A while back Drawpile got a huge update. I updated without thinking about backing up or taking note of my brushes so I spent this week kinda throwing some hours into figuring out the settings. The biggest roadblock to doing spontaneous drawpiles with my friends was just about 10 hours of prep & I think I got it taken care of. The new MyPaint brush functions are pretty cool & daunting. I'm not saying this as a knock, having more resources on the platform is great but I just don't see myself doing any collaborative work on the same canvas at the same time that requires having charcoal & watercolors & inky spongey type brushes- personally. I think the idea is awesome & cool but I just don't see that happening for me. The ability to create my own brushes to make my drawpile presence really unique & cool is also tempting but drawpile for me is more or less like 2 hours at most with some friends before everyone either bounces or the canvas is full & I'm the only one left working on it. (I'm slowwww.)

I was threatened to share more of my art or suffer disaster sooo fiiine here's some art. I guess this is art. Is it art? It's kinda like ratty, bent, broken tiny feathers that fell out way after a molt. But if this is art then it's something I must share. My other note pages are far, far more technical scratchings like the margin of papers as I first started experimenting.

As an illustrator I am very reactive to what I see. I can, at times, hold a vivid & pernicious idea in my head I want to translate as closely as I can to a canvas. What often is the case, however, is I'll create scummy crummy scaffolding & block out shapes until I get an sense of "oh this is good" & then take that to detail & fuss about composition, backgrounds, design as afterthoughts. I am more open today for the kind of happy accidents & snappy expediting processes that come with painting & I almost universally feel there's more character & expression in my paintings vs my attempts at creating rigid mangaka or animator style linework. I'm not Seely, I'll never be Seely. I watched one of their streams over 12 years ago in SAI, a program I don't even use, & when I use 100% opacity linework I still think "no this is awful, it's not as good as Seely" & either beat my head on that wall til I crack in half or divert my energy into other directions. The later, I find, produces much more agreeable results to me. Wild how such ancient bubbles of decisions parsed almost a lifetime ago can linger around floating in my intuition.

It is without question I overthink my work. I also strive to lofty goals in work. I have demonstrated I have more ability, always pushing the ceiling & limits of my knowledge further & further up. It is a rewarding, satisfying feeling to continue to chase that height- & every time I do I think this rising tide will lift all boats. It will make even my looser or less effort work lift with me. Painting has been the first I can recognize that sentiment holds true. Sketching has not budged too much over the years. Though I am constantly swapping out how I internalize or plan digitigrade anthro legs like a maniac swapping Mario Kart 8 tires on every run as if it's gonna make some big difference. Rule of cool, man. Do they look cool? Awesome, then it works. Don't need to be so rigid. If you think too hard about digitigrade legs then you'll always hit the wall of realization they do not function like plantigrade do. Acts like kneeling or sitting will always create anomalies so quit your fussing. Or so I tell myself over & over again. I just can't help myself I wanna get that holy grail of "this is a person" & "that's just an animal, standing upright in a funny coat, wait a minute!!!" Then I do absolute bananas coo coo junk like "fwingers" ? Aiyaiyai. If fwingers get a pass, anything does, if you ask me. That's me just warming myself up to embracing more comical, or cartoon styling.

uuhhh anyway I did it! I shared my art & some of my thoughts. Nobody gets an earbeating on their messenger, nobody needs to make rash decisions, everything's gucci 😎