Another year gone by, and truth be told, I see no real reason for this blog to exist. Maybe I'll delete it. For now though, let's just make another post. I had the idea to do a step by step description of a recent painting, since I think it's probably my best work so far. I also want to give a general summary of what could by called my "creative process" at the moment, since the process itself is something I feel like has come a long way, while all the same still feeling very inefficient.

    So here was the initial sketch. This was done in July, during a time when I was mass producing lazy little drawings like this. It's pretty normal as far as that kind of thing goes, though in this case I knew immediately that I intended to properly finish it, just because of the character. The coloring was also done at the same time, just planning out the general idea of how it should look. Of course, as usual, I was preoccupied by something else, so this was placed on the backburner for a long time.

    In mid December, after completing a monstrous project, I finally returned to this one. So this is basically just continuing on the existing sketch, drawing right over it and fleshing things out. My plan at the time was to keep this one "lazy", since I had lots of similar sketches I wanted to clear out before starting anything new.

    Truth be told, I can barely remember doing most of this, even though it was just earlier this month. I only remember spending a long time on the hands and the left arm. At some point I realized that the arm needed to be raised in that manner, with the elbow pointing into the background, in order for the hand to make any sense. Of course, the arm itself doesn't really add up, but I figured I could get away with it just by hiding the elbow behind the hair. Regardless, I think it's a good change. More "active". I have a bad habit of flattening poses toward the viewer, like an Egyptian painting or something. It's still pretty flat of course, but not as much. I also wanted to add in various machinery around the border, but decided to delay it until later, and of course eventually decided to just leave it out.

    So from there I started redoing all the lineart, to make the stuff that's used in the finished drawing. What I do is reduce the opacity of the initial layer to 15% or so, then just go over the whole thing on a new layer. When it comes to this kind of thing, I really don't know what's normal. I assume most artists due something vaguely like this, but for all I know my method might be really stupid or something.

    I actually deviated tremendously from the sketch this time, mostly because my investment in the drawing had steadily increased and I no longer felt like the hair was acceptable, so I kind of revised it as I went. This was a clumsy and disorganized thing to do, but I guess it worked out. I also twisted the arm upward a little more, and realized that I actually just forgot to take the ears beyond a simple placeholder. The ears in the third image here are still in a sketch-like state on a separate layer. I postponed properly finishing them until later. The face is also still unfinished.

    I decided with this drawing that I would keep the lines relatively thin. In the past I've typically tried to use a lot of varied line thickness; however, I've begun to get the impression (partly from studying Japanese artists and partly from looking over my own shit) that if the image is going to be colored, extremely thick lines may be a mistake.

    Next I started planning the colors. In the previously mentioned monstrous project, I experimented a lot with combining green and flesh tones, and found that it can present some issues. Green and red are opposite colors, so they don't really mix properly. Here I was comparing a relatively normal color palette (on the left) with a more green suffused variant. The little circles to the left of each are the color of the hair and skin at maximum brightness or whatever. In the context of a green background, the greener tones seem much more correct to me, so that's what I went with.

    And here began an arduous process. I don't really understand painting at all. What I'm doing here is essentially just experimenting. I don't have a clear idea of what this should look like, so I just throw colors around and see what happens, with the goal of arriving at some kind of plan. If I can quickly and messily create a semblance of something decent, then I can redo it more carefully with knowledge of what I'm trying to do. I think this entire phase would be unnecessary if I was more experienced, but for now every painting is a learning experience.

    So going through these, I immediately darkened the green in the background. It just looked better to me. For the highlights in the hair I decided on this blueish green color. With the skin I just did whatever. Then all of a sudden I decided he should be lit from below, so I changed the lighting on the skin and added a brighter green to the lower half of the background. In the third image I've finally finished the ears and face. In the fourth I had the idea to significantly darken the forward arm, along with the chest and right ear to a lesser extent. Since this is a slightly weird painting where the light is ostensibly coming from behind and below, I hoped darkening the more forward parts of his body would improve the sense of depth.

    I messed with the skin some more. I think darkening the right side was correct, but it was too uniform and created the impression the character just has dark skin, rather than that area being in shadow. From there I settled on these options for the lighting on top of his head. Maybe it seems silly, but I was actually quite torn over this. I felt that in isolation, the more varied coloring in the first one was more interesting, but taking the image as a whole the simple blob of highlight looked better. If I had to guess, I think it's because the bottom of the image is already fairly busy, so making the coloring in the upper area comparatively simple creates some kind of favorable dynamic. It also contrasts with the horns and face slightly more strongly. Now, I'm not sure either of these options really makes sense from a lighting standpoint, but that's too much to worry about now.

    And from there began the even more arduous process of actually finalizing the colors. In the experimental phase, all the painting was done on a single layer. It actually felt great to paint like that, so I decided not to divide up the coloring too much at this time. In previous paintings, I've made several layers just for the hair, several for the skin, etc. This time each "main region" just got a single layer, and I just blended the lighter and darker tones freely with each other.

    Overall this was the most time consuming part, and I never really reached a point where I felt like it was truly done. I just had to decide to stop messing with it after a while. Also somewhere along the lines I moved the bellybutton.

    And finally, the last thing was the smoke. By now I was exhausted, so I didn't go too crazy with it. I also messed with the background a little more, adding some vertical streaks and an even brighter glow at the very bottom. Technically, of course, it isn't truly finished. His erect dick is supposed to be visible, but I'll probably get around to that later. I also initially envisioned him exhaling a trail of smoke as well, but I think that's more than I can manage with this one. Likewise the external area could have something going on. Perhaps machinery, perhaps just a starry night sky, but I don't think I'll bother with that either.

    Anyway, this character is really precious to me. I mentioned him before, saying that I wanted to do him justice or something like that. I don't think I have yet, but for now, I'm pleased with this work. Maybe in the future I'll determine that it's actually just terrible. That's often what happens.

    Well, it's been a year. I've been meaning to write something for a while now. Where do I begin?

    So I got a graphic tablet at the end of 2020, and my drawings have been almost exclusively digital since then. To make a long story short, this really expanded the scope of what I was willing to attempt, and over this year I've ventured into new depths of depravity. It's been overall exciting, though I've come to realize the extent to which I'm playing with fire, so to speak. Perhaps I'll go into that in more detail later.

    Anyway, the year hasn't been as productive as I'd have liked. I chased fetishism too far, started a lot of 'projects' which were overly ambitious for my skillset, and diligent practice fell by the wayside. All the same, I think it's been a needed learning experience. I've never had a hobby quite like this one.  I don't really know my best modes of operation, and this year was nothing if not experimental.

    With regards to technical things, there's almost too much to talk about, so I'm not going to get overly specific. The transition to the tablet initially came with some frustrations. I felt I'd lost a lot of rudimentary control, couldn't seem to make anything look acceptable. It's a different medium, really. I had to relearn a lot, on top of all the entirely new factors to consider.

    So here's theoretically my best work this year. At least, it's by far the most detailed thing I've ever done, and I spent the most time on it. Whether or not it was really worth it I'm not sure, but this encapsulates the theme of the year very well, so rather than ramble about all of my misadventures I'll just focus on this one.

    So what was the idea here? Well, I had been dabbling in lazy transformation sequences for a while, usually not spending more than a single day on any given one. I threw one of these onto pixiv and was pretty surprised by the attention it got. Not that it was remotely appreciable in the grand scheme of things, but I was bitten by something. A desire to do better. To see if I could get several hundred bookmarks instead of 50, etc.

    So this was to be a higher effort image set. I would spend maybe a week instead of a single day, and try some coloring. I also wanted to produce some kind of 'landmark' work for myself. Something that would flex all the skills I'd developed thus far. What I actually did was dive into a lot of things I had very little experience with. Looking back, the extent to which I overreached is pretty clear and ridiculous, but I didn't see it then. Nor did I learn my lesson immediately. I actually started several similar projects before finally taking a step back and realizing the absurdity of what I was doing.

    Then I fell into a kind of slump, having lost my direction. I also blundered into creative writing as a side effect of the overly elaborate image sets I'd been working on, and this consumed me for a few weeks. Honestly, I can't even put into words the initial feeling. My mental state at the time was unlike anything I'd ever dealt with before. I don't think I've ever been so rapidly drained of sanity. Every paragraph I wrote would take an unholy toll on me, plunging me further into that strange creative hell.

    And I haven't even fully recovered! I'm still writing, but at least now I'm enjoying it, and I feel mostly sane. It's actually extremely exciting. I can't wait to see how it turns out. Too bad it's a brand of depravity that only sewer mutants could abide, so I'll probably never show it to anyone.

    Anyway, where are things at now? I've re-stabilized. I'm drawing inklings a lot. I love them. I wanted to complete Inktober for once, drawing an inkling every day, but the creative writing spell that pervaded most of the month ruined any hope of that. Still, I think I'll just continue with that plan regardless. Nice, simple drawings of inklings. Once they're done I'll go back and visit some crazy fetishism upon them, giving some closure to this year's numerous unfinished projects. That should round things out. After that I think I have a pretty clear idea of how to proceed.

    If all goes well I think I'll write another entry around the end of the year. I thought I'd write more this time, but most of my issues are so personal and strange that I'm at a loss as to how to describe them. Life as a perverted maniac is unendingly complicated, but I'm cannibalizing my weaknesses into strengths. Or something.

    So let's just pick up where we left off. The last post ended on a hopeful note. I'd filled the green sketchbook at the end of June and was moving on to the next. Symbolically this meant a lot to me, especially with my birthday also being in June. New year, newfound motivation, ready to take on anything, etc. As fate would have it, I was stricken with the worst depression of my life in early July. I don't know what triggered it. My only guess is it had something to do with the Adderall, which by that time I was taking less and less frequently.

    I won't dwell on it too much, or the process of my recovery. For a time all of my mental "happy places" (dreams, sexuality, etc.) became mortifying to me. By the end of the month I was mostly over it. The real miracle though is that I kept drawing through it.

    So these are the sketchbooks I bought in college. Moleskine or whatever. It turns out they suck. The pages are small, overly translucent, and have this bizarre phenomenon going on where the pencil slides across the page with a scraping sound (sometimes even visibly tearing it) but leaves no graphite. I don't understand it. This happens once in a blue moon on normal paper but with these it was incessant. Anyway, I'll go through them one by one. The first one was started on July 1st and finished on August 7th. The first two weeks were slow and characterized by sickening depression. Eventually I found my usual salvation in perversion, and returned to copying catgirls and the like. There was one night where I stayed up listening to old Back2Warcraft videos (they brought me peace somehow) and just churned out 4 or 5 drawings one after the other. I'd never drawn so tirelessly before, nor have I since. After that I was back in action, and for the rest of the month focused on one artist at a time, copying them extensively.  Here's some of them (yeah I'm posting copies again).

    These are from Niwabuki, Benantoka, Hcnone. Niwabuki is a nice artist I found on twitter (probably through Shimatora) who does lots of little catgirls in loose t-shirts and tight shorts. God bless him. Benantoka is of course a legend. I found this story of his about a hermit girl and thought she was cute, so I drew her a bunch. Hcnone is another artist I found recently. I really like his colorful, simple style and find it fun to try to convert to pencil drawings. Apart from that I kept up the practice of doing at least one original thing a week and posting it to twitter.

    The second shitty sketchbook lasted from August 7th to September 13th. I was still copying Hcnone a lot at the beginning, and also got the idea to start experimenting with crayons. What I learned is that crayons are a pain in the ass.

    1 - This one's ostensibly original, but it's very heavily inspired by Hcnone's style. It was also one of the first things I used crayons on, and among other things I wasn't sure how to approach shading. I randomly tried using a darker color, pressing harder with the same color, and hatching with pencil beneath or over the crayon. I think the conclusion was that applying pencil and crayon to the same area is a bad idea, but then what do I know? Anyway, I was happy with this one. Made it my DeviantArt icon.

    2 - This is a tomatojam copy. I love tomatojam. His stuff is always fun. The original has more colors, but my box of crayons had only two satisfactory shades of green. I stretched them as far as I could. The lighter and darker areas of the hair were done with the same crayon. I liked how the shading on the stomach came out. I expected it to be imperceptible but I think the effect comes across well enough. Her pupils are fucked up though. Don't look at them too closely.

    3 - Akita Morgue copy. This is one of my favorite works from this artist. I'd been meaning to give it try for a long time. It was really difficult, there are mistakes, but it was a lot of fun and I'm overall happy with it.

    4 - Just one of the twitter uploads that I think is alright.

    5 - This is a copy, but I didn't write down the artist. This was the last thing I did with crayons before deciding they're too frustrating and I would just wait until I have a tablet to venture into color. I will say though that I like the effect you can get with crayon by mixing pink over apricot (the skin color here). Looks nice on shoulders, boobs, etc. Another interesting effect I found, but never used for anything, is that if you draw something very hard in pencil and then erase it, the crayon wax won't stick to the area where the pencil was, so it appears white through any color. Could be a neat way to do highlights or something.

    I also found a nice artist called ctrl+z toward the end of this period and fell in love with the octoboy.

    The third book took me from September 15th to October 14th. It contains my horniest drawings so far, as well as some "loomis heads" and some stuff in pen for inktober.

    1 - Kind of a rip off of the thing I used as a reference, but whatever. There are elements of this I like, but I can't help but feel there's an awkwardness to it that I can't put my finger on. This is the case whenever I try to draw inklings. Their proportions are really weird and flexible. This one is maybe too tall, but on the other hand I feel like I have a terrible habit of making characters' heads too big, so whatever. The gun thing (splatling gun?) was fun. I need to draw more wacky machinery.

    2 and 3 - For each of these the pose is pretty much lifted straight from a reference, but I turned them into Orin. The intent was vaguely Nametake style in the first one, Okiraku Nikku for the second. I like them, especially the first. Hopefully it's not just my profane love of Orin clouding my judgement.

    4 - This one will be embarrassing to talk about, but what the hell. It's an attempt to draw a character who appeared in my dreams throughout the first half of 2020 (and who was in turn based on a random drawing I did back in 2019). I mentioned in an older post that I was on antidepressants at the start of this year, and these dreams were more or less inspired by my blurry mental state at that time. Of course I'm a big weirdo for dreams, and so they started meaning something to me. Then the awful depression in July made its mark on things as well, and I've come to associate this character with sexuality and the side effects of psychiatric drugs, among other things. He means a lot to me and I hope I'll do him more justice someday.

    5 - Just a page full of dicks. I tried to study the styles of Radiohead (the genius, not the shitty band) and my idol Horihone Saizou.

    6 - What was I saying about making the heads too big? Oh well. In my defense it's hard to make the face big enough to manage any detail and still fit a proportional body on the page. Anyway, I have an extreme fetish for freckles, so I just went apeshit on this one, and gave her a big dick too. Still, a lot of restraint was exercised here. I drew several other Orins which are too embarrassing to show, as well as tons of extremely tiny ones in vulgar positions.

    7 - This is crap, but I guess I'll put it here. Pigmhall fanart. It was going to be an inktober thing but I decided it was too lazy. This is why I fail inktober, by the way. I suddenly start having expectations of quality.

    So then around the time I finished the third book I randomly drew something in MS paint. It was meant to just be a quick experiment with drawing with a mouse but turned into a crazy multi-hour project driven by the exciting new possibilities of "save" and "copy paste". The result was a real nightmare of fetishism, but it was also the most fun I've had with anything in recent memory. I saw my destiny unfolding before my eyes. I'd found my purpose in life. Or that's how it felt anyway. I put it on pixiv and a couple maniacs out there actually bookmarked it, so hopefully I made some fellow pervert's day a little brighter at least.

    Anyway, after that things slowed down. I think I was expecting horniness to guide me on indefinitely, and when it ran out I sort of lost my direction. I also foolishly started playing factorio which ate up a ton of time. I seem to be back on track now though, cranking out catgirls. Drawing is fun. I'm glad I got into it. I'll get a tablet soon and we'll see where things take us.

    The time has come for another ramble. I didn't feel like doing one at the end of May, but June has been a wonderful month, and I've got the motivation to write, so let's talk about all of it. Brace yourself, dear reader. This will be one hell of a diatribe.

    So for starters, I've finally filled this notebook with drawings. 100 sheets, apparently. There's crap from 2017 in there, just to give an idea of how long this has taken. Of course, about a quarter of it was done in June alone, and April and May's combined output makes up another quarter. I originally bought it at the behest of a psychologist to track my daily activities (or at least the productive ones) with the hope of forming a useful habit of some sort. The first page has something about cooking eggs written on it. Nothing else. That's how long that lasted. At least I know the last time I cooked eggs was October 2 of (probably) 2016.

    In any case, it was later cannibalized into a sketchbook, and a resolution was made. "When I fill this with drawings, I'll have proven my capacity for commitment and will buy myself a tablet." So, are we actually ready? It's true that June has been unprecedented. For probably the first time since my brief affair with the piano in college (like 8 years ago) I have fixed my obsessive inner eye on something other than gaming. It's possible, I've done it. Drawing is now "the thing". But still, it's really only been one month of acceptable performance. And I'd like it to be much more than "acceptable". Those 6 hour sessions in the practice rooms of the music building. The brain melting journey to a triple digit combo in MPE. Let's find that fire again.

    Anyway, let's talk about the last two months. And let me voice, again, my hatred for this website. I tried to put these things in chronological order, but they just did whatever they felt like.

Mid-left: This was done May 2nd. It's a copy of a picture by tomatojam. I was still experimenting with Adderall around this time, and drew this one on it. In this case at least it worked very well. I was actually interrupted at one point (to help carry some planks into the basement) and I immediately resumed drawing when that was done. Maybe that doesn't sound like anything special, but for me it is. Typically such a thing would require me to "restart" completely. Might take hours, might not happen at all. Actually, come to think of it, this was the first time I drew something in the middle of the day. Everything before was always done at night (for a handful of reasons, avoiding distraction chief among them).

Mid-right: This was probably done on the 2nd as well, though I uploaded it to twitter on the 3rd. I didn't use any particular reference for it, so of course it's quite simple. It also features the classic "hide her body in a big shapeless sweater" technique. It could be worse though. I don't really mind how the clothing came out. Mainly I'm not happy with the shape of the head and the hair. The text on the sweater says "the big D". There's a bit of a story to that, but I suppose now is not the time.

Middle: From the 3rd. Again I was copying the ineffable Kotoyama. I just like how these came out. I need to study Kotoyama's style more in the future. He(?) seems to be a master of making simple things look fantastic, particularly facial expressions.

Far left: From the 8th. The pose is strongly based on something by Kotoyama, and the clothing is lifted from tomatojam's spider girl. I did not originally intend for her to have bat wings, but there was room on the page and I figured it matched the outfit well enough, so I just threw them on for the fun of it. Again the shape of the head is a little off. The intent is that her head is tilted back so we see it from a low angle, but I'm not sure this really comes across. Apart from that I was quite happy with this one, though of course I leaned heavily of the references.

Far right: The 31st. The rest of May had some up and downs. Once again I got kind of disconnected from the energy I'd found. Many days I drew nothing, and a lot of what I was doing felt boring or pointless. I can't quite remember what was going on. Probably something sexuality related. Most likely, in fact, seeing as the solution seems to have been drawing lots of lewd stuff. But I'm digressing.

    So there is always power in catgirls. This isn't a direct copy of anything, but I'm ripping off Nametake's style quite a bit. Or at least trying to. It wasn't really meant to be Orin either, just a catgirl with huge tits. But, well, it's clearly Orin.

    So let's talk about June. It had a sort of slow start actually. I wasn't completely out of this rut I'd gotten into in May. I also started playing tons of TSS on fightcade and sank a few nights into TGM grinding. Thankfully I finally got the long sought Death Master rank on the 9th, and so TGM's priority in my mind shrank to a reasonable level. In fact, stupid as it may sound, this is probably one of the reasons June went so well. I knew I needed to push gaming to the background to properly focus on drawing, but I'd been practicing for this M rank for months, and had come within less than a second of achieving it several times. To just stop caring about it at that point was unthinkable, so it gnawed fiendishly at my mind. Every few days I'd have to devote several hours to it, even if just to prevent my skills from rusting. With it finally done I was free to take a long happy break from that game.

    So anyway. At some point I started copying a lot of stuff by Okiraku Nikku and Kenkou Cross, and this seemed to get the ball rolling. After a shaky first week I started drawing pretty much every day, only missing one or two due to the chaotic cycling of my sleep schedule. I even reached a point, unbelievable as it may sound, where filling two pages was the norm.

    Here's a bunch of copies from June. They're just ones I like, basically. I could try to talk about them but I don't know if I have much to say. Maybe in the future I won't post copies. I should be spending more effort on original things after all. I've been holding myself to one or two a week, but I think I can do better. I should also experiment more in the realm of copying itself. I mentioned this in a previous post. I should practice reproducing things from memory, doing things multiple times with certain variations, etc. But it's okay. The urgent task was gathering concentration and putting in time, and great progress has been made. Can only take one step at a time.

    Here's the names of the artists I copied, in order: Petenshi, Radiohead, Otokoter, Caburi, (I forgot, oops), Morisugi, Collagen, tomatojam88, Akita Morgue.

    And here are the "original" things I did this month. I wasn't sure I wanted to talk about them, but why not. By the way, don't ask why the thumbnails are different sizes throughout the page.

1. I had this idea that I knew how to do fabric all of a sudden. Why I thought this I don't know. Her clothes look stupid. I copied the crystal ball thing from Kenkou Cross's "Vamp Mosquito". The eyes and hair are loosely based on some of his succubi as well. I spent a decent amount of time on this one but didn't really plan ahead at all. This is a blunder I make regularly.

2. Is that Momiji? I'm not really sure myself. Here I tried to do something in Okiraku Nikku's style. I did a lot of copies of his stuff this month. Big boobs are really fun to draw.

3. A slime girl, inspired by tomatojam. I had a blast drawing this, though I don't really like the way her face came out. I should do more of these. Simple, stupid fun.

4. Pretty lazy. I wasn't really planning to even put this on twitter, but I did for some reason so now I guess I have to include it here. I tried to reproduce the forward leaning posture of Otokoter's inkling. The face is pretty much directly taken from a Kenkou Cross picture.

5. Based on nothing in particular. I guess that's why it looks so weird. I tried to utilize differing line thickness, but this is still a technique I don't properly understand. I think her torso is a little too long and her legs are too short. I also made the whole thing too small. Some better planning would have helped. Still, at the end of the day, I don't hate it. Inkling fetish too strong.

6. This is based on several simple drawings by the artist Kuromotokun (I recently discovered him, he's a genius). Finally, I made a point of planning things out, even drawing a whole "rough draft" of sorts on another page. There are silly errors all the same of course, but whatever. I'm very pleased with the lack of eraser damage, and the hair came out nice. The clothing is also some of the least disastrous I've done. The big problems are her butt being too low, and the legs are fucked.

    So, in summation? This was a rather horny month, but maybe that's the key. I'm a perverted maniac after all. You've got to follow your nature to some extent. It was a cute semi-coincidence that I filled the sketchbook (notebook really, fucking lined paper) on the last day of June. That inkling in the hard hat was the very last page. I'm really amazed at how much I did this month. Even just the act of drawing every day, no matter how much, is something I thought I'd be lucky to do by the end of the year. I'm thrilled by this, really. Things are actually looking up for once. Let's keep going!

    Also, in a way this green book has served it's original purpose. How poetic.

-

    Oh, and here's a little story. About 7 years ago, around when I drew that girl in a tie, back in the golden age of kusoplay, I actually bought some proper sketchbooks at the campus store. I never opened them though. I just continued drawing on random crap pieces of paper (my dorm room was a holocaust of loose pages and unfinished assignments) and since I only drew one thing every 5 months this served me well enough. Anyway, gremlin that I am, I kept the sketchbooks this whole time, still wrapped in plastic, somewhere in my room. So I went rifling through my old college shit (which I've also kept for no reason) and inside an ancient swollen notebook I found this picture of Youmu.

    From #DrawYoumuDay, 2016. What a surprise. I used to draw things this way, microscopic and crammed in the corner of the page, as if to not waste any space. I also remember I took the pose for this Youmu from the minotaur on the cover of Show No Mercy. Well, I found the sketchbooks. I guess I'll draw in them now. Only took 7 years. Today (or rather yesterday, I've been writing for like 6 hours, I'm a slow guy okay) brought back some nice memories. I also had 15 other things I felt like writing about, but I think this is enough for now.