#honestly this comic was EXHAUSTING it was a marathon to finish so i honestly. have some bad vibes associated with it

[ravenxbones]

this was my final comic for visual storytelling ii at the end of last quarter, featuring pumpkinheart and spice from my holiday-themed fanclans!

[teaboot]

Any tips on learning how to draw for impatient creatives? All my creative work is usually a pretty short brain -> reality pipeline (short form writing, improv, podcast). But I do really want to learn how to draw to make cool comics and visual novels n stuff! I once attended a 2 hour painting class and got mentally exhausted with the precision of it all halfways through.

Honestly, I'm also pretty Impatient with my work. My brain seems to prefer "sprint, walk, sprint, walk, sprint" type activities over "steady marathon" stuff, and for overcoming that, I'm not sure I have much useful advice that wouldn't make me a huge hypocrite.

I can work on one painting for ten hours, but if it isn't done at the end, it's unlikely I'll ever finish it. Same with writing. It's either that, or small sketches and drabbles that update sporadically.

(My current point of pride is that I've gone back to work on this one painting four times in the three years since I started it.)

I guess if you *really* have your heart set on doing something that requires dedication and repeat visits, I'd maybe try looping in a partner or a manager of some kind to create regular deadlines and reasonable expectations?

Lord knows *I'd* benefit from a life-handler so lord help you 😭

[randomoranges]

here is a very self-indulgent blurb for a very self-indulgent au. 

teaching is fucking hard ok. one day is like 4 weeks of work. 

Friday Nights

The first thing Étienne does when he’s out of his winter gear is crash face first onto the sofa. There’s a pile of laundry that still needs to be folded, but he’ll get to it later. From the entrance, he hears his boyfriend chuckle and before long, there’s a dip in the sofa as Edward joins him. Étienne believes he’s moved some to give Edward room, but he realises it’s a thought he never put to action, when Edward nudges his legs so that they can properly take over the couch and have enough space for each other, the laundry and their accumulated fatigue.

 “I thought this week would never end,” Edward groans from somewhere beside him. Étienne would like to snuggle up to him, put his head on Edward’s chest and get lulled by the rhythmic beating of his heart, but moving requires energy that he no longer has. Instead, he stays in his position, with a vague notion that some part of Edward is close by.

 “I’m convinced today lasted seventy-two hours. I feel like I’ve been run over by a train.” He doesn’t even bother to properly turn his head so that Edward can hear him and if it comes out partially muffled by the sofa, he doesn’t care.

 Étienne remembers a time when, not even some ten years ago, Friday nights were synonymous with fun and the words “good time.” He would go out, meet up with his friends, stay up late, and paint the town. Now, if he makes it ‘til midnight on a Friday night, he considers it a minor miracle. If they do anything exciting on a Friday night, he considers it an act of God.

 To think, he used to be a fun guy.

 Now his idea of fun is sleeping in on Saturday and maybe spend five minutes with his boyfriend, before catching up with the neglected housework, the grading, the planning, the e-mails he never got around to and preparing for the week to come.

 Hell, Edward could strip before his very eyes and Étienne isn’t even sure he’d manage to remain awake to fully enjoy the show.

 He silently mourns for all the things he could be doing now that it’s the weekend and that he’s not.

 “When d’we get borin’?” He slurs and asks. He hopes Edward heard him. Shifting and turning his head sounds exhausting.

 “When the school year started.” Edward replies bluntly.

 A laugh manages to bubble past Étienne’s lips and Edward responds with a gentle squeeze to his leg.

 Edward is right though. It’s the same thing every year. Just as they start recouping somewhere in the middle of July, summer comes to an end and when the school year starts, they’re perpetually playing catch up with their rest until the next break when they can recharge their batteries.

 Oftentimes, Étienne wonders why he picked this job. It often feels as though he’s running a marathon without any proper training.

 “I know we said we’d get the cleaning done today so we wouldn’t have to do it over the weekend, but I’m so tired. Can we get to it tomorrow?” Edward pleads, sounding desperate.

 Étienne’s been living with him for three years now and every summer since he’s moved in, they’ve tried (and failed) to set New Methods to keep the house in order and every year, without fail, once October rolls in, it’s the same thing. The laundry accumulates, the dishwasher doesn’t get emptied out right away and the dust bunnies seem to have a more exciting sex life than they do.

 It’s a miracle there’s food in the refrigerator.

 He sees 750 students in a week, 150 per day, has to deal with their moods, needs to be entertaining enough, discipline the group and also keep them motivated, explain, clean, grade, prepare, plan, respond to e-mails, to administration, to calls and to meetings. He barely has any breaks in a day and lunch is an hour’s worth of catch-up. The chores can indeed wait.

 “I think that’s the sexiest proposition you’ve made me since Thanksgiving.”

 This time, it’s Edward who laughs. He feels more than sees Edward shift and manoeuvre them until they’re more comfortably placed on the sofa, laying on it together, Edward holding him close. He finally has his head on his boyfriend’s chest and Étienne lets out a content sigh.

 “Are you turned on by my proposition, Curly?”

 Étienne looks up in time to see Edward waggle his eyebrows in a comical suggestive way and he manages a tired grin and a weak swat to his chest.

 “Maybe if it did a little dance for me, I would.”

 They share a tired smile at that and settle against each other. Edward makes an attempt to rub Étienne’s back, but after a few strokes, his hand remains comfortably on Étienne’s back and even just that is nice.

 “I don’t know how teachers’ who have kids do it.” Edward says suddenly, out of the blue.

 “Maybe they’re not having them with a teacher partner. Maybe they’re super-humans. Honestly though, I don’t know. We can’t even manage to fold the friggin’ laundry. Can you image having to care for another kid after dealing with a whole bunch of them all day long? Doing more homework and assignments and whatnot after grading a whole stack?”

 “Just the thought of it makes me even more tired. I have mad respect for them though. There was a girl in uni with me who was a single mom and was already teaching and finishing her degree. I honestly don’t know how she did it.”

 Étienne whistles low. He doesn’t think he would have been able to do it. Hell, he didn’t even move out of his parents’ home until Edward asked him to move in. He’d tried. For a short while. But he hadn’t been able to properly care for his apartment, while teaching, grading, prepping, planning and trying to keep himself fed and alive. By Christmas he had moved back home.

 At least Edward gets it. At least Edward feels the same as he does. It’s a perk to their relationship amongst many.

 They both agree to the statement and get lost in their own scenarios of having to find even more energy to care for a child after a draining day of teaching. In fact, they get so lost in their own thoughts that when Étienne next mentions something, he realises that they both fell asleep for close to an hour.

 He shakes his head, partially amused, a little annoyed and he watches him sleep for a moment. He considers waking him up, but then thinks better of it. He could get up and get a start on dinner, but even that sounds too complicated and draining. Instead, he decides, to lay his head back down and rest a little more. Maybe they’ll order in and call it a day afterwards. Tomorrow will be another day anyways.

[nocaptainreuben]

BREAKING: Fire&Lights feature in new book and it’s A-MAY-ZING!!!

When I finished Songs About a Girl last year, I couldn’t wait to see where Charlie’s story would go, so I was unbelievably happy to get my hands on Songs About Us and delve back into the world of Fire&Lights and Caversham High. It’s no secret that I’m a big Chris Russell fan and, having just finished his second novel, that fact is just getting more and more true. As I’ve said before, Chris has an uncanny understanding of teenage girls and writes so perfectly for YA that it’s hard to believe he’s still so new to the scene. 

Songs About Us kicks off a few months after the events of the first book, with the blogosphere having moved on to new dramas and Charlie trying to keep her head down, get through her GCSEs, and be an “ordinary girl”. Predictably, that doesn’t last long and when she reunites with the boys she is pulled back into the glamour, drama, romance and tension of life with the band. People like to be scornful about the passions of teenage girls, particularly when it comes to boybands, and it would have been easy for this trilogy to be dismissed as “a bit of fluff”, but this book shows just how wrong that judgement is. There is so much going on in the story that it is never boring or predictable, but rather than it being the shallow, sensationalised, materialistic experience of reading about bands in gossip magazines, Russell goes beyond the surface of all that and uses real issues to bring depth and emotion, painting these teen music sensations as real, normal people who the reader feels on a level with.

One example of this, which I was so happy to see included in the book, was when he addressed the manufactured relationship between one of the Fire&Lights boys and a fellow female pop star. I’m going to be very vague about this so as not to spoil anything, but when Charlie asked said boy about the relationship, he shared with her how he was struggling with his identity in terms of romantic relationships. And not only was it brilliant to see some LGBTQ+ rep in there, but I absolutely loved how it was handled. I think the thing that impressed me most was the fact that neither the character in question, the character he was speaking to, or the author felt the need to put a label on him; no word was ever given to his sexuality, just an explanation of how he felt. This was so refreshing, and when Charlie responded with:

“You shouldn’t put so much pressure on yourself... You are who you are. Maybe that’ll change, maybe it won’t. As long as you’re happy, none of it matters.”

I felt the need to stop and praise it to everyone around me. It was portrayed as something that Charlie literally couldn’t give a tiny rat’s ass about, because it didn’t change her friend whatsoever and had no impact on Charlie’s life, so why should she care just because it’s different to her own experience? This, along with other passing comments from background characters about their own sexualities, really helps to normalise LGBTQ+ identities and is exactly what we need in mainstream media.

I mentioned in my review of Songs About a Girl how Russell created such brilliant characters, with such an effective, visual style of writing about them that Fire&Lights very much felt like a real boyband. In Songs About Us, this was still true, but as we’ve now spent a bit more time with the boys, their personalities have started to be further developed away from the confines of what relates to the band. Obviously, Gabriel was the main feature of the previous book, so it was really nice to see the focus shift away from him a little and allow the other band mates to shine. The friendship between Charlie and Melissa also remains a strong element, and I was happy to see that even with things getting more complex, new characters being introduced, and more page-time being given to characters who’d previously been more in the background, that relationship wasn’t lost. Melissa is such a great character, who provides a lot of the comic relief in the more intense parts of the books, but more than that, it’s so important to see healthy female friendships in YA, and the fact that Mel didn’t take a back seat to any of the Fire&Lights drama or Charlie’s romantic relationships was such a positive thing.

The pacing is excellent as well. Here is an author who understands perfectly when to pick up the excitement, when to drop, and how to do so with admirable subtlety so the story neither feels like an exhausting rollercoaster ride nor plateaus to a point where you feel like you could put the book down. Usually when I need to stop reading, I’ll do so at the end of a chapter because that’s a natural place to pause, but with Russell’s writing style it never feels like you can. His chapters often end so well on these enticing mini-cliffhangers, that you simply have to carry on reading, even when you have other things to do. Case in point: my friends and I had a Marvel Cinematic Universe marathon over the last couple of days, and after I picked up my book between films, I elected to keep reading even when Captain America: The Winter Soldier came on. Now, I know there’s a whole debate over the best Chris, and I’m not gonna say Russell is better than Evans, but… ;P

All in all, Songs About Us is an extremely strong follow up to Chris Russell’s debut, with plenty to satisfy the pickiest of teen readers; gripping plot twists to shock you, gorgeous boys to fall in love with, wonderfully nasty characters to be angry at, emotional moments to melt your heart, hilarious lines to make you pee your pants… Reading this book was honestly such an enjoyable experience, that left me with a huge smile for days, and I will be foisting it into the hands of everyone I can convince to listen to me.

[alexdrawsagain]

was supposed to upload this ages ago......

92 Truths                                

Tagged by  @willhernandezdraws​

I am not as open about my life as some would like. However, I feel sorta comfortable with these since you have no idea if i’m telling the truth or not.

I love that ambiguity.....                                                            

Rules: Write 92 truths about yourself then tag other people

LAST…

[1] Drink: Great Value Apple Juice

[2] Phone call: People call me.

[3] Text message: The phone company texted me that i paid my phone bill

[4] Song you listened to: Long hot summer night: Jimi Hendrix

[5] Time you cried: N/A

HAVE YOU EVER…

[6] Dated someone twice: No

[7] Been cheated on: No

[8] Kissed someone and regretted it: No.

[9] Lost someone special: Yes.

[10] Been depressed: Yes. However, I can’t spend my time feeling sorry for myself and often have to push through it to get $#!t done. It feels like running a marathon but you’re exhausted at the beginning. Or piloting a jalopy of a spaceship that sputters and throws sparks throughout the journey.

Sometimes it gets better. And there are many days where i’m fine and then it hits me like a sack of bricks.

[11] Gotten drunk and thrown up: Never gotten drunk.

LIST THREE FAVOURITE COLORS…

[12]  Green

[13] Neon Blue

[14] Dark Red

IN THE LAST YEAR…

[15] made new friends: @willhernandezdraws @therandomninjakitty @the-solar-surfer.

[16] fallen out of love: No.

[17] laughed until you cried: More like until I started coughing.

[18] found out someone was talking about you: Fight me in the streets you wuss.

[19] met someone who changed you: Yes.

[20] found out who your true friends are: All the time

[21] kissed someone on your Facebook list: No

GENERAL…

[22] how many of your facebook friends do you know in real life: All of them except for Will and Dre. I now use a backup facebook account to talk to them.

[23] do you have any pets: No.

[24] do you want to change your name: No. But I do like it when people use my full name for a change.

[25] what did you do for your last birthday: Ate some cake and went back to work on chores.

[26] what time did you wake up: 9:00 a.m.

[27] what were you doing at midnight last night: Passing out while reflecting upon the changes my life is going through.

[28] name something you cannot wait for: This list could be a mile long. But the biggest thing on the list is getting started on the drawing for the third issue. Laying out all the groundwork is taking longer than I thought.

[29] when was the last time you saw your mother: Today.

[30] what is one thing you wish you could change about your life: That I could have my own place that I own.

[31] what are you listening to right now: The Dance of Hours from Fantasia

[32] have you ever talked to a person named tom: I don’t think so.

[33] something that is getting on your nerves: Another mile long list. Loud drunk people who party until 2a.m. blaring their music next door is a good start.

[34] most visited website: Tumblr. Or Amazon to do a lot of virtual window shopping

[35] elementary: Got in trouble a lot for daydreaming and being called an underachiever.

[36] high school: Got way better and way worse at the same time.

[37] college:  I have no idea how to describe this. A rollercoaster? A non stop exhaustion iron man race? A bunch of new experiences. Severe disappointment. Leveling up art skills. Discovering new art? Sadness. Just a lot of stuff.

[38] hair color: Black.

[39] long or short hair: Long enough to put my fingers through.

[40] do you have a crush on someone: No.

[41] what do you like about yourself: My hair now that i finally grew it out to a length i always wanted.

[42] piercings: None

[43] blood type: Red

[44] nickname: Everybody calls me Alex

[45] relationship status: single.

[46] zodiac sign: keep your witchcraft.

[47] pronouns: He/him

[48] fav tv show: Pushing Daisies

[49] tattoos: Hell no.

[50] right or left hand: Right.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIRST…

[51] surgery: Some stitches.

[52] piercing: None.

[53] best friend: I have no idea.

[54] sport: frisbee.

[55] vacation: Mexico

[56] pair of trainers: Something that had lights in them.

RIGHT NOW…

[57] eating: finished eating breakfast.

[58] drinking:  apple juice

[59] I’m about to: go outside

[60] listening to: the dance of hours again

[61] waiting for: My motivation to kick in.

=--------------------------------

[62] want:

[63] get married: First I have to find the lady, dude.

[64] career: Comic book artist and writer.

WHICH IS BETTER…

[65] hugs or kisses: I’ll take both but i’ll be honest, i don’t really hug anyone outside of requisite times of the year and family gatherings.

[66] lips or eyes: Eyes.

[67] shorter or taller: I’d love a lady to be shorter than me since most of the ladies around me seem to wanna date sequoia trees. But Jack Kirby’s stories of a shorter superhero being in a loving relationship with an amazon of a woman have warmed me up to the idea of a taller woman considerably. Also Greg and Rose.

[68] older or younger: Either but within reason.

[69] romantic or spontaneous: Both.

[70] nice arms or nice stomach: Both.

[71] sensitive or loud: I honestly do not know the answer to this one.

[72] hook up or relationship: I’m a relationship man. People are not paper plates you use once and toss out the next morning.

[73] troublemaker or hesitant: I’d like someone who is restrained in polite company but when it’s the two of us we’ll be two hell raisers blasting AC/DC and freaking out the norms at 2a.m.

HAVE YOU EVER…

[74] kissed a stranger:  No

[75] drank hard liquor: No

[76] lost glasses/contact lenses:  Yes. I thought someone stole my glasses but they were actually wedged inside my locker.

[77] turned someone down: No.

[78] sex on first date?: No thanks.

[79] broken someone’s heart?: No....? I mean if it was someone who liked me but never said anything and I never knew about it I guess that’s a possibility.

[80] had your own heart broken?: Let’s not get into that right now......

[81] been arrested?: I’ve been in the back of a squad car once. But that was for my own protection rather than because I was being arrested.

[82] cried when someone died?: Yes.

[83] fallen for a friend?: I don’t want to answer this......

DO YOU BELIEVE IN…

[84] yourself?: My personal creed is that nobody is going to do my work for me. Whether that be chasing dreams or doing things that are difficult for me. Meaning I have nobody but myself to blame for my success or failures.

[85] miracles?: I believe in luck and coincidence.

[86] love at first sight?: No.

[87] Santa Claus?: No. Even as a kid no matter how much I wanted to believe in it. I knew for a fact my parents got me my stuff. They didn’t lie to me. They just asked what I wanted and often bought it in front of me so the belief system wasn’t there at the beginning. I do like the idea of Santa as a mythological figure though..

[88] kiss on the first date?: I would totally be down for that but the problem is getting the first date. And i think that both parties need to be on the same page for that. 

[89] angels?: Like Q.84, there is no higher power watching out for me. The only one who’s going to get me out of a jam is me.

OTHER…

[90] current best friend’s name: I actually do not know off the top of my head. There are people in the running but I barely see them. Ask me this like 7+ years ago and this would have been easy.

[91] eye color: Dark Brown

[92] favorite movie: Raiders of the Lost Ark.

[cencan]

Okay, so this is probably going to be a little all over the place since I’m streaming from my conscious, but I need to get this out: I’m not really sure on what I want to do with my life right now, and I feel like I’ve become complacent.

For a while, I thought that one of my biggest interests was drawing. Before I went to school this past year, I remember being super giddy about just working on ideas that I wanted to do, even spending entire nights working on them and being tired as hell during work the next day. Unfortunately, a big weakness of mine is that I get bored very easily with something I’m really fired up about. This mostly happens to big drawings that I do when they usually reach points where I’m bored working on them, want to wrap up work and post them online. Because of this, I have a hard time improving my art skills since I get bored at the practices behind them all (this applies to proportions, coloring, everything).

I’m not sure if I’ve eluded to it before (maybe I made a tweet about it sometime ago, I don’t remember), but the Fall 2016 & Spring 2017 semesters for my new college weren’t too great for me. It’s mostly my fault for enrolling in a traditional art school before finding out that they were teaching stuff like game design & animation, but I was seriously put off by how wishy-washy a lot of the teachers were in teaching the classes they were supposed to… y’know, teach. At their best, they taught me at least a couple new skills that I didn’t know before. At their worst, they’ve nearly killed my passion for doing any art, even stupid sketches.

Probably the most eye-opening class I took was Intro to New Media, which was a showcase of the stuff I was interested in that I talked about a moment ago: animation, games, comics. It was a really enjoyable class and the professor behind it all was among one of the best I ever had in my 342876384 years of college-going. As of me writing this, it’s nearing the end of July 2017, creeping closer to the Fall 2017 semester. I changed my major to Media Arts & Science after my super good experience with the New Media class. Almost all the classes I’ve seen in my course catalog look great, great, GREAT.

However… my current job’s workload isn’t lightening up for me; it’s only been getting busier over time, making it a lot harder (if not impossible) to negotiate an alternate schedule with my manager. The tasks I do at my job are mostly time sensitive, with the whole day depending on starting & finishing different tasks at set times. So even if I wanted to do more college, I just can’t.

And honestly, I’m at a point where I don’t really know WHAT I want to do. I don’t even know what I’m passionate about anymore. Every day now, it’s mostly the same: I work my 9-5 job 5 days a week, and every one of those days I either play some video games or goof around on YouTube or something for several hours. Weekends would be perfect, since I don’t have anything during those times exhausting me, but it’s the same deal; now, I just have 12 or so hours to do all that lazing about instead, and before I know it, Monday is here, and the cycle repeats (hell, I’m typing this on a Sunday night).

I rarely do any art now, too. Sure, I sometimes get the urge to grab one of my sketchbooks to doodle some stuff during lunch at work, but it’s never consistent. Most times, I don’t sketch anything during those bits of free time, away from all distractions and I have the best opportunity to do SOMETHING… but I don’t. And whatever sketches I DO end up doing, they just sit there. There’s never any other development done on them, not even just to mess around on my tablet for a bit when I get home. They’re just there. Anytime I even THINK about getting off my lazy ass and bust out the tablet to work on something, my mind gets physically exhausted, and the next thing I know, I’m either watching another marathon of YouTube videos that I’ve already watched 342876384 times before or I’m mindlessly playing some video game.

Even if I did have my passion for art or at least doing something productive,  I get so mind-flooded with the big question of what I even wanna do. Game design/development? Even though games are my first love in entertainment and I love talking about them, I’ve never designed any games as a kid (not even one-off, stupid ideas), and the core behind learning how to design them is surrounded behind knowing how to program, something that I’ve taken several classes on in the past and have been burned by nearly all of them. Comics? I only just recently got into reading comics, and it’s still very sparingly, what makes me think I’ll have the guts to learn more about making them? Animation? There’s so many man-hours that go into it and the industry behind it has gotten a lot of shade around it in recent times, not making it the same business as it was even 10 years ago.

Even if I could feasibly do all of these things, what makes me think I wouldn’t get easily bored by them? Would I just stoop to rushing them to get them off my plate, like I did with my personal stuff? Anytime I think about all this stuff, I just feel like I’ve become complacent in my slot of life. Work’s taking up most of my time & energy, I say to myself. Guess I shouldn’t bother doing anything else, I say to myself. You’re gonna get bored of drawing again, anyway and won’t pick it up seriously again for another 2-3 years like you did several years ago, I say to myself. I really don’t know what to do anymore.

Guess I’ll just watch more YouTube videos.