The structure was not well-built to begin with though.

Scroll commission depicting the Boiling Isles from The Owl House, which I haven’t seen.

Definitely looks like there are a lot of cool shows I’ve missed in the years since trying to follow shows without juggling streaming subscriptions became too annoying for me, though it does look like more things are popping up on YouTube or whatever after the fact, so I could probably make an effort to watch some of the recs people have made. Although technically? The Owl House is an isekai and I tend to not like those, lollll. (Also, I still never finished Gravity Falls and should do that at some point…) In the meantime, I was surprised to find all of MLP:FiM on Tubi, and after finally finishing that series, I’ve just been rewatching old eps. :V

Anyway, this was an interesting challenge. A mix of landscape, character-focused drawing, and weird perspective. I’m constantly worried about overcooking scroll pieces with marker, but most of that is probably just my perception of what scroll pieces “should” look like.

Drawing a bike I know is harder than drawing an animal I know because I’m less confident with bike anatomy, ha.

It’s also harder to balance really wanting to be accurate and what is supposed to be a looser style specifically so I don’t have to be as accurate because bikes are hard to draw… :’) Tan tires suck because it’s harder to hide! This is also the first disc brake bike I’ve drawn, and unsurprisingly, I like rim brakes better lol.

I’m glad I got to use some of my Push/Pull sparkly paints, including a teeny dab of the blacklight-reactive paint, though.

Recent Art

After going to the Ink Swatching event at Happy Hues, I was motivated to play around with the sample inks I got, which resulted in a bunch of bird art.

All of those are actually from April though. May has been a more challenging month, but you can see the miscellaneous doodles and things in the sketchblog.

I am also on my third time inking the Ram for the Zodiac series. I really don’t like how the first two attempts turned out, but three is usually around when I kind of hate the idea of redoing it more than I hate the result, so hopefully this will be the last time… (That said, I have redone inks up to five times because I’m an idiot who always rushes through pencils which is the main reasons inks turn out inadequate.)

I would really, really like to finish the series at long last this year though. After the Ram, there’s just the Dog left.

Commissions

I am (officially) open for commissions again after fifty million years.

As always, I’m down to discuss things I don’t have listed, like rice paper scrolls. I’m working on another scroll commission right now though, so I’m getting a better idea of how those will go. Mostly the thing with rice paper is that it’s terrifyingly fragile and absorbent and everything brushstroke is extra permanent so things either need to be extremely planned out pre-production and/or you need to just accept whatever happens.

Older Art on Riso-printed Sketchbook Covers

Push/Pull makes various mini journals and sketchbooks in-store. I updated some older art for 2-color Riso for the covers.

I’ve posted all of these before and most also appeared in SHADOWS v2. The zine was a good place to pull work from since it’s all inkwork and it was easy to add a pop of color for Riso. The wolpertinger is the only one that was originally created to be printed with Risograph.

• Deer shedding velvet (2020) 🡆 5×7 sketchbook, 32lb smooth white pages
• Eel-heron (2020) 🡆 5×7 notebook, 32lb smooth white dotgrid pages
• Plague crow (2020) 🡆 4.25×5.5 sketchbook, 60lb white pages
• Ocelot (2020) 🡆 5×7 sketchbook, 90lb natural pages
• Wolpertinger (2023) 🡆 5×7 sketchbook, 80lb natural pages

A bunch of people asked for the plague crow as a print at the time, but I thought it was too simple to make prints of. It’s fine as a lil sketchbook cover though. I’ll probably repurpose more old art for other sketchbook/journal variants, so more soon.

Upcoming Events

I’ve been confirmed for:

• Saturday, June 6, White Center Pride
• Fri-Sun, June 19-21, Punk Rock Flea Market
• Sunday, July 26: Seattle Zine Fest
• Saturday, August 1, Ballard Art in the Garden
• Fri-Sun, August 21-23, Everfree Northwest

I haven’t been to Everfree since 2018… In 2019 they had a date conflict with Anime Central, which I opted for instead. Sometime in the pandemic years, they moved from Seatac to Belleuve, which made my potential commute really arduous. Now that the Eastside lightrail is finally connected to Seattle though, it seems a bit more feasible. It’ll be interesting to be back after such a long time, but I’m kinda nervous about it, tbh!!

Also,

• Applied: Slightly Furry’s June Market (June 27)
• Waitlisted: Smol Art Mart (August 8-9)

I had a good time at Furswap #4 this month and will definitely be doing more of those events in the future. I believe #5 conflicts with Everfree though, alas.

New “News” category of Blog

I’ve debated for a while adding another section (technical: another custom post type) to the site for “news,” which would theoretically be shorter missives than what I usually post to the blog. Maybe something in between microblogging and long-form blogging. Like, each of the section of this post would be its own separate news post. I’d been mentioning short news updates, like upcoming events, in the sketchblog when I remembered to, but that was a half-measure and I felt like I needed a separate section for news, especially news often doesn’t coincide with me having new art to post.

I didn’t want to make short event announcements to the blog because at this point, they feel so different from what I normally use the blog for, but I really just need to stop being so precious about things… setting up new sections is an unnecessary pain.

So compiling news in a bigger post like this is maybe my compromise with myself, but it works out because this is basically how I structure my newsletter updates — but here I feel like I can be as pointlessly verbose as I’d like because it’s not an email, and all of my blog posts are long anyway.

So yeah, there’s a “News” category on the blog now. You can subscribe to it separately if you want.

Some recent floating head commissions.

Seven years later (?? what is time), I finally watched the last two seasons of MLP:FiM.

I was surprised they went with a timeskip and how-everyone-ended-up-type finale, but I don’t mind it. I do always like it when stories come full circle, so it was fun to see Luster Dawn land in Ponyville. (Although, that makes the unicorn magic student to alicorn princess pipeline a bit too convenient, and shouldn’t another type of pony get a chance at the throne? 🤔) And the finale song was at least catchy even if all the verse lyrics are kind of terrible. (The chorus is all right.) Most of the music in the latter half of the series felt really phoned in, which was a bummer given how good it was earlier on.

It was fun to see cameos of various background characters and to see how they ended up too (even if I completely forgot the Cake twins existed because they made 0 appearances in the last two seasons, so didn’t recognise them at first, lol). The main thing I’ve disliked about timeskip endings is the “everyone gets married and has kids” part, but I can’t have any complaints about Pinkie/Cheese because they’re both great, they’re cute together, and they’d make great parents, so??

Applejack/Rainbow Dash is a bit left field and only implied, but sure, whatever! I guess it helps I never had any strong feelings about any ships in this series. Fluttershy/Discord is fine too. That had plenty of build-up, at least. And Rarity escapes unpaired and unscathed! 🎉 Twilight, too, lol, but she kind of had to.

The introduction of Kirin into the series felt hella late and super weird, and I was disappointed they only really had the one episode. It sort of felt like they intended to have a full movie or special with them, but it never panned out? Griffins and dragons were long a part of the series and hippogriffs/seaponies got introduced in a movie then remained part of the series thereafter, so why did Kirins get shortchanged here?

The overall design is fun enough, but none of the individual Kirin characters really stand out since they only got one episode.

Even though she flattened out as a villain the longer she hung around, I’m glad Chrysalis never reformed. Her powered up design could’ve been cooler, but whatever; her original design was already the best and needed no adornments.

Event poster for Seattle Solstice AlleyCat’s summer event this year.

I think text placement could probably be better, but it was a lot of information to stick on there, and I’m pretty happy with the lettering for the main event name. The lettering got adjusted somewhat for stickers and patches:

Color also got simplified for the patch. I’ve considered making patches before, but never have, so I’m pretty interested in how these turn out. I actually redid and simplified the lineart for this for an embroidered patch, but we ended up going with woven patches, which allow for significantly more detail, so we were able to keep the original lineart. Simplifying to a more limited palette was definitely a good idea though.

I’ll also be updating the design to 2- or 3-colors for printing on shirts, but they’re still deciding on shirt colors, so TBD.

I think the sloppier style fit the vibe better, but probably it would’ve been better to keep things simpler from the get-go so it’d be easier to reformat for different products.

Anyway, if you’re in the Seattle area, ride bikes, and are curious about alleycat races, go check it out! It’s an all-volunteer effort, and Seb works hard to put on a good event. You don’t need to be competitive or fast to have a good time. There’s a DFL award! (That’s Dead Fucking Last. :P)

Unfortunately, I won’t be at this one because I’ll be at PRFM, but winter events are more my jam anyway. :P My first alleycat was this past October during solid darkness, steady rain, and 25+ mph winds, lol. Being out in the sun during the longest day? No thanks, man.

Feeling the capitalism pressure again lately and have been wanting to draw self-indulgent stuff that I cannot attempt to monetise in any way, but I don’t really know what that would be anymore? Haven’t been in a fandom in a long time. Haven’t felt particularly enthusiastic about OCs in a long time, but I end up doodling them out of habit, I guess. I’ve just thinking it will be good to have fresher references for Art Fight.

I like birds and wildlife and they’re fun to draw, but they also have a universal appeal. Art of birds and wildlife will always end up for sale, and years later, it’s still hard for me to pick apart whether I draw any of that stuff because I want to or because I can sell it for a buck later. The spectre of capitalism haunts everything. They can obviously coexist, but nothing feels genuine to me anymore if it can also make money? It’s exhausting. It has been a decade+ of this exhaustion now.

I think too much about all the silly shippy bike anime fanart I drew in 2014. It was a fun time and I was insanely productive and all I ever made was chump change because the entire fandom was like 30 people passing the same $20 back and forth and it was great. Dunno how to go back to that.

Dogs.

Suddenly and incredibly unmotivated lately and just wanted to work on something easy and stupid for a bit, so I finally made fullbody references of the idiots as dogs. I feel like it’s been a long time since I’ve drawn feral canines, so it was good to work through an anatomy refresher, too. Digitigrade feet are honestly so fucking weird.

I really should never design asymmetrical characters though because I will forget which markings go where even when it’s a basic af border collie. Should make newer normal references for them some time, but I feel even more out of practice with humans than dogs. Bleh.