My watercolor process has been somewhat slow and meticulous leading to some overthinking about theme and compisition. It’s made pieces take longer and longer, turning into procrastination. So I’m trying to draw faster and in shorter bursts to outpace any fussing. Working with some of my favorite Japanese inking pens like the Tombow Fudenosuke and some chunkier nameless ones for filling.
A Fire Horse to ring in the New Year and some other things…
Just two things this week…
Another new piece! This one is larger than the others at 16″x20″, the biggest I’ve worked with watercolor. I had a strong mental image for this and it came out kind of precise because of that. I like it but I want to work more spontaneity into my watercolor work, more pretty bleeds, textures, all the things that make watercolors themselves.
A few pieces I added to my website. This first one I finished about a month ago, a continuation of this piece:
This piece was from the end of December 2024 but I forgot to post it:
This was also from the end of December 2024, a painting of my partner Tess:
Recovering from surgery again, though this time not anywhere near as intense as my Whipple. Still, its been three weeks and I’m just getting my feet under me. I have a longform piece of writing I’m going to share documenting my experience with the Whipple soon that I’ve been working on the past month.
For now, here’s a little collection of art work from the past few months! Some intensive pieces at the top which are more recent and some experiments further below from several months ago.
A wintery welina to you all! It feels like this year was very fallow creatively because, while I did draw a ton, I was mostly focused on working and saving for 2024 and also doing a lot of organizing! I also used this year to take classes and workshops to dig deeper and renew my creative process. Next year will be focused on 2 collaborative graphic novel projects so I really wanted to focus on absorbing art, fiction, and the creative philosophies of others. Still, combing through my work for the year, I did more than I thought so here’s a little round-up in no particular order.
Some favorite things I watched/read this year though I didn’t watch many new things:
Comics: The Extraordinary Part: Book One: Orsay’s Hands by Jerome Mulot and Ruppert, Blood of the Virgin by Sammy Harkham, The Great Beyond by Léa Murawiec, CODA by Si Spurrier and Matías Bergara, Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise by Trade Moore, A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll, #DRCL midnight children, Vol. 1 by Shin’ichi Sakamoto, Prokaryote Season by Leo Fox, Social Fiction by Chantal Montellier
TV: Pluto, Jujutsu Kaisen, Beef, Reservation Dogs, Succession, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Barry, I’m a Virgo, Dead Ringers
Movies: Killers of the Flower Moon, Anatomy of a Fall, The Boy and the Heron, May December, John Wick 4, Tar, Beau is Afraid, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Suzume, May December, Napoleon, Passages, The Iron Claw, Perpetrator, Rotting in the Sun
Games: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur’s Gate 3, (I put no effort in digging for indie games this year sadly)
Books: Wilding by Melanie Tem, The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, Villette by Charlotte Brontë, Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman, Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, Twins: Dead Ringers by Bari Wood, Serious Weakness by Porpentine Charity Heartscape
Remember when I said I wanted to move to LA last year and had a lead on a TV writing gig? Lol. Lmao. Maybe in a few years when stuff gets back to “””normal””” in LA T_T.
Continuing on from my previous post, I thought I’d talk about how to get useful feedback on one’s art. Unlike prose, visual media is something we passively ingest every waking moment of our life. I think developing a critical eye around art is a challenge because of the commodification of the form; our eyes gloss across reams of visual information as we scroll social media, and much without actually engaging with it, to say nothing of how algorithms then tailor what we Like to show us more of the same, shaping our visual tastes without our consent. This is all to say, I find people’s knowledge and critical thinking around the visual mediums I’m involved with (illustration and, especially, comics) to be lacking. So, if you’re not going to art school or have access to formal means of critique, how can you get useful feedback on your art?
Experience: To echo some previous points, let’s start with orienting critic and artist again. Understanding your critic’s experience level re: giving critique, their taste in art, and setting up expectations before the reading begins is an important step. They may have knowledge around a certain style of art, a particular medium, and frame their feedback according to their knowledge base instead of what would be helpful to you. Helping them understand your experience is also key to recieve beneficial critique.
So how do you orient yourselves towards each other? Give the critic specifics: locate where you think there are strengths/weaknesses in the piece. Tell them if this is your first attempt at something or a skill you’ve been practicing for a long time. Tell them what type of feedback you want eg. nitpicky, blunt, a light touch. Let the critic know; again, it’s okay to protect your ego or the esteem of your work. If the critic has no experience and isn’t particularly knowledgeable around art terminology, maybe they can provide a more gut-level type of feedback. The simplest subjective questions (eg. What do you like/dislike? What does it make you feel?) can be helpful to some degree.
Medium: What’s your critic’s familiarity with the medium and style you’re working? Will they understand the traditions and tropes you’re working with? Will they be able to call you out on cliches? If they work in a different medium, what are the benefits of the genre that you’d like to draw into your own work? Can you give this critic a questionnaire that interrogates that aspect of their experience more specifically? EG. maybe you’re trying to become an animator but your critic specializes in realist paintings. Maybe you can have them focus on overall composition or establishing a visual hierarchy. Honing in on what your critic is most likely to notice will help you get more specific, beneficial feedback.
Intent: Again, cold read critique can be useful. But aiming your critic’s eye is a great way to get useful critique. Otherwise a critic may spend time on 1) things you already know need to be fixed 2) things that don’t need to be fixed. It’s at this point you can establish goals or intent for your work—style, mood, visual touchstones, and where you want the trajectory of your work to go. With these goalposts in mind, the critic can then measure their experience against what you intended and share whether your piece hit the mark for them or missed. You can also share with your critic the amount of work you’re willing to do to improve the piece: will you overhaul the entire thing or simply be fixing up tinier mistakes? Perhaps you’re open to abandoning it completely. Knowing this, a critic may choose to focus in on certain elements to critique or provide a more comprehensive amount of feedback.
Patterns: Part of art is muscle memory; that is, your body records procedural physical movements from how you move your implement to how you hold it, with what grip and pressure. Part of developing your work is breaking muscle memory to introduce new ways to move your implement; when you don’t consciously ‘break’ how you draw on a physical level, it reinforces the pattern you see in your mind. The mark and the movement becomes entangled and sometimes invisible to the artist. How does this feed into getting useful critique? Providing a critic with multiple examples of your work, a whole portfolio or simply the same subject drawn many times, will give them the opportunity to notice patterns in our work that we can’t see ourselves. On a broader level, this can also reveal other patterns beyond technical flaws like repetitive color palettes or repetitive compositions.
To end this post, I thought of this quote from Sontag’s Against Interpretation: “Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”
Part of processing any critique you get is deciding where your specific sensory truth ends and another’s begins and deciding, between the two, whose you want to follow.
The most common questions I get as an artist are “What inspires your work?,” “Where do you find your ideas?,” and “How do you know what ideas are worth developing?”
Inspiration is often described as something that happens to us, an element out of our control that suddenly erupts unbidden into our consciousness. At least, that’s how it felt when I was a child but only because everything I experienced in my youth was shocking in its novelty. I was struck by the unknown all around me. I used to associate inspiration with a state of ideational flow and the emotion of joy, excitement. A sort of creative high. A common misconception people have is that the experience of inspiration stays the same throughout one’s life. That inspiration is a thing that just hits us out of nowhere. But as adults, we begin to lose out on encountering new and surprising things because of sheer experience. So how does one get inspired?
Continue reading “Inspiration, Ideas, and What’s Worth Pursuing”
trust not the eye; make of your meat an imaging device 