*’m L*lling At This Harder Than * Really Should Be.

I was in a livestream last Friday, and asked for a challenge... a photo of something that'd be really hard to draw.

First thing I got was a picture of a hand, but I draw hands all the time. Second was this portrait. Bald guy, really bold lighting with strong shadows, and all I had were H2 leads.... that was more like it. So, here's the results.

This took about... I dunno, I wanna say an hour and a half, two hours? Probably needs another solid hour of work to tighten up stuff like the ears and the nostril.

Anyway... came out alright, I guess.

I just realized something.

Mirrors don't flip something left to right. They flip things front to back.

This is, officially, blowing my mind.

WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?

Yay, spambot.

My earliest memory is watching my brother play Super Mario Bros. on a rented NES, and he keeps "throwing" the controller to make Mario jump farther.

Straight out of high-school, he got a job coding browser games at nearly twenty bucks an hour. He got laid off and re-hired twice, and he's currently writing fiction. I've spent the last seven years trying to drag myself out of an addiction to gaming.

Little sketch of another character. I spent a few hours working on military and law-enforcement gear for this setting I'm developing.

Not sure what this guy's name is... I'm calling him Galen for now, but it doesn't sit right with me.

Concept art for June and Jove, characters for a sci-fi comic. Same setting as James, but different storyline.

AI's use virtual appearances for things like video-calls and AR appearances. To make themselves instantly identifiable as AI's, but easy to relate to as people, they use appearances that are lifelike, yet unfeasible or "impossible."

The most standard element of this is to use a  hybrid of animal species for a base appearance: June's a combination of rat and eland, while Jove is a mix of cat and dog. June's rigid gauntlets and boots don't cover the joints (knees and elbows, that is), which is a normally an important consideration. Jove's spandex tights... well, most spacers in this setting wouldn't be caught dead wearing something so flamboyant.

These aren't quite final designs... I'm still deciding on how to mix the features. And I'll probably be giving June a tail.

I need to work on those horns, too.

Finally, at long last: I have a name for my style of work: Tradigital... Woo! Time to go re-tag everything I’ve ever posted. Fun story: I was thinking about how to categorize my work, and I thought, It’s kinda part traditional, part digital... tradigital! And I thought, I wonder if I’m the first one to think of that. So off to Google I go, and it turns out, I wasn’t! And I went, “Cool: now I have a name for it!

Also picked up a new term a little while ago: “Spotting blacks,” which is where you fill in solid black areas of a comic frame... funny that in the myriad of comic how too books I own, it wasn’t mentioned once. Good thing to know, since spotting blacks is the part that I do digitally.

First decent shot of James. I usually avoid curtained hair like an old cliche, but it just seems to work for him. The inking went pretty well.

Principal character for a future comic.

I need to do more studies of bats. Argh.

My third second birthday

Whelp: those of you who’ve known me for a while are aware that three years ago yesterday, (Nov. 28), on my daily walk from my apartment to the McDonalds where I would sit and draw all day, I suffered a stroke. Today I got to meet the ambulance crew who picked me up, and I found out a few interesting things:

That thing you see in all the hospital dramas+crime shows where the paramedics shine a little flashlight into someone’s eye and use the dilation reaction to check for concussion? They really do actually do that. Relevant to me because I’m been blind in my right eye (Nothing to do with the stroke, had a bout of Diabetic retinopathy some 10 years ago now: that’s a whole ‘nother story), and as a result my right eye is permanently dilated, so i’ve always been a little paranoid that someone would do the flashlight thing and incorrectly assume I’d had a concussion due to the resulting lack of response in that eye. Wasn’t a problem when they picked me up three years ago, but I need to get an updated Medic Alert pendant. X3

You know how people will complain about having to wait like 45 minutes for an ambulance? Chances are, quite often, that’s probably because the ambulance has to drive out from the next town over. An ambulance centre covers an entire region, not just one metropolitan area. When I had my stroke, the ambulance centre was literally about a block away, so they got there in a matter of minutes. (Stroke of Luck #1).

When it happened, I had been walking down the street, someone saw me keel over on a lawn, and called 911... stroke of luck #2: If I had stayed at home that day, no one would have found me till my brother got home from work several hours later... if whoever had made the call hadn’t seen me keel over, but rather had simply seen me lying there, they might have assumed I was just passed out drunk on the lawn or something. For that matter, I’m lucky they decided to call an ambulance at all.

Second thing I found out on my visit: once the ambulance crew drops you off at the hospital, they don’t hear anything about what happens to you after that. I would have thought that one of the major payoffs to being an ambulance crew member is the satisfaction of helping to save peoples lives, but once the hospital takes you in (if you make it there, that is), doctor patient confidentiality takes over, and the ambulance team doesn’t hear anything unless it makes the papers... which it usually doesn’t, unless the news is bad, which, all too often, it is.

So, when I showed up to meet the guys who’d scraped me off somebodys lawn and spent 45 minutes trying to resuscitate  me right there on the street (keep in mind: 10 minutes without oxygen is long enough to cause brain death, tho CPR will keep the air pumping into your system, so, stroke of luck #3, I’m really lucky they got to me so quickly and didn’t just give up and call it after 20 or 30 mins), they were pretty happy to see me up and about, hale and hearty.

Details of the Stroke itself below the break.

Anyway: once I landed in the hospital, They thought I’d suffered a heart attack, and treated me as such (technically a correct assumption, since the stroke had immediately caused a heart attack). Stroke of Luck #4: everything they did in the first 24 hours to treat me was the exact same thing they would have done if they’d known at the time that it had been a stroke.

So: after a bit of time in the hospital (and notifying my parents et al), the cardiologist, Stroke of luck #4, asked the staff Neurologist, who wasn’t even supposed to be in that day, #4.1, and asked him to take a look at me. The neurologist saw something on my EKG chart that he had heard about at a conference he’d been to that very weekend, which suggested that I’d suffered a stroke rather than simply a heart attack, #4.2

Anyway, after that all got straightened out, I went through 2 months of rehab in the hospital (Including daily physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, and Speech Therapy). Stroke of Luck #5, I had an amazing team of people taking care of me (Including, coincidentally, no less than 5 therapists/doctors named Michelle, and I think a nurse or two as well). Turns out, my town has basically the best rehab team/facilities in the region. Stroke of Luck #6, the costs for whole thing, top to bottom, from the ambulance ride, to the therapy and hospital stay itself, to the bucketload of pills I was proscribed, down to the gas my parents burn driving me to and from doctors appointments, is totally covered by Canadian social assistance, since I’m on medical disability (Have been since even before the stroke: my diabetes and ADD make a very nasty combination).

So, that was three years ago... during the 2 months in the hospital I did very little drawing, and virtually no writing, and my skills basically rusted away to almost nothing nor does it help that apparently I suffer a neurological right side neglect, which has an interesting impact on my drawing (i’ll draw a figure that looks pretty decent overall, but their left side will look like I phoned it in... interiestingly, not the right side of the drawing, the figures right side). I’ve basically spent the last three years trying to regain my prior skill, and there’s a loooot of rust to brush off for the 10 years of independent study and practice I’ve done in comic art and writing. (when I dedicate my entire life to something, I don’t take half measures).

The hospital stay did have one side benefit; with a whole team of nurses handling my blood tests, insulin shots, and meal records (none of which I was ever able to manage on my own). The diabetic specialists were able to sort out a management system for my diabetes as a whole! I was first diagnosed as diabetic when I was 6, 27 years ago now. Back then the insulins available weren’t nearly as effective as what they have now, so I was never able to keep my management on track. Bad management meant bad blood sugar levels, which was painfully discouraging, so I sort of just let my management as a whole slide. Since I wasn’t getting tests regularly or keeping records, my specialists couldn’t even advise me without any data to work with. Which only made my blod sugar levels worse. But,  over the course of my hospital stay, the nurses handled all my tests/shots/pills. With that information, the specialists sorted out a management plan, which I’m happy to say has working quite well for me these days. I’ve been doing pretty well following it. Every stormcloud has a silver lightning.

At any rate: I ramble. Back to the sketchbook for me.

Hi have you herad from brian recenty? I think your frinds with him right Im worryed about him and trying ro find out if hes ok

Sorry, anon: I know a couple of people named Brian, online and irl... Could you be more specific?

sorry I mean brianedbysaucepan

Oh, you mean Brainedbysaucepans... yeah: he's been kinda reclusive as of late, I see him appear on Skype sporadically, haven't gotten to talk to him as of late. :/