It's chocolate ice cream

     Oooh, you weren't expecting another update so soon, were you? That's my trap, I "trick" you into thinking I'm a lazy asshole, but now and then I follow a left jab with a right hook.  After some more boxing analogies, you are left confused, maybe a little sleepy.  That's the perfect time to show you this.

 

     This was the first one.  I can't stop drawing pictures of myself from when I was in my late teens/early twenties.  I feel like if you could come up with an image to represent the "internet generation", whatever you came up with would be very similar to this if you were being honest.  I'm sure this genre of person has always existed in some capacity, but the internet made it viable.  I made myself a little sad with this one, I wasn't expecting to put so much disappointment into that poor woman's face.  

     I was surprised at how quickly it came together.  Maybe an hour or two of work? That probably sounds unimpressive, but for me it's unheard of.  If I'm getting to the point where I can draw a few people in a reasonable time frame, maybe I'll actually be able to draw backgrounds that aren't just perspective lines, and as long as I'm dreaming, maybe I could overcome my crippling inability to colour.

     Middle child syndrome.  Whenever I'm satisfied with an initial drawing, I get the second one started with just the highest hopes.  This means I'm literally not capable of being happy with it.  Not that I think this one is particularly bad, I just couldn't make it work as what I originally wanted it to be.  At least my hands are getting less atrocious.  That's a left-hook fist if I ever saw one, and I have to say I'm surprised with how much I like the eyes.  Big enough to be expressive without being a pile of weeaboo anime bullshit.  On reviewing these, I think I overuse some poses, and am going overkill on certain perspectives.  I'm trying to be a little more creative with what I can do, which led to the third drawing-

      Not that what I've been drawing so far has been photo-realistic, but I hadn't done much exploring of cartoony exaggeration.  This took me almost no time, like I'm talking in the fifteen minute range here.  Again, probably not that impressive, but something like this would have taken me days a few months ago.  Now that I can actually draw faces/expressions, I might be ready to start making animation again. 

    
     So until next time I guess, this is me in real life.

Well now I'm even more confused

     I've been bumbling my way through some more Adobe programs lately.  Mostly Premiere, the video editing software, with a little After Effects on the side.  They're both fun as shit to use, and when I get better at using them I hope I can crank out some fun stuff.  After Effects even has green screen capability, which could blow things wide open if I made that happen.  Of course, I still think there's a lot of learning to do before I actually start dropping real money on things.  Creative hobbies can get pretty goddam expensive, and you don't even get adorable little costumes like the guys that do model trains get to wear.

     I made a few tutorial videos for a video game with the help of Premiere.  You might notice the horrible sound quality.  I tried using a different mic than I had used to make the earlier cartoon projects.  This mic was a condenser microphone, and those usually have a better reputation for voice recording than the dynamic mic I had been using.  Unfortunately, that seems to have been the wrong choice to make for this.  Although, since I'm getting better with Adobe Audition, I was able to salvage it a little.  As hissy and weird as it sounds now, you should have heard it at first. 

     The game is called Dwarf Fortress, and I should tell you right away, I completely understand if you don't watch these videos all the way though, if you even watch them at all.  It's one of those games that I'm really into because it's difficult, complicated, unforgiving, and unpredictable.  The graphics are ASCII (a Sanskrit word meaning "ugly like troll taint") but if you don't mind tedious computer work you can find user-created tilesets that make it look less like ass.  Long story short, I recommend this game to people often, but it doesn't have a learning curve so much as it has a learning cliff.  Maybe I'm just the kind of person that enjoys pointless challenges, but it's so far up my alley it's tripping over stray cats. 

     So, yeah!  There's that.  No drawings for this update because for the life of me, I couldn't find my friggin stylus.  It eventually revealed itself, so I think I'm going to be doing some more of that over the next few days and hopefully will have an actual, entertaining update up within a week or so.  Until then, you always have the option of downloading Dwarf Fortress (it's free) and learning a completely useless skill.  Until next time,

farts,

me.

A grumpy old creature of habit

     That was a lot of months.  I didn't do a whole lot of anything for a while because I get skittish when it's time to move.  Now that I'm settled into the new home and replaced all the shit my dumb ass broke in the move, I started back up. 

     For a minute I thought I was going to end up doing a bunch of pictures of complaining about the heat, because that's certainly something I've never done before.  I decided not to, but don't worry, I still have a deep well of non-creativity to tap and managed to make some more drawings of overweight men. 

     Speaking of non-creativity, looking at these after I drew them makes me think I'm crossing that boundary of "inspired by" into "plagiarism" with regards to Will Laren  Here they go in some kind of order:

     So, please allow me to explain what happened here.  Two months of not practicing takes a toll, as you can see.  Also, I'm still sort of incompetent with Photoshop.  I keep hitting buttons without realizing I hit them, and then not knowing what settings I changed.  Still having trouble making perspective work, that's one shitty leg/foot combo on the left.  My greatest failure with this image is that I couldn't get the mullet to be as kickin rad as I wanted it to.

          This is loosely based on my previous Halloween costume.  I like this one more than the last one, it came together much more easily. 

     This one I am most proud of/embarrassed by.  Only proud in the sense of I figured out a few things about Photoshop, embarrassed at how simple those things are and how long this took.  As far as the actual drawing goes, I do think it's slightly better than what I've done so far.  With the exception of the Liefeld claw-hand and the general noisiness of the image, I'm pretty pleased with it.  I think I'm drifting into some kind of pseudo Simpsons/Family guy character style, that isn't really on purpose but I think just a side effect of the way I've been drawing mouths.  As far as what this picture is about, it's a depiction of what I figured my life would be like in my early 20's, as imagined by 19 year old me getting ready to move to Halifax. 

     So I'm going to try to not let it slip so much.  Not that anything is really hanging in the balance, but I could swing dangerously close to being that kind of asshole I talked about in one of the first entries, all "durr hey check out my blog oops I'm bored of it."

     Uh, bye.

I don't really know what to call this one

     I've been thinking about what to talk about in this update for a while.  I had an idea of what I wanted to say, but I'm not a big fan of talking about myself on this level.  Something about shouting your innermost oddness into the wilds of the internet was never something I understood, and it's not something I plan on doing very much of, but for the sake of stretching out a little bit, I'm going to to take a shot at it. 

     Let me preface this by saying that if you aren't interested in reading my aimless ramblings about my many, many psychoses, I understand completely and suggest you skip down past this wall of text and get to the hilarious drawings I have provided for you.  I also want to point out that what is to follow contains one of the most annoying things on the internet: self-diagnosis of a psychological problem.  What I'm about to talk about isn't something that a medical professional has told me, and I have nothing even resembling medical training.  You would be completely justified in lumping my opinion in with Jenny "well of course vaccines cause autism!" McCarthy and dismissing it as hard as you can.

     For most of my life, I've been a walking trainwreck of anxiety.  There was always something of it there, but it really started to get out of hand when I was about nine years old.  I've always had difficulty in large crowds, but something changed and an extra-thick layer of difficulty got added to my day to day issues.  I'll go into the events that triggered the change in a moment, but first let me tell you that I recently learned there is a name for the problem I have.

Misophonia. 

     Quite literally, "hatred of sound".  An intense, unreasonable emotional reaction to specific sounds.  I even recognize that the feelings I get are unreasonable.  The logical part of my brain tells me that I shouldn't feel the way I do at the time, but try getting the rest of my brain to cooperate.  Honestly, up until I saw that this wasn't just me being an unreasonable asshole, and that there are other people going through the same thing, I was angry at myself.  I never understood why I couldn't just calm down, like people kept telling me to do whenever I brought it up.  I don't know how many grown men you've seen weep, but for about an hour after discovering I wasn't the only one, I don't even know how to describe how I felt.  I mean, people aren't usually happy to realize they may have a psychological disorder, but I'll take that over just being a petty asshole any day.

     I still have extremely vivid memories of how it all started.  I was in grade 4.  A classmate sitting to my immediate left, let's call him "Bauhaus", developed a wet, repetitive snort.  When I say snort, I mean *SSKKKNNNNNNRRRRRRRRX*.  When I say repetitive, I literally mean 3 or 4 times per minute.  After a few weeks it really started to wear on me.  I confronted him.  "Bauhaus", I said, "could you try to cut back on the snort?" He got defensive. "I can't, if I don't it's going to drip out all over my desk." "Well then, could you blow your nose?" "That won't work, it's packed too tight."  It was at this moment that I first started having the thoughts.  The thoughts are expressions of rage in my head, and they get really fucking raw.  "Moron," I thought. "You can't have it both fucking ways, either it's so loose it's about to drip out, or it's so tightly packed that it's not an issue.  Learn to use a fucking tissue you stupid asshole." 

     The snorting continued throughout the school year.  Sometimes the anger would build up enough that I would start crying.  Any time I tried to talk about it I got dismissed.  The combination of the feelings the sound made me have coupled with nobody taking me seriously was horrible.  When the school year finally ended, I had never been so relieved in my life.  How terrible, then, that when I returned after the summer to start grade 5, I immediately noticed several of my new classmates were in the business of sniffling with a similar frequency.  The same anger, the same dismissal, and the beginning of the rest of my life.  Over the course of the next few years, there was one lesson I learned over and over again;  emotional honesty causes more problems than it solves.  I know that it's unhealthy to hold emotions in, and everyone talks a big game about letting them out, but every time I tried to tell someone it resulted in a)getting screamed at b)being told to stop being such a baby or c)the person thinking it would be really funny to make the noise even more to "annoy" me.  Let me tell you something; I would fucking kill for it to just be annoying.  If it was just annoying, I could deal with it.  It's enraging.  Not just enraging, but "I'M GOING TO BITE YOUR FUCKING NOSE OFF AND SPIT IT BACK IN YOUR IDIOT FACE" enraging.  Which brings me to my next link.

     The Activation Scale - When I first read about what misophonia was, I was at least a little skeptical that it applied to me.  That went away to instant I saw this scale.  I have been all the way up to level 9.  I've never been to 10 because as much as I get enraged, I don't think I have it in me to hurt people that way my brain is screaming at me to.  I want you to understand, I'm not saying this in a "ha ha man I get mad at stuff lol" kind of way.  I'm saying the urge that fills my body is "CAVE THIS FUCKING IDIOTS FACE IN WITH A CLAW HAMMER".  I'm being completely serious in saying I've had to leave rooms or take other measure to keep myself from exploding in a screaming fit at people.  As a kid it was common for me to scream into a pillow, cry, or just hit inanimate objects, because the pain distracted me for a while.  High school was terrible.  My ability to focus got worse and worse, and by the end of grade 12 my marks had dropped noticeably.  And then, the horror that was university.  Imagine going from 30 people around you driving you crazy, to a lecture hall of 200 people, none of them having the faintest idea of how a kleenex works.  While I have much more of a handle on it these days, I still hit level 9 maybe once or twice a year.  For instance, one time riding the bus (nightmare), a woman in front of me had a dry, repetitive sniffle.  "Ok, no problem" I thought. "Just put the old headphones on and-" The headphones had broken moments earlier.  Panic set in immediately.  I must have looked like a complete weirdo, because my ultimate solution was to put my fingers in my ears and hum.  This is because my brain was telling me to grab her fucking ponytail and yank so that her head would wang off of the metal bar. 

     I don't like feeling like this.  I don't even like the idea of hurting people, especially for things they don't even know are tremendously enraging.  So imagine how things went when I found out that getting intoxicated really, REALLY helped me deal with it.  I live in Nova Scotia, so it doesn't seem all that out of the ordinary if you're drunk all the time, or high all the time, or doing whatever other thing people in economically depressed regions do to get through the work week.  These old bones can't handle that kind of inebriation anymore.  I am really lucky, however.  I managed to land a job that allows me to wear headphones and listen to music.  That's an averted disaster, because there's a guy at work who routinely makes a noise that sounds like he's drowning in sandpaper. 

     Even as I'm typing this I'm trying to psyche myself out of posting it.  Like I said, the main lesson I've taken from this situation throughout my life has been "don't tell anyone about it".  I imagine it can be frustrating for people around me because trying to get a gauge of how I really feel about something/someone is like pulling fucking teeth.  It's gotten to the point where I'm not even trying to keep it in anymore, it just won't come out.  No words solidify in my head, my mouth won't open, and I stand there pissing off whoever is trying to ask me a genuine question.  Every day requires that I brace myself mentally and take a lot of steps to distance myself from it as much as I possibly can. 

     At the very least, I've developed some super powers from this.  I've listened to so much music that I have the amazing ability to snidely mock those with less developed taste.  "Oh, you're into (band)? Heh, that's cute."  Small instances of dickery keep me sane and make me look cool.  Try it, it's fun!



     Ok, so that wasn't very funny.  Now on to the joviality. 


     I still haven't quite landed on a consistent style.  I do think it's getting closer though.  I'm starting to get to the point where I can visualize something and then try to draw it.  Up until a few months ago I couldn't do that in any meaningful way.  It's still not turning out 100 percent the way I imagine it to, but it's getting less horrible every time.

      I know ironic mullets were a thing for a while, but honestly, you can't shake hands with the devil and say you're only kidding.  The mullet is a lifestyle, to be embraced, studied, and ultimately understood.  So says 16 year old me who, in a fit of rebellious anger, sported a mullet for at least 6 months.  Good thing I was the kind of fat guy that looked like he might be muscular underneath it all.  AH FUCK I just realized I didn't finish his hand.  Don't I look the fool.  The fat, mulleted fool.

      

     This piece is titled "Nick Woods: Self-portrait, August 29, 2026"

 

     This piece is called "Nick Woods: self portrait, May 15 2002 GODDAMIT I FORGOT TO FINISH THE HAND AGAIN"

     This piece is called "Nick Woods: self portrait, December 23, 2040"

      This is the best muscle lady I've ever drawn.  She is named MuscleChick Humperdink.  Have you noticed that aside from 90% of the visible hands in this update not being finished, they're all strategically placed in such as way that for the most part, you can't see any feet? I know it seems like a cop out, or that I'm trying to avoid challenging myself, but it's literally just a accident of framing.  You can believe me or not, but here's how I feel about it.

     Yeah boi. 

On trying too hard

     There's nothing worse than someone who's clearly trying too hard (of course there are worse things, it's just that I'm a white guy living in eastern Canada in the 21st century, so this is the kind of shit I have the luxury of wasting my time complaining about).  I catch myself trying too hard more than I would like the admit.  Lately, I've been thinking it's actually an integral part of the process.  You start off by wanting to do really well, come up with all sorts of ideas that seem great, and get to work on making them happen.  If you have any sort of ability to self-criticize at all, you invariably realize the bulk of your ideas are complete garbage and try to salvage whatever you can.

     I can usually help this process along by having someone look at what I'm doing, so that even if I disagree with their opinion, it's at least an opinion that isn't blinded by my own prejudices.  Look at the last animatic I posted, for instance.  When I first recorded the audio, I spent maybe...no time writing it, and just started riffing into the mic, hoping for the best.  I was pleased with myself, but after giving it a few listens I almost totally hated it.  So, naturally, I re-recorded a lot of it.  Great! It was objectively better.  Still terrible.  This process took me several weeks, whereas I'm sure someone other than me would be able to give it a single listen and proceed to give a lot of valid criticism.

     Now, this isn't just crocodile tears in a vain attempt to fish for compliments.  I don't need people to tell me that I'm getting better, I know that for a fact.  Right now, it's a week shy of one year since I've started this blog, and looking back, christ on a crutch, the first drawings I put up were bad.  Right around June was where things started to improve and I think it's been getting better since then.  I have to admit I slacked off a lot in the December-February stretch, and I could sit here telling you why, but it all amounts to one stinking pile of irrelevance.  What is sort of relevant is my discovery of my own process; try way too hard for a while, and then relax and do better.

     The first thing that happens when I try to hard is a complete stripping of what I was actually trying to do.  I try to make something I think people will like instead of what I wanted to make.  This ends up being completely unfunny since I don't usually understand other people in the first place (not in the "listening to Joy Division nobody understands me YOU JUST DON'T GET IT" kind of way, I just get more confused in general as I age).  The most recent series of drawings I made are an excellent example of this whole idea, LET'S HAVE A LOOK.

     So, what was I thinking here? I can explain, sort of.  Sometimes I entertain this fantasy that I could draw comics.   One of the comic ideas I had involves a certain amount of MOOONNNNSTEEERRRRS! I don't have any experience drawing things that aren't people; I thought it would be a fun challenge to branch out a little and see what happens.  So, I had this vision in my head of a sort of cave-troll kind of thing.  Well, about 20 minutes into that endeavor I noticed I was drawing a gorilla, pretty much one step removed from drawing a human.  Rather than scrap the whole thing as an aborted gorilla drawing, I tried to salvage it by maybe making a monster head? Then, of course, my lack of skill/experience in this area jumped in and snatched the tablet from my lap, saying "ha HA! Good luck, asshole!".  It was at this point that the caption came to me in a moment of clarity/hilarity.

     With the first drawing out of the way, I got the trying too hard out of my system.  When that happens, everything changes, even the methods I use to put down the foundation.  This drawing probably took me half the time I put into the first one, and I'm much more satisfied with it.  I even did a little better than I usually do with foreshortening; that one elephanty foot doesn't look nearly as bad as my drawings in the past have.  Still a little fucked up, but not laughably bad.

     And finally, the one thing I'm always excellent at, making fun of assholes.  This was a mad scribble and took even less time than the first one.  Look at that fuckin hand, I'm getting way better at this.  I don't know if this is the kind of lesson people should be learning, but it really seems that less caring = better results.  So please, stop giving a shit, for your own benefit and ours. 
    

Eleven months of minor progress

     I've been at this for about 11 months now.  I can say with confidence that it's gotten better, and I can also say with confidence that it's still pretty silly.  That's ok though, it's not as if anyone expected I'd be some mad artistic genius.  I'm still plugging away at making another cartoon, but it's more than a little hamstrung by my near inability to draw non-human things from any sort of perspective.  I've had to scrap and restart nearly every asset for the cartoon half a dozen times, but at least it gets slightly better each time.  Have you ever tried to draw an easy chair? It shouldn't be as hard as it is, it's right there in the name.  Perspective is a motherfucker, as you might remember from an earlier update where I first experimented with it.  Looking back, fuck, that was some terrible work.  Remember when I said that part of the reason I was putting it all out there was so that I would have a metric with which to judge my progress? It's a good thing I'm nearly incapable of being embarrassed, because those drawings are on a "getting pantsed in front of your entire junior high class" level. 

    So! As I screw around with drawing nude people, watch cartoons made by amazingly talented people and lament the fact that I can only dream of being that funny, I can't help but constantly criticize myself.  The first thing I thought after my last update was that the audio in the animatic was generally terrible.  By that I mean the actual recording itself, which was all muffly and hissy.  Some of the voices and acting was ok, but I went back and re-recorded a lot of it.  You know how you can tell when someone is trying way too hard?  I can, but only after I've tried way, way too hard.  I do enjoy the process though, because it's when you're honest with yourself about how the first idea vomit you lay down is mostly garbage that you can really start finding what works.  Well whatever, that's enough fishing for compliments, here's some of the stuff I've been cranking out. 

      It seems like I have to have at least one major problem at all times.  In this, the hands and feet are actually sort of not horrible, but the face makes up for it by being goofy as heck.  I don't know why this guy is wearing swim trunks in a bar, I figure maybe this is The Palace.  Sweet action pose, though!  He's the T-1000 of chasing down dudes who deny the high five.

      Not safe for work, I guess.  I'M DELIBERATELY AVOIDING DRAWING GENITALS.  This is the internet and I'm sure there are people finding creative ways to jerk off to this kind of thing,  but I'm in the business of making it as difficult as possible.  One of my methods is giving the women mannish faces.  Look at that; she looks like a male character from a 1980's anime.  On that subject, I'm sure I've said this before, but it really isn't my intention or desire to draw anime style characters.  It's just a thing that keeps happening.  It probably stems from my being a long time horrible nerd and the constant exposure I had to it during my childhood.  Fucking hell though, look at those feet and hands! They're so good I might be getting a little randy myself.

     I will never get tired of Owl Man.  He's not creative, original, interesting or anything like that, but he's a good excuse for me to draw nude people.  Speaking of which, I didn't draw a single butt this time.  I don't know if I'm just getting old or what, but it doesn't bode well as far as I'm concerned.  Anyway, that's pretty much it for now.  Closing in on a year since I started doing this, so maybe I'll have to have a tearful retrospective of how far I've come.  Or maybe some kind of party.  Or just drink a bottle of wine and throw things.  Whatever, it's my anniversary. 

Urgent matters and idle chatters

     There are two shows I've been watching recently that are both pretty new and pretty goddam sweet.  I say that about a lot of shows, but we're in a little bit of a golden age for this sort of thing.  You would think that with all the different cartoons I rave about, I must be pretty easy to please.  This is the opposite of fact.  I'm insufferably difficult to please, and sometimes I think I take pleasure in that fact.  With that being said, the two I'm about to show you are the best new ones I've seen in at least a few years.  I'm not going to do a huge preamble here because there's something else I want to do with this post, but you really need to know about these.

China, Illinois - A lovely deuce dropped on us by Brad Neely, who, if you are at all familiar with, you will know from the Washington song.  He worked on some of the best seasons of South Park while maintaining a pretty deadly youtube channel.  The video I linked is on the youtube channel which only has promos for the Adult Swim show alongside the original youtube shorts, and it's one of those things where people are really divided over which one is better.  I say those people are idiots because they are missing the point entirely.  The point is, fucking enjoy this god damn it, smile for once in your empty life.

Rick and Morty -  Have you ever heard me talk about Adventure Time? It's a thing I do ONCE IN A WHILE.  There's an actor on it that just so happens to have been doing internet animation for years; Justin Roiland.  Years ago he blessed us with House of Cosbys (which might actually be why the internet was invented in the first place).  He also did Doc and Marty which HOLY SHIT NOT SAFE FOR WORK DAWG.  Rick and Morty is a way cleaned up take on Doc and Marty, and as it turns out, is the best animated show I've seen in years.  It's as if a very, very dark Futurama smashed into The Venture Bros.  That sentence alone should tell you everything you need to know if you know anything about me at all.  I've been pushing this show on everyone lately so I hope you trust me enough to check it out.


     So, as far as actually making cartoons goes: I'm working on it.  The last two I made were both made up as I was going along, and I think that kind of shows.  This time, I'm putting more effort into it.  There's a step in animation called animatics; they're used to block out the action and interaction before the real effort goes into animation.  I still didn't really do this the recommended way, not because I'm such a rebel, but because I still don't really have a great grasp of what I'm doing.  Currently, I'm only a small portion of the way through the new cartoon, but I have a first draft audio recorded and did a really basic animatic.  Consider this a progress report, since waiting for it to be finished would mean not making any posts for three months or so.  Here's what I have so far.

     Ok, so, pretty crude.  I know anyone out there with audio engineering training is cringing pretty hard right now.  Sometimes I think the whole reason I do this is so I can record silly voices with a sub-standard mic.  Anyway, there are still a lot of problems, like the audio needs to be redone at least a little, and I'm not really satisfied with a few of the lines.  It could end a little better, for sure.  Well, whatever.  This weekend I plan on starting the actual asset creation (i.e. actually drawing some things) which I'm excited about because I actually did a little bit of learning on how to do colouring that isn't atrocious.  This is the most ambitious of my cartoons to date, which is funny considering how simple an idea it is.  I've had some ideas for other cartoons, but I like those ideas so much that I don't want to waste them by churning them out when my skill isn't where they deserve.  Hopefully within a few months I'll be making stuff that I'm actually proud of.  This one should give me lots of practice with character/background design and maaaaaaybe when it's finished it'll look good.  

     Anyway, by this point you're probably tired of both my actual voice and my metaphorical typing voice.  Stay lovely kids, and frost those tips.