Another sketch dump to stall

Here’s your reminder that I’ve drifted so far from my cartooning job for a reason. I am flailing to grab any thread I can that lets me produce something, anything!!! In general, I gotta use an outside force to nudge me past executive dysfunction and pain walls, which is extra hard in this pandemic isolation times! Otherwise I gotta revert to high school Chrispy to play with this project created by high school Chrispy: I put an idea in my brain and then juggle it in active memory for days/weeks/months/years/decades and hope that playing out an idea in my head a thousand times means I can blurt it out on impulse if my brain gives me a window. Every report I did in high school was like this. Absorb info, pace around in a brainfuzz state for a week, while healthy kids were socializing and having hobbies, then enter a fugue state the night before and typing it out in one go. I rarely went back to correct typos, cuz my brain disappeared again once the window closed. And I thought EVERYONE worked like that, so I was just really lazy and a bad person!

So, yeah, I’ve percolating ideas and trying various tricks to make sketches emerge, but I’m also struggling enough that I can’t plan at all - like, I can’t pull up any images I saved as refs, so I dive in cold and make all the same anatomy mistakes! (My ref folder has 1000 pics in it, cuz I get ambitious, find refs, then can’t focus enough to draw them. So instead of drawing… I search for MORE refs, hoping a new one might inspire me to draw! I seriously now have 200 examples saved of the same five poses I wanted to work on.)

Until I get a full set of images to justify a proper post, you’ll have to deal with this stalling from random sketches that leaked through the flailing. (Some may get reused in future poses. All were posted on Twitter - @chrispco - first, cuz whenever I get any clear-thought window, I post on Twitter to let people know I’m still here. It lets people think I’m way more present than I am!

Been trying to use blue pencil to trick myself into a quasi comic mode, where I can be more free in sketches, since the result is the inking atop the pencil. When I did actually ink one of those, it got weird. But a step is a step.

Wait, did I ever share that piece here? If not, there it is. Tijo and Rhenna taken to inks, with a bit of soul lost in every step. (Which I’m not posting, cuz *I* can say I liked the sketch better, but no artist wants to post a finished piece and be told by well-meaning folks that all that finishing the work wasn’t worth it.)

Another try at my fav Momentum scene: When Aaron and Nate are at the quest start site, and Aaron uses the extreme nature of the swirling energy involved to put on a show for Nate! (Bonus: At the end, all the energy starts swirling and moving - letting them know Meret was sneaking up, and had just entered their range! It’d make a great cartoon scene!)

Speaking of: Here’s a Meret to join the sketch page in the banner image. This one was drawn to close out a sketchbook.

Meret was on the right of the final sketchbook page. Phoebe was on the left.

If one sketchbook ends, another must begin. This is how I christened the new one. Zappy Rhenna! (You’ll get tangential extra context for this one eventually. Consider it a tease.)

Wish me luck on pulling one of my posts off. Momentum doesn’t have any value, really, but if I can start pulling off these old indulgences - remember how I said I can keep ideas in active memory for decades, and pop out instead of what I wanted when I get a focus window? - it’s a step to holding focus and completing plans for… other projects.

As always, with my awful situation I hit the “you really should be dead” line all the way back in 2015, so the thought of a years-long process to recover, should my med situation ever get properly stabilized, is still technically all bonus. I can’t take back staying alive now. Commitments were made and I’m my family’s sunk cost. So I wait, plan, celebrate the scraps… and dissociate to imagine a world where 15yo got proper treatment, and he got the “embarrass yourself with OCs” teen era he lost to brain fuzz. (Also, there was no real internet during my teen years. I am owed lost experiences!)