3/25/23-I'm regular!

Hi! I'm medicated again now so I think I'm beginning to get into a better place like I want to as spewed in my last blog post. I'm up to organizing something that I think will be cool and good for me, my friends, and you, the viewer! Aside from that though-I'm very busy...

Like with the fact that I'm visiting my girlfriend next month! I know it's really stereotypical to make the long-distance lesbian pilgrimage but I'm really excited to. :). I'm also working on a sort of funny crochet project...the blanket in the background of Walter White's house! Yes! It's a super simple granny square pattern but that's exactly why it's been a nice low-pressure project for me. I'll put pics up here when I'm done. That's all I have for now, stay safe and have fun everyone :P

3/15/23-YES I AM A SCHIZO

Lately, I've been trying to develop a framework with which to compartmentalize and view how I experience fear because it is a feeling that, to this point, has controlled my life. and why shouldn't it? it's a feeling programmed into us to make us aware and keep safe...but obviously that goes wrong all the time. there are these faults within every single brain that sometimes get grit in them, water, other miscellaneous particulate, radiation, stabbed and wedged with a crowbar, etc. that widen these faults into something greater than is useful. It's also not useful to lament this too greatly which brings me to my point of the fact that I need to develop this personal "fear theory" in order to accept a lot of the things that are holding me back; including the formed topologies/connections in my brain that I am going to have to live with forever-like the tried and true schizautism combo

without delving too much into unnecessary personal detail, those two things specifically (and it is known that they are correlated so this is a fairly obvious conclusion to come to, but regardless) affect the way i think on a very basal level and i am aware of it. they shape both my internal thoughts and my external world and any combination of the two thereof! being aware of it really fucking blows though. with awareness comes self-awareness which then dives quite steeply down and plunges, with hair precision, onto the spike of self-consciousness. which i have far too much of!

i have spent my entire "online art career" as much as it makes me want to shrink away into a gelatinous pile of meat to say that, being self conscious! extremely self aware that i am not at the level of my peers-i don't draw cutely enough, my subject matter doesn't match my surroundings, my skills don't align with popular values, etc. etc. the list goes on and would clog the fuck out of this without getting to the point. so i've spent a fuckton of time, wasted, trying to compensate for those things! it's completely stripped me of my own individuality because i had been taught and shown from a young impressionable age that i needed to blend in and try to be like everybody else or the world was going to tear me apart, leave me unemployable and homeless, and render me a useless thing to get picked at and on at best. which is scary! it makes me afraid!

this has permeated my art and still does now. every single thing i do with my art is calculated and hesitant even now-it's still massively influenced by the drive i feel to fit in so i can make enough money to scrape by because i feel like if i just stop this i will lose everything. which isn't much. 2000 followers on tumblr, 1600 on twitter, limited reach and undercharged commissions. but it's all i have to share what i do and try to scrape up income as someone who is very disabled. the pressure i feel to conform and appeal to people is so immense that i actively stop myself from doing the things that i think i really want to deep down because it goes directly contrary to what i have proven to myself is "necessary" for my own self preservation. and this sucks ass severely

i don't really have an answer or a solution to figure this out right now. but i'm working on trying to figure out what i need to do to let myself exist without this overwhelming fear that is killing me from the inside out. trying to have faith that working towards "showing my true colors" will not land me in deep shit. i don't want to be afraid of art anymore because that's fucked up. it's not my fault that i'm put together differently than others and it's not my fault that it's frowned upon and alienated despite being a natural variance in Being A Real Thing.

if it does ruin me to outwardly look schizophrenic then so be it-at least it would have been me living more honestly and without so much unnecessary fear

12/28/22-EW, FEELINGS

As the new year approaches, as it does to many others, the tick from 2022 to 2023 has me in a grip of socially-obligated self reflection! But, this is okay, because it's good to reflect. I'm choosing to do that in a blogging format because I'm a shutin and mostly just sitting around sniveling waiting to clear covid. I don't have a clean way to segue into what I want to talk about and I'm not going to pretend that I do.

As I label myself fairly often and consistently as an independent cartoonist I find myself with a stark absence of actually producing works I would consider to be cartoons! This is somewhat disappointing! Of course, I am not working with the modern common usage of "cartoon" to mean "that animated shit what on cartoon network and nickleodeen" but instead to mean illustrations, comics, etc. other vaguely sequential work in the spirit of what cartooning means to me. There's not a right or wrong answer to what constitutes this, objectively, but objectivism defeats the point of artwork, no? It comes as a surprise to nobody who's ever seen my work or spoken to me for more than a moment that I'm extremely inspired by, specifically, cartooning and the culture surrounding it during the 90s, and the bleedthrough and mingling of that into the aughts succeeding. While the inspiration may be obvious, I feel as though the work I create and share still lacks a lot of the honesty and other miscellaneous minutiae of the discipline that drew me in in the first place. Objectively, (see how I'm tying it back there? see? I'm not just a rambling wacko) I truthfully do feel like I've let "modern" art conventions, eremitism, societal standards (I know), and social media sway me from my goals, and it's pretty saddening to think about.

I've always found myself most drawn to artists, and artworks, that value the power of being non-literal and display the qualities of a process intended to transliterate one's experience of the world into a medium that has the potentiality to encapsulate a variety of feelings, thoughts, ideas, concepts, and other words for the same shit. Works that show thoughtfulness beyond the traditional tenets of proper execution and has a line of thought to follow; the things that you can look at and see that someone made, and why they made the choices present, irregardless of the technical integrity of the end product. This isn't to say that those who focus on principles such as, (and I only use quotation marks here in order to express my own distaste for the rigidity placed upon these terms in common discussion) "anatomy," or "flow," are a bunch of sellout chumps. Some are, but so are some of every subset of people. Covering my ass from angry tweens who earnestly use the term "content creator" aside, the qualities I find most enrapturing about art, I find missing in my own! Because I am a bitch. Who does not listen to myself and what I actually care about. Which is a bitch thing to do, don't you think? Cartoonists do tend to be bitchy by nature, but I believe that I'm doing it in the wrong way.

Children's art, naive art, "outsider art," and so on, is some of the most inspiring work to me out there. They aren't worried about what some dipshit on Twitter thinks about their work. They aren't worried about making sure their page looks nice. They aren't worried about being marketable! They make their stuff because it means something and it largely ends there. Visual interest is present throughout despite this! One of my favorite examples of this is Tomokazu Komiya's pokemon card art:

There are tons of these and I always like stumbling on ones I haven't seen before. Looking at this one, you can see quite a few elements that people tend to pick out as in poor practice or mistakes: Asymmetrical eyes, wobbly lines, stroke-y coloring, oblong shapes, inaccurate local color, less-than-perfect composition, etc...But it remains interesting to look at! For me, at least. I don't care about all of the things I just listed because that is not the point of the piece. The point of the piece is that Ledyba is sad and hiding! And it conveys that perfectly! AND in a way that's interesting. The neon yellows contrasted against navy blue, the shading of Ledyba's yellow and red parts with blue-green hues, the white outlines, how dark Ledyba's red is compared to, say, an official Sugimori piece, are all still uses of "color theory" albiet not in the way that like, a DeviantArt tutorial would tell you to. There is "anatomy" present in the simplicity of Ledyba's body and limbs, there's "flow," and so on.

Not only that, but I love this stuff so much because you can actually see the choices made. I find myself bored with conventionally created artworks that value consistency because it's no fun to look at from a creative standpoint. Every line, every color, every special effect, is predictable in an innumerable amount of works I've seen. Yes, there is the point to be made that some things are more inherently pleasing to the human eye, and I agree with that! But, just like in music, visual repetition and predictability gets old and grating after a while. With the Ledyba, I get to pick it apart, like disassembling a...something or other, and seeing how the pieces interconnect and what job they do in the grand scheme of the piece, in their own instance of usage and their specific context. I get to see the choices made! I get to see that there was blue mixed underneath the head to shade it, and then stark black and white to create contrast and definition, without regard to how neat or smoothly it was applied, because being neat and smooth is not the point of the depiction. Scanning the piece remains fun! The inversion effect outside of the spotlight renders the piece looking flat, but, who gives a shit about that? The percieved depth of the ladybug is inconsequential to the fact that it looks cool and is visually interesting. I can't keep talking about this pokemon card because my blog entry is not about pokemon.

The point, of that whole spiel, is my attempt to demonstrate the things I value and want to emulate because it's...valuable to me. That's pretty easy. The hard part is actually doing this. I can ramble on and on about a number of different artworks that I think are beautiful and make an excellent use of the medium to convey something meaningful or apply techniques in novel, untrained ways, and yet, I find myself stifled and unable to practice what I preach. Massive thumbs down. I look at my art and see refinement designed for consumption instead of fun! Quick satisfaction and easily digestible information as opposed to inciting thoughtfulness! Stupid shit instead of interesting garbage! I have learned to think, perhaps not too much, but in the wrong direction, that works directly contrary to my values and personal philosophy.

I want to make graphic, messy works; cartoons, even, dare I say, that take more than a quick glance to process and absorb. Predictability, again, is nigh impossible to escape, but I can sure as hell try to make people have to look at me, and what I do, with a different eye than some of the other mass-marketed billion dollar slog out there. I've let myself become easy. With everything that I have experienced in my life, (insert sob story here) I think the least I've earned is to present a challenge to the rest of the world in turn! I need to grow a spine! A strange, gnarled, weird spine, that sort of resembles a dog, or a funny face, or something else entirely, and then make everybody else figure out what the fuck it is. Novelty, sentimentality, communication, translation, and, and, and, and...you get the gist, is what I'd like to achieve with my cartooning, and I really need to step up and actually do it. There are other people in the world who already have soullessness covered and in excess. I don't need to continue to do it to myself just because I've been told it's the only way. I need to step up my contrarianism!

This all being said, my specific goals mostly include becoming more earnest and to actually loosen up technically! Imagine seeing someone who wants to get worse at art! You've seen it! That's not really true. I just think I've become boring and repetitive. Caring less about doing the "right" things and instead just focusing on what I think is most effective, and, even more importantly, fun, I'm confident, will lead me to making more and better work. Here's to trying to force 2023 to take me in that direction!

tl;dr: Threeo's gotta loosen the fuck up, and he will. Cheers

10/25/22-I LOVE TO MAKE THINGS SHITTY FOR MYSELF

Recently I started a new big crochet project against my better judgement! It's the "Patchwork Persuasion Afghan" (links directly to the pdf hosted by them) by Lion Brand and it's making me wish I was dead just a little bit. But I have to power through it all! To have a cool blanket!

09/27/22-THE CONCEPTION OF THE BLOG

I downloaded FFXIV and made one of those little guys and her name is Sal Slaughterhouse and my concept for her is that she's doing some sort of wrestling persona bit 24/7. Thank you. Here's a picture of her.