Weekly Update - 237 - 9/23/24

Kinda fun when I draw all this structural stuff to try and get the pose right, only to then ultimately hide it all behind my ridiculous hair and tails!

Anyway, we're back! But only barely. Got in late last night, still feel kinda woozy from travel. Being on a ship all week long gave me some strong sea-legs, but now as I stand here at my desk I feel like the land is swaying. Pretty sure it's just me though.

'Twas a fun vacation, but I'm glad to be home and I'm ready to get back to work, doing this whacky comic stuff I like to do!

Bunch of appointments happened to stack up right at the start of this week though, which is annoying. Gotta take the cat to the vet again today (he's very old, needs his meds and his checkups), got a gym appointment immediately after that, got a dentist appointment tomorrow, like, why did I do this to myself? It seemed like such a good idea a month ago.

While each thing only takes about an hour each (except for the vet, which can take 20 minutes or 5 hours,) it really breaks up the day and makes it hard to just sit down and focus on art for an extended length of time.

So now, the big question:

Comic this week? If I can get the linework and flats done by Wednesday, then yes, I think I can post on Friday.

Drawing: Pages 208-210

Playing: Satisfactory

I did do a little bit of sketching on the trip, but I don't know that I have a ton to share... if the winner of the poll below is the one I think it is, then I'd rather just render that out in its full glory than share my several subpar practice images. My skill with pencil and paper has significantly diminished after so much time spent using only digital media, and while there are some skills that translate, I can't really say I'm all too proud of what fell out of my pencil this past week. It's very rough, it's pretty ugly... but it was good practice.

Lastly, I'll close out the poll at the end of the day or first thing tomorrow, so there's still time to place or adjust your vote if you haven't yet, tip the scales, so to speak.

Who Should I Draw Next? - Round Nine | Patreon

Ramble:

This is sort of a pre-ramble to a ramble, but I think I would love to ramble on about House of Leaves at some point. I'm a slow reader and I don't like audiobooks, (the VA always does the voices wrong. None of the characters ever end up sounding like they do in my head!) So I only tend to read when we go on trips and we pretty rarely go on trips. As a result it does take me a long time to get through books, but I dug into House of Leaves a bit more on the ship and I was kind of enamored with the surprisingly artistic approach the author has taken with it. I knew a little bit about it going in, but the layers of complexity that are being used to draw me into the... several stories the book is trying to tell simultaneously and the house that links all these characters together has surpassed my expectations. Just the mere fact that it isn't always clear what order is the correct order to read different passages in, or if some are intended to be read at all, it gives your eyes the freedom to dart around the pages and explore the book on their own. I feel it's very well done.

At dinner one night last week I was trying to explain the book to one of my engineer friends, he didn't seem as if he was able to grasp why I feel like it's so much more than just a goofy gimmick. He kept comparing it to a "poem about a duck that's in the shape of a duck," a phrase he kept repeating which felt like a gross, deliberate, and really kind of a disingenuous oversimplification of the elements I was trying to explain. It felt to me almost like he was saying that an M. C. Escher drawing would be somehow suddenly awful if you put it in a triangular frame. It's an argument that completely ignores the quality of the writing first, and fixates instead on the artistic framing of that writing, then assumes that just because it's in a frame, it's bad. And yet it's the hill he opted to defend, much to my dismay. Being unable to get past his analogy, it made it impossible to explain anything else about the book before the conversation naturally drifted on to other topics.

Now, we were admittedly both kinda drunk, but it rubbed me the wrong way that he wasn't understanding (or even making the effort to try and understand) what it is I find so interesting about House of Leaves. I think I blame the WAY I was trying to explain it, rather than any true lack of understanding on the part of my friend. Any time you get an artist and an engineer in a conversation, there's going to be a rub. My brain doesn't work in a very logical or technical way where every topic must be linked with a steel cable of reasoning, and my friend often doesn't think in a dreamy, artistic, emotional way where two completely unrelated topics can coexist in a harmonious parallel from an imaginary perspective. (I tried not to phrase that statement with any bias, but I'm admittedly biased.) House of Leaves is more of an experience than a simple story, and it's incredibly difficult to express that experience in a summary. We were actually joking afterwards that it's probably very unlikely the book will ever appear in audiobook form (I don't know if it has or not, but I don't see how it could.) So... I think I may want to type up something a little more... coherent, at some point, in an effort to explain the book with my left brain, rather than rely upon my usual senseless verbal blathering that nobody ever seems to want to hear.