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.