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.
