Poppy

Poppy's original name was Avery. As all of her sketches are on my old laptop - this is the best image I got. The comic was this silly little sketch thing I was doing in my spare time (meaning I got 10 pages in before I wandered off and never returned) PLUS it had no cohesive plot - or really any plot to speak of. It was essentially "Pretty in Pink" if the main character was a little bit heavier and snarkier and totally winds up with the weirdo friend because the rich guy was a jerk. Anyway... Its no longer quite that! YAY!

The only major difference between Avery and Poppy is their hairstyles. I tend to shy away from short haired characters (and recently, red-heads) because I have short red hair (that I dye red because its a really fun color), and I dont want to be accused of self-insertion. (This is also why I try to avoid drawing stick thin characters (though, from time to time I do draw them, such as my avatar - Helena).) I was recently accused of drawing no characters with short hair, and then doing blondes (which is funny because I write less blondes than I do any other hair color)... which is why I'm kinda rambling about it now.

The problem I've been recently having is I've been drawing my characters TOO TALL. Like, it drives me crazy how tall I've been making them. (The images above aren't because after scanning them in I went in, lassoed the bodies and shrank them to the right size). Though I feel too tall might be an exaggeration; I'm trying to draw more petite characters and they keep coming out looking like total BOSSES. Like I dare you to make a comment about "healthy weight" kinda characters. Which Poppy and Avery never were.

Anyway, I realized that the comic/ book's title "A PoppySeed Affair" sounds like I'm euphemistically talking about opium. ... Which I swear I'm not. It's actually one of my favorite favorite "how to slay a vampire" lores. (Essentially, as this tale goes: you use a bag full of poppy seeds on the believed vampire's grave, so that when he rises at night to prey on the living, he doesn't get very far. Apparently Vampires are obsessive-compulsive, because they will not be able to leave until they've counted every single seed - and if you used a full bag, the sun will rise before the vampire is done and HE'LL BURST INTO FLAME!!! MWAHAMWAHAHA!!!) (I swear I'm not making this up. I couldn't if I tried. Even if it sounds like The Count from Sesame Street).

In fact, I chose Poppy as the MC name long after the book title. ... But I dont think I'm changing the title. Yet.

Tess Sketches

For "Like Ash in the Shadows" the main character, Tess, I doodled lots of character sketches. I was just trying to pin down how she'd look. 

What I shouldn't be doing

My schedule doesn't actually have much room for stuff outside of: project work, Adeline Season 2 (yes! Season 2! Link to come as soon as it launches!), and then chorish stuff like sanitizing my bathroom and emptying out my stinky fridge. And yet, I decided (after Cory Doctorow visited our program to give an interesting talk about the problems with copyright law) that I would forgo sleep if I needed to do this years NaNoWriMo.

Why??? (you might ask; I'm certainly asking). I dont really know. I just feel like it would be a good exercise in time management and functioning on less sleep than normal. I think I've just read one too many cheap (and by cheap I mean less than 2.99) amazon kindle books. (Hint: for the most part they're TERRIBLE - ESP "YA" aka: Craptastic Paranormal Romance). So in rage-not-stroke I decided I would resurrect an old idea, spice it up with some new direction, and actually pound it out with the help of NaNoWriMo. Obviously I wouldn't use a good idea (that I have strong attachements to) as NaNoWriMo is fun but normally produces terrifyingly bad writing. (Which even NaNoWriMo admits, is kind of the point).

Originally I was going to do a totally-not-sherlock-fanfiction-I-swear! I read a kindle book (again, less than 1.99) called The Devil's Grin and it was totally-not-self-insertion-sherlock-fanfic-I-swear! It wasn't bad (when we weren't in the presence of Sherlock) and as a stand alone non-fanfic (aka, if they took out Sherlock) it would have been a decent book. Not good, mind you, for I found the writing too sparse. I know its a plague of modern books to overwrite (I'm looking at you Twilight and all other Paranormal Romances!!!) but this did a complete 180 and ended up on the other end of the spectrum. Too little is shown. What little is written tends to err on the side of telling. Like the introduction of Sherlock. Because he's a well known literary figure, the author didn't need to show too much, but she missed out on adding a new dimension to him. 

Or, rather, a believable new dimension to him. I dont care how she explained it in the book, I'm a big fan of Benny Cumberbatch's Sherlock and absolutely love his "I'm a high-functioning sociopath! Do your research!" Because in my mind, Sherlock is a sociopath. He's the actual manifestation of  a misanthrope. Instead of being a "misanthrope" as many Romance Books (and I mean Romance as in from the early 19th century) characters were (which was an affected state of mind instead of an actual one). And there's a great quote from Sir Arthur Cannon Doyle how Sherlock was about as likely to fall in love as Babbage's computing machine was. 

My point is: as much as I love Sherlock, Self-Inserted-Romantic-Sherlock-Fanfiction doesn't work for this very reason. You cant change his character to make it work, or else he stops being Sherlock and starts being a guy who just happens to share some major quirks and the same name as Sherlock.

I have to admit, quite a few of my story ideas stem from some other story I read. Usually where I toss the book into the wall and go: NUH-UH. And then repetitively tell everyone I know that I could write a better story. Probably in my sleep. So, for NaNoWriMo I decided I'd do a Not-Sherlock-Fanfic where I'd do it "better". And I use "better" loosely because it didn't come to pass at all. I was going to set it in the 1920s. The Heroine was going to be an opium addicted show girl, whose sister winds up on a slab in the morgue. And how she goes all vigilante detective and solves the case herself. Except she meets the Sherlockian character, who really solves the case. Anyway, it didn't happen because I couldn't pin down the Sherlockian character. And I couldn't pin down their relationship (not romantic at all) and I couldn't get his reactions right. 

Which leads me to the second (and final) idea I'm running with: "a Poppyseed affair". Just like "Ash in the Shadows," Affair stemmed out of a .99 cent kindle purchase. But it had more than 40 reviews! And they were all pretty positive! 4+ stars! ... Which means I should just stick to my gut and learn from my mistakes (except I'm a sucker for punishment). I ended up reading ... oh, maybe up to Chapter 6 before metaphorically throwing it across the room and dramatically "ugh"ing. (For those curious its called Blood and Snow - but you've been warned). I think the major thing it has going against it is: WHO THE HELL PUBLISHES AN E-BOOK ENTIRELY IN PAPYRUS FONT??? WHO??? WHY??? AURGH!!!!

Its eye-gougingly bad, but thats because the typeface is a bitch to read. Whoever published it in that format should be taken out back and forced to (clockwork orange style) watch Helvetica. At least a hundred times.

Typeface aside, the story fluctuates between decent, almost tongue-and-cheek (but not quite), and craptastically angsty. The character spends an entire chapter moping and monologuing complete in passive voice and TONS of TELLING. (insert Eye-Roll here). UGH. Whats interesting is how blatantly sexually charged this book is, in comparison to say, Twilight. Unfortunately, it also leads the heroine to "flush" "blush" "burn crimson" and "bloom red" in almost every page. Can I not read a single Teen Book without the heroine bursting into flames??? (Or rather, could she just burst into flames, like, literally? Cause that would be an interesting twist on the rather tripe trope). 

...

Where was I going with this? Oh, right. So after getting to chapter 6 and nearly vomiting I decided to write (not for the first time, I'll mention) a little satirical one page about Craptastic Paranormal Romance Tropes. Which managed to flesh out to an entire story. I'm as shocked as you are. And it even has a decent skeleton to build off of, because I took an old idea (A Poppyseed Affair used to be a sketch comic, high-school drama story about a girl named Avery) and then mixed it with the Paranormal genre. And now it actually has a place to go!

doodles in technicolor

notes I took in class and then colored. I love note taking.

TSU Teaser 3 - WIP

I always did mean to get back around to drawing teaser posters for TSU. The next in order was Thomas, but he proved to be difficult both to visualize and conceptualize. >.<.

First itération. Possibly Second or third, but definitely the furthest I got. As you can see, I didn't like it. And Audrey made a very valid point: its very hard to read what exactly is going on. If you cant tell, its Thomas' back. At this point in time I'm so used to working on it/ looking at it, I can tell, but I dont count. But there just wasn't enough drama/ tension. 

WIP of the second (or third of forth) itération of the poster. I'm still not too sure how exactly I'm going to color it, but after all the time I put into the line work, its probably not going to be the cutout style I used above (and for the 2 prior teaser posters). I might try out (and am currently trying out) a painting technique that synthétises the cutout style with my watercolor-esque style. 

Oh the image here is far more cluttered than what I'm painting. This is actually an accumulation of my sketches, initial rough (the cyan blue) under the shadows and second rough (the purple), and finally the outline top layer (the dark blue). It'll need some more tightening up, but with any luck, I wont have to worry too much about line.

a sitting boy

Trying out a new shading technique / playing around with colours. A commission, so I hope it turns out okay.

Procrastin~Nation!

obv a work in progress. I decided to apply the face shading technique to full bodies (instead of, oh, writing a 2-3 page paper on Digital Ethics due tomorrow). I took a really old drawing (I think something from high school, honestly) and painted it. It needs some more work and then some fine tuning, but, honestly, I'm really beginning to LOVE painting in photoshop. Well, so long as it remains black and white. Color still kicks my butt.

(original)

And Classroom Doodles

Having run out of No. 5 pencil lead (the only size pencil lead I use (that and No. 3 for really super fine lines)) I've taken to bringing my tablet to classes so that I can continue to doodle while I take notes. Sometimes I do more than doodle.

Sherlock Doodle.

I was doing homework (project work actually, 10 images down, 50 more or so to go) when I got that "eff it" urge and decided to open a new photoshop document and play around with faces. I've been doing this in class more and more (in fact, I'll put them up as well) and its been a fun experience. I want to learn how to draw a larger variety of face shapes (not that I'm currently doing that either) and I've been experimenting with drawing from shadows rather than from lines (I know! I'm the line girl!). I ended up doodling Sherlock. Yes, I did tweak Benny Cumberbatch's weak chin, I just don't know how to get about drawing it, and I personally like defined chins.

I think its more correct to say this is my interpretation of Benny Cumberbatch's Sherlock. And yes. I do call him Benny. What kind of horrible name is Benedict?