John Marston's Chair

 Too much has happened since my last update here but I'm not in the mood the make commentary. The only thing driving this post is yet another funny YT thumbnail (one of my favorite subjects).

 

Half an hour of our favorite cowboy assembling a gaming chair for his first foray into gaming, 15 years after Red Dead 1. He's great, and it's wild hearing such a distinctive voice just being a regular dude. I started watching his content after my playthrough of RDR2 a few years ago. Such a nice guy! The whole RDR cast seem to be super kind & cool people really.

I needed a reason to start posting again, thanks Rob. 

Bonus content;

Here's another good one. This is next level excitement. Bro is living. Title, thumbnail, channel name, all twinning. Tripling. Phenomenal.

 

 

 

 

The ol' Life and ol' Times of ol' Tom Brown

 Sometimes I see a YT thumbnail and I must click it. This is how I fell into my newest and unexpected mini-obsession. Let me share aforementioned thumbnail;

COME ON, he looks so distraught, what is this?! With the promise of a 3hr 38m journey into this kid's 1830's (? I think) school life as presented by the BBC in 1971, of course I had no choice but see what the HELL this was. The opening credits;

 

 

Boy ... let me tell you about the supermassive sinkhole I tripped into thanks to YouTube recommendations. So, yes, this is the TV series, based on an apparently multi-generationally universally beloved novel written in 1857. I ended up watching all of it in 2 sittings, it's still very fun and insane and mysteriously watchable; I'm kinda obsessed. I didn't find the obsession until I looked for it on eBay though, which I feel might have been a grave error. I really don't want to go off on a tangent here, so I'll try to keep this semi-brief because I can't decide whether I want to make this post about the TV series or the books- but I don't have anything compiled about the show (or movies!) yet so I'll just go with literature for now. But you see, I had to cite the initial draws. The show itself is so fun though, I really am tempted to do an episodic breakdown/ commentary thing on it .. holy hell. Anyhow, right, the books.

I ran an initial search on eBay for the novel it was based on. There were more than ELEVEN THOUSAND copies for sale, and probably 100+ editions in English at first scroll-thru. What on earth? What is this and why haven't I heard of it? Looking into it I learned very quickly that it is indeed a long-treasured tale. A bildungsroman goliath of cultural importance even. Matter of fact, there are some really cool facts about this series. The first version of it on film is a silent film from 1916, and that version is weirdly fun and highly watchable too. Just incredible to me. Ash did a little digging too and read something like it was the most popular English language novel in Japan's Meiji era (1868-1912)? And the funny thing is; while watching the tv series I kept thinking how so many Japanese school life shows I've seen felt a lot like it. The whole thing is just utterly fascinating to me. The reach and influence of this single british novel (and its followup of Tom's college years that I know nothing about). Idkidk, I am just besotted by it all and I can't fully explain it. Here's a little fact snippet from the never-wrong internet;

So right, I mentioned it being a grave error, the looking it up on eBay bit. That's because I'm a sucker for beautiful antique editions of books and there are Quite A Few beautiful Tom Browns's. I ended up buying a couple from the late 1800s and early 1900s. I collected a ton of covers for this post though, and I'm sorry in advance for how trash they'll look on this site having no control over how they'll display here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Just a smattering of extremely affordable choices, and none of these are even the editions I bought! Ugh, damn it. Here are the ones I ended up getting;

Son of a bitch. They're so pretty. I saved a handful of endearing dedications and notes inside covers too; I'll post those next time though. I don't have any editing left in me for today and I'm too impatient to sit on this any longer. I feel the weirdest urge to make fanart for this silly old "franchise"? I don't even know if it can be called that. But man, I think I love it. It's altogether charming, virtuous, satisfying, uncomfortable, weird, raw, and completely fucked up. God Bless You, Tom Brown. More to come later, for sure.

2024 (?) ART POST

I haven't made much art this year at all, and I don't have much to add to that statement. 

The summer heat has rendered me numb and despairing, completely unfocused and incapable of creative outlet. Soooo as usual I've sunk into playing video games, so I can't focus on the heat and despair so intensely. Comfort games are such a big help when I'm hot; I can't even put into words how badly heat affects my mental state, art is the last thing on my mind when I'm hot, I stress about it way more than your average person (but I'm beginning to suspect that it's hyperthyroid related, as it's a big symptom). There have been slight reprieves of course, we went to Colorado for a while a couple weeks ago. It WAS hot there but the place we stayed had glorious AC and so did all the vehicles. I was able to make a painting there, Stephanie bought a pile of cheap canvases & acrylic paint and we painted some cute impromptu stuff.

I ended up giving this horse to Stephanie, I owe her a lot, this was just a tiny token of appreciation. If I can bother her to send me pics of the beautiful things she painted I'll add them later! But YEAH, that's the most recent thing I've made. There's mostly been a weird amalgamation of sketches this year; 

All standard fare, aside from staggering urge to sketch Willie Nelson. I briefly messed with some (brush!Arrtx brand) paint pens, months ago, with varying success; 

Orville Peck, Cloud FF7 and a random dude. These paint pens were a lot of fun actually ... I love the look of precise, brushy colored lines without hard edges.

In other news! I can't wait to see Orville live, holy shit, I just realized it's next month. Oh man. Very exciting. And!!!! In October, Damien Jurado will be playing at the South Pasadena Masonic Lodge, and I'm excited about that for various reasons. Lainey might come to visit again soon too! Things are looking pretty good right now aside from the heat.

Hold on, I found a few more sketches. I don't even know if these are from 2024, but I haven't uploaded anywhere in so long it doesn't really matter.

Timmy & a belfry in Salem from our visit to Mass a few months ago

 A couple comedy Brian Mays for fun. Believe it or not this helps with art block a lot and I ought to do it more. Not limited to Brian May ofc, he's just the funnest and most familiar for me to draw comedically for the time being.

 

 

Elyet & a Pedro sketch from a year ago apparently (?!). Lainey and I did a thing for a while where we sketched the same photo reference then boggled over each other's differences. I love her art so much! And Elyet there, he's a character from a story I am still writing.

 

Here are a couple bonus P5 & JJBA fanarts I found; Guido & Goro. GOD DAMN P5 is such an excellent game, the complexities of (some) of the villains are so satisfying. That being said, there's about 30 hours too much dialogue lol 😭

I am finding more random art but it's mostly crapola .. I haven't been inspired or gripped by basically anything at all this weird year, but traveling a lot. Will update with photos, youtube thoughts and yarn things later. xoxo ♥

 

BERSERK PANELS

Just a few panels from the Berserk manga I colored years ago with copics. I still like them enough to post somewhere besides my mostly defunct Berserk tumblr.

 

 

This last one looks strange because I used a posterization effect, otherwise the coloring is "real".

It vexes me to no end that they've made it difficult to make decent looking image posts here, as in, to align them side-by-side it's nearly impossible. Visually I will loathe how this blog will look, but I must keep struggling.

I have a lot more, I am not sure where they are unfortunately! It's so disappointing to lose digital files over multiple computers. I have the original colorings somewhere, but again, I don't know where some went. 

This next one is massive irl (for me, at least- it's probably the largest thing I ever colored). I printed the manga panel onto art paper, I -think- it's 12"x18". I photographed it at multiple times during the coloring process.

 

This was a really fun project tho, and ultimately I like the process coloring more than the end result. The whole thing took many many hours and I colored the hair pretty impulsively (if that's not obvious lmao). I added black outlines with a brush pen & white stray hairs with a gel pen at the end. Glitter on the lips ofc. This was scary to work on tbh!! It was so beautiful and magnificent and huge irl that I was scared to completely butcher it. I still have it, but I don't know what to do with it.

This goes without saying but all the manga panels on this page were drawn by Kentaro Miura, may he rest in peace. Sorely missed.