I'm jacked up on Melatonin fruity chews, LET'S DO THIS

      Man, turns out I will take any excuse to not practice something.  It's been hotter than the devil's jalapenos here, and it makes me want to learn science so I can find a way to send the sun into the super-massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy and just never have to deal with that total asshole again.  I'm sitting here with two fans going, intermittently spritzing water into them so they blow a semi-refreshing blast of stale water on me.  My back soaks every chair I sit in and I have history's worst case of silly-putty-scrote.  The only comfortable way to get food in me is to either barbecue it, or order pizza.  The gas those options give me, coupled with the ridiculous humidity of Nova Scotian summers, makes my apartment feel like some kind of shitty jungle.

     Nevertheless, I've begrudgingly continued to draw stuff.  I was getting pissed at it because I was changing methods so often that I felt I wasn't making any progress.  I've finally found a few youtubers that both have the skills to teach and the vocal ability to not be some mealy-mouthed motherfucker, so that listening to their videos doesn't make me want to push strangers into traffic.  At some point I'll do an update talking about them, but this isn't that update.  For now, let's talk about some of the garbage I've been churning out.  Remember in my last update when I mentioned that I had been doing lots of stuff, and most of it has been so awful so as to have been thrown out?  Yeah, look at this and try to imagine how bad that stuff was.

     Hey, I'm pretty sure that's not how legs work.  And I'll tell you this, I'm 100% sure that's not how the human pud works.  And mother of god, you know that Neitzche quote about the abyss staring back? Those nipples.  That's what he was talking about.  Anyway this was an example of the approach I've been taking lately, putting a lot of work into the head/face first.  I find some awfulness of body can be forgiven as long as the face is fairly convincing.  I didn't do any shading on this because I have no idea how to effectively use gradients yet, and I should probably worry about getting other things under control first.  Things like basic colouring, like at least the skill level a five year old would bring to the table. 

  

     See what I mean?  Probably not the best example of foreshortening either.  For those of you that aren't artists like me, foreshortening is when you make something smaller/larger to make it appear farther away/closer to the viewer.  At least the right hand looks kind of ok.  I was getting really frustrated with myself at this point, like legitimately asking myself if I was even really trying.   Of course I was, I'm just not good yet.  Try telling that to someone going through it, though.  Sitting around realizing you're bad at something isn't very high on the average to-do list.  It probably sits around the same spot on the list as literally anything involving diarrhea.  It was coming from this dark place that I set to work on my next one.

      Haha, ok!  I was actually way happier with this.  This is a second attempt at Matt, a character I posted a way worse drawing of in an earlier update.  Honestly, name something that isn't immediately funnier with a pot belly.  Think about David Bowie, in his prime, and add a huge pot belly.  Think about Kevin Costner, fumbling through an English accent with Morgan Freeman, and give him a big old pot belly.  Think about starving children in Africa, and-

Uh.

     So anyway, yeah.  I've been trying lately to come at things from a "character design" standpoint.  Not that I'm near where I want to be before seriously starting to create things, but this was something I picked up from some of the youtube channels I've been watching.  Just by making the heads I can usually figure out everything else really quickly.  The head tells you what a character is thinking, how they feel, whether they need a pot belly (they do), and many other things.  I've been doing speed runs, as it were.  Using the same technique over and over again to just drop deuce all over my bamboo tablet and see what happens.   On my first attempt, I of course drew some gross nerds, and also accidentally drew Ziggy.

     While none of these are what I'd call great, they're an obvious improvement for me.  Faces that are starting to look like actual faces you'd see in something?  At this rate I'll be drawing pot bellies and puds like nobody's business.  My plan right now is to add more fine detail to some of these existing faces, and then finally start trying to maybe give them some bodies that don't look like shitty mannequins.  Jesus, at this rate, I might actually learn how to draw someday.