what takes up this enormous amount of time I presumably have?  A plethora of half-way finished and unstarted creative projects, that’s what.

For instance, up until about 4:30 yesterday, I was trying to plan a new site design.  Now it is finished.  It involved a creative process of:

1. Realizing that I wasn’t using my web-hosting effectively
2. Buying back my old domain name back (hint: defaulthero.com will in fact lead you to the main page.  I plan on making it my main domain once my hosting runs out)
3. Trying to plan the site layout for a couple weeks (during which time I was extremely “not busy at all”)
4. Installing WordPress
5. Mucking about with themes
6. Installing a really horrible-looking theme so I would have break down and fix it (McManus was right about temporary fixes.  I use that knowledge to my advantage)
7. Amazingly getting a good idea for the design
8. Sketching a rough design late at night two days ago
9. Scanning a detail off of the design and making a vector graphic based off of it in Illustrator, also also two days ago
10. Finding a theme similar to what I was planning on making
11. Sleeping
12. Working
13. Coming home and practicing CSS wizardry
14. Checking the outcome
15. Editing
16. Repeating the previous two steps a couple dozen times
17. Examining finished product, calling it good
18. Basking in the afterglow.

All of these steps are absolutely necessary, which is why I don’t do it as a job.  The only thing that really slowed me down was babysitting an extremely noisy cat.

I’ve also been planning out and doing the blue-lines for couple inking projects.  I just need some time to sit down and actually do them.  Today would be a good day for that.  I’ve had the rough drafts for one of them already finished.  Here is just one page of those drafts:

Yeah, I still use my comic characters for something.  A couple of them actually managed to develop into decent designs, and they give me something to draw when I need.  The other inking is probably going to be done sooner than this one.  The subject matter is a surprise.

My other major (minor ones are not worth listing) project is designing a doll that I can make a lot of and dress and decorate as different characters.  I’ve got an entire list of characters that I want to make, including Genzo, Fujiki, and Yasuda from Cheeky Angel, Funabashi from A Bad Boy Drinks Tea (Basically Genzo with slightly bigger eyes and a gakuran, sans scar and dyed hair), Hamel and Raiel from Violinist of Hameln, Ida from Traveller of the Moon, Riiya from Akazukin Cha Cha, Woo Joo-In from Do You Want to Try,  Jacob Grimm and Wilbur Wright from BROTHERS, Kokonose and Kashii from Momo Tama, etc.  Basically the doll will be a generic form and fairly easy to make, but it should be able to be embellished to look like different people easily.  I know what I want it to look like, I just haven’t gotten around to making the pattern yet.  Three-dimensional sewing patterns take more effort than just drawing an outline on a piece of paper.

Webcomics – not so much.  I’m not going to make time for something I have very little inspiration for.  I occasionally come up with a some story ideas for it out of habit, but this is a project I’ve been doing and doing over since high school.  Sophmore year, I might add.  I’m not calling absolute quits on it, but I feel that it’s not worth doing in its current or previous forms. Especially when the only feedback I get for it is from relatives and friends that overpraise the generic things and totally ignore anything I think was actually of merit.

Everyone and their brother are doing webcomics now, anyway.  Having one does not make me special.  Nor does it make you special for knowing me or even being related to me.  My comic was not that great to start with, so please stop asking about every single time I mention drawing or web development on the phone.  It’s something that you honestly don’t appreciate as anything besides something someone you know did. And that someone can do better things.  I am not a one trick pony.

A couple of weeks ago I was playing Final Fantasy IV. I actually managed to get to the very entertaining “The Male Characters Suddenly Decide to Kick the Female Characters Out of the Party for No Discernible Reason” cut scene before stopping. I usually end up stopping when I get to Edge for some reason, but I managed to persevere this time, probably because my computer was non-operational.

I was also attempting to illustrate a fairy tale as a comic strip. I didn’t get very far, but I’m still working on it off and on. It was excessively gory and bawdy and delightfully bizarre, totally not the type of thing I would want to show my mother or post on a Bluehost-hosted site. It is possibly my favorite one right now, narrowly overcoming Hacon Grizzlebeard, which is about a prince that gets a princess preggers with his illegitimate child by utilizing what are possibly the smoothest moves known to the whole of mankind.

That’s why I ended up with this page in my sketchbook:

At the top are two SquareSoft-style dwarves. One is shouting the confusingly public password of the Dwarf Castle (SAY IT WITH ME!), while the other is engaged in firing his lazor.

The bottom half is the character design for the shepherd’s daughter that ends up marrying a a giant, talking snake-monster before going on the the most inexplicable adventure ever dreamed up by mashing a bunch of existing folklore themes together. The story never actually gives her a name, instead preferring to call her the shepherd’s daughter or the young queen, depending on whether she has married the prince yet in that particular stage of the story. I call her Zinnia because her most outstanding attribute is the fact that she does not wilt, not matter what strange and frightening things are occurring around her. Also, I find her to be colorful and easy to understand, which is pretty much how I feel about Zinnias. If they get too dry, they droop at bit, but after you give them water, they recover quickly and stand out just as brilliantly as before.

It also includes a messenger. I like his snark and I want his hat.

I also ended up drawing another Final Fantasy IV related page a few days later.

This is basically how I imagine a few of my characters would react if they were to get a hold of a copy of FFIV that supported multiple players, a system capable of playing it, and were made to play the character that had the closest sounding name to their own.  Ed certainly seems to be enjoying himself, even though he is far too old to be playing video games.

They’re fighting the Trapdoors, a series of irritatingly strong mid bosses that block every single door in the Sealed Cave dungeon. Those battles are button mashers because a Trapdoor can kill one of your dudes in one hit, and the only way to stop it is to beat it down really fast before it was a chance to do so. I was very much reminiscent of Ed and Cecelia when playing against one. I alternately shouting “CESSHY! CESSHY! CESSHY!”, “JUMP, KAIN! JUUUUUMP!”, “EDGE! ATTACK! ATTACK NOW!”, “STOP HAVING TURNS, ROSA! WE DON’T NEED YOU!” “RYDIA! QUAKE NOW!” “AUUUUGHH! EDGE DIED! WHEN IS ROSA’S TURN COMING?!”

The battles were extra exciting because you have to go through about 15 of these dorks before you are able to get to a save point.

I’m tired now. I’m going to bed.

Here are some of my ink drawings.  Actually, I suppose you could call them paintings, because they are done using a brush.  These were done a few months ago, back when I had the money to buy new art supplies and the inclination to use them.

All of them are of characters in my super retarded comic

If you’re wondering what I used for this, it was black and white Koh-I-Noor ink and Rosemary’s Kolinsky Sable Brushes done on really cheap Bristol.  Both the ink and brushes are things that are far too nice for my skill level.  Both are also things that are just sitting in a chest in my apartment.  I really should use them again.  Otherwise the money I spent was pretty much wasted.