gs_silva

I drew some more horses. I've been feeling burnt out but maybe horses are a nice break. These were grabbed from FB so I don't know if they'll show up.

I was going to draw all the horses for Tết (Lunar New Year), but I'm falling behind.

I fell behind on Alien Romance posts! I keep up better on my Patreon page. It doesn't have the transcripts but it has additional commentary that I don't post here. Then again, here has commentary that I don't post there.

( I'm putting this one behind a cut even though it's meant as catharsis because I know I have some friends here who have had metoo experiences. )

The instructor gets into the passenger seat of the test vehicle, and Cathy gets into the driver's seat. He gives her a steady stream of instructions, and she doesn't respond directly, but she's more or less keeping up. He tells her to parallel park. As she's twisting around to look out the rear window with one hand on the steering wheel (which we all had to do before rear view cameras were invented, and is still probably a good idea in some modern cars), the instructor looks down at Cathy and smirks.

***

How are you all today? I'm hanging in there. I don't feel well enough to go out, so it's a day for staying home. Anyway, I spent entirely too much yesterday and all I got to show for it was some cake mix. So I suppose I should make some cake.

My friend sent me a pretty amazing mug.




The picture's pretty blurry, and it's gold leaf on pink, which is hard to read. But it says, "I'd punch a bi*ch for you, right in the throat." I don't know if I've ever had a friendship before with this vibe! Now I do, and I love it! My hidden aggressive side doesn't have to stay completely hidden. It's still not much of an aggressive side. After I messaged her to thank her and laugh about it, I helped talk her preteen son through how to draw mouths.

It takes a village!

Ella accompanies Cathy to the Department of Motor Vehicles to take her driver's license test. We've already determined that her state doesn't accept the International Driver's Permit, so she has to do it the hard way - by taking the test in English, both written and driving.

Ella reviews a few key words for Cathy: "Rouge is red. Vert is green. Droit is right. Gauche is left."

They approach the check-in desk. "G'morning, Ma'am," says Ella. "Catherine Arzamattisev is here for her appointment." Slightly mangling Cathy's surname. It's okay, though. It's been a running gag that Cathy can't pronounce 'Arzamastsev'. Neither of them can.

***

I've been in a Cathy state of mind lately, drifting and somewhat lost, but still with lots of tangible responsibilities on my shoulders. You still have to cook dinner even on days when you can't articulate your thoughts. Cathy's about to get her learning disability tested to its limit. How is she going to get through this? How much will Ella be able to help? Ella really wants this to happen.

It's been a few days. Been having trouble drawing, which is too bad because I have less time to do it in so it would be nice to not be having this downswing. See, part of drawing is engineering - knowing where the lines go so they'll build what you need to show. And engineering is a whole mindset. And I'm not in that mindset. Muscle memory by itself won't do it.

My Patreon comics continue but I'm on my phone right now and I can't grab images with my phone. I'll do it later. The storyline is there! It took me 6 hours to draw one daily comic. That's not okay. It should only take 1 or 2.

Massive debilitating headache, probably because of my glasses. I had a pair of 'good' glasses I bought off the shelf but for some reason they just work better for use for long periods. I ran over them with the car. I salvaged them anyway and was still able to use them, but I've also had to use my prescription glasses more and they're wonky. My eyes are actually what's wonky. I go to take an eye exam and then whatever data comes out produces lenses that I absolutely can't use. So I used another off-the-shelf pair yesterday and it really messed me up. I need to look at something that's not a screen.

So I'll go do that.

I always say I'm bad at marketing myself. I freeze up. It feels awkward. It feels like work. It feels like I'm testing fate to come down and punish me for being so brash. It's safer to bow my head and hope my work speaks for itself, to the very few people who bother to look at it.

All this to say there's an award here on Dreamwidth celebrating crowdfunded arts, and Alien Romance has been nominated in the Webcomics category.

Don't just click on me and leave, though, if I can convince you to look at the other nominees. Maybe there's one there you'll like better.

The other categories are:

Art (Vote here) (See nominees here)
Fiction (Vote here) (See nominees here)
Poetry (Vote here) (See nominees here)
Patrons (Vote here) (See nominees here)
Other projects (Vote here) (See nominees here)

Life is tough all over. A friend is having a particularly difficult stretch, so to cheer her up, I offered to draw her something silly with a character of her choice and a character of my choice.

I always choose Cathy. For one thing, I own the rights to her, so that's easy. And she comes out of my pencil easily, now that I've drawn her at least a thousand times. (I'm counting previous drafts of Alien Romance, plus my rough draft of the hypothetical sequel, plus all the many, many times I drew her for prompts or just because.)

She's very versatile, too. With her wide eyes and unruly hair, and big ears that look like they're ready to go flying off somewhere, plus a fashion sense that favors scribbles and flares, she always looks a little bit lost. She doesn't belong anywhere; therefore she belongs equally well everywhere. The Silly Old Bear seems like a good enough fit.

Today is a special bonus flashback. It's really long and not actually related to the current plotlines.

Maurice answers the question about childhood bullying posed by ysabetwordsmith.

Typhoon is very angry about the snow. She's not even an outdoor cat, and would be perfectly capable of finding a comfortable spot on the catio. But she's displeased and concerned with the conditions of this establishment. She'd like to lodge a complaint.

I'd say it was pretty, but it's all whited out now. Not a lot of contrast anymore. It's as pretty as the cover of The White Album.

(Which was just white, with "The Beatles" embossed on it, also in white.)

(There was a version that had the text in black, I guess? Or was that just the cassette/CD cover? I had the LP and it was white-on-white.)

Yesterday I did a marathon session of daily comic, wishing the whole time that I could have some high-quality alone time. Now I'm trying to have a marathon session of touching up the graphic novel, but my stamina for holding a stylus and tablet and staring at scribbles on a screen is much reduced.

At least the kitchen is cleaner than it used to be.

January is always a hard month. Ideally, I could go into semi-hibernation and not speak to anyone except for saying goodnight to my spouse and son every night, and come out in mid-February with a renewed sense of my place in this world.

But have you listened to the news lately?! That's not a world I have a sense of place in.

Not that it's THAT different from the previous iterations of the world. Humans were doing a lot of gawdawful things then too; we just had to dig a little harder to hear about it. Americans could still benefit from digging into the news, because while we have a full set of international news sources available to us, we still rarely look at it. I know a few American friends who read The Guardian. Somebody mentioned Al Jazeera a while ago; I haven't followed them in a couple of years, because you have to brace yourself for a high global death count (since they cover world conflicts that are harder to find in other English-language news outlets) and it's been a long time since I was able to do that.

Mostly I read French-language news now, which is not complete, but they cover the Middle East and Africa pretty well, and they're more likely to speak directly about the ugly bits of US and UK politics. Not always. You still have to click around different sources. But I can read in French. My vocabulary has improved in a direction I wouldn't have otherwise chosen: tuer, incendie, lacrymogène. To kill, fire, teargas.

I made a snow horse in the front lawn a couple of snowfalls ago, and I go out and patch it up when the temperatures allow for a little melting and the blocky, chunky snow becomes more malleable, but it's pretty thoroughly a wreck at this point. I was looking forward to an additional chance with this snow to build upon it, add a whole new layer and make it smooth and horse-shaped again, but it looks like it'll be just too cold for just too long.

In Alien Romance world, I'm working on a scene where the pub band is performing, and it has some continuity problems, so I'm trying to decide how much work I should put into changing the art entirely. There's this one guy in my comics critique group who is a bass player in a similar band in real life, and while he's always happy to identify and point out issues in my portrayal, it makes me want to put a little more effort in so he doesn't give me too long a list of corrections.

I had another friend who was a blues singer and she used to do the same thing for me, but she passed away last year. Every time I think about her, grief hits me all over again, and I think about her a lot.