Fowl Pride

It was Gay Pride in NYC Sunday, but since I live so near the parade area, I tend not to join in the festivities much anymore - it kinda comes to me. And in my sick state, not the most welcome of crowds. I used to be so into all the naked bodies, which are still pretty, but the outfits haven't improved much. I really wish someone would come up with a better symbol for gay pride rather than that rainbow flag - it's just so graphically inelegant. Kinda like this ducky here.

Through A Blog, Darkly

About September last year, I got a birthday present from my friend Rima that has been kinda mind-boggling: I had a rather detailed astrology reading that marked out my entire year from that September onward. It's kinda uncanny: the reader mapped out periods in the (then-) coming year where I would be experiencing great challenges and difficulties, both in the work as well as personal situations. Over half a year later, time periods where he mentioned 'intensity' showing up in my chart have proven to be spot-on harbingers of the most difficult periods I've been experiencing lately. I'm in the middle of one right now, supposedly lasting From May through to July. It certainly rings true in this blog, when you look at the work I've favored doing over the past month or so. Friends of friends who follow my blog have gotten word back to me, all with the word "dark."

It's a trying time to say the least, and while I expose my moods with my drawings (can I call them art? I dunno - they're just random sketches more often than not), I find it a bit harder to write about the details - in that, I'm at least very private.

There's not a lot of people I know following this blog, and I do it more for the sheer sake of drawing, the one talent I've always had and would be remiss not to use everyday, but I apologize if the posts haven't been entertainingly pleasant. Regardless of how good I am or not, I've learned to accept that I am an artist, and my art will speak for me when I can't. And my mood has been dark of late, because of major changes I've been going through for the past several years, that seem to be culminating this year. So the seepage into my work and posts seems inevitable.

We'll see if the astrologer's predictions will come true - maybe I'll end up using more bright colors come August! But I can't stop drawing. It was a promise I made to myself over two years ago, when I realized I had spent so much time not using my abilities after a rather difficult period back then as well. I'm glad to have kept my promise going nigh on three years. I've made so much personal progress that I didn't realize I could, just by drawing everyday, even when I didn't want to.

And apparently I'm someone for whom mind-over-matter applies, because when my mood goes down, so does my health. I'm currently fighting a sinus infection / cold, the result of me trying to fix my stiff neck problems by over-applying liniment to the entirety of my neck. Well, all that chemical icy-hotness resulted in making my throat feel like it was exposed all night to a draft, and voila. So I've been avoiding the computer and been drawing offline. I'll upload those sketches later.

Torturous

I think this drawing is getting overworked. I had no desire to finish it properly but when I saw how far off her right eye was, I started to tinker and then kept at it but with no real direction. So I think this may be the last we see of Oubliette...at least this drawing of her.

Oubliette, Part Three

I loved playing with the chalk tool in Painter, but while the black parts were okay to do, iit's highlighted problems with the face that I now need to fix. Ugh, still with the week-long stiff neck, though. How appropriate I'm drawing a woman named after a torture device when I feel tortured myself...!

Oubliette, continued

My neck has been out of sync and sorts all week, for reasons neither I nor my chiropractors can fathom. This was all I could stand to do on the computer last night while the smell of liniment and chemical heat of Icy Hot wafted through my shoulders.

Joey S., Done

This piece is pretty explicit so I've cropped it out (but you get the... uh... picture). It's a pulley system I imagined almost 20 years ago in a quick sketch that I did, perhaps just to be provocative. Around that time, I got a few drawings published featuring this kind of leather costuming, and people thought I was way into leather as a fetish, when in reality it's all superhero costumes to me. In the end, I got a friend to pose for me, and I just drew in all the costuming, which made me finally realize the finished piece nearly 2 decades later.

Joey S., pt.2

Gay pride is coming up, and this piece on my friend Joey might be appropriate, so I tinkered with it a little more. Maybe I'll finish it before next weekend.

Storm Again, Done

Just a quickie rendering style.

Storm Again

I used to draw Storm so much when I was a child, and I still love the character. But I had an epiphany about why I do. It had a lot to do with her righteous anger, and how I wanted to feel empowered the way she seemed to be in the face of adversaries. I was gay, a minority, and back in the 70s, so was she... not only a woman, but a black woman, yet she was the most powerful and feared of the X-men. She possessed a self-confidence I didn't have in my childhood, both from who I was to how I related to people (certain family members in particular). It all kind of fell into place when I thought about things recently. Gay men the world over are known to fall for divas, but Storm's power and often wrathful displays of it against her opponents added an element that I never realized - the right to be angry, the right to fight back. It wasn't until yesterday that I realize I've coveted that all throughout my life.... assuming my theory is to be believed.

Fall Deeps

Yesterday's drawing made me want to revisit some old drawings and completely retool my approach to how I'm doing them, and hopefully finish them. This color study seems way more interesting as a possibility for the old fashion sketch I started weeks ago.

Deep Blue

Some days your moods control you, and other days you control your mood and can make something of it. Despite feeling off for way too long and somewhat physically ill (I pulled something in my back and neck right before a workout), I found inspiration in some magazine editorials this evening that I channeled into creating, as opposed to, well... otherwise. So much so in fact that I started and finished this image, which was almost exactly what I saw in my head (which rarely happens so completely) in just about one sitting. I'm really happy with how it came out, even if I would probably want the linework to be super precise, but it came out as I had hoped. I added some messy color overlay to the image posted here in case of pic theft. :)

Oubliette

Monday was spent reading old comics, specifically Grant Morrison's Marvel Boy mini-series. It had a great female character named Oubliette, which was apparently the name of a medieval torture device. I left the file at work but will upload it later - anyhow, it was just the beginnings of a sketch, nowhere near done.

edit: and here it is. Told you it was far from done.

Icons

I was designing all day and evening and I wonder if drawing icons for a web design counts as drawing in my blog? I mean, technically they're drawings, but they're so computer aided I don't think of them as anything but design graphics.

Phoenix, Glow

A little more, and I like how it's going. But I think I might stop there - I was eating a sandwich at my desk and the coffee-stained bag wet the paper, so now the sheet is ruined so far as finishing it is concerned (I cropped out the stain).

Hmm, that torso is huge.

Phoenix, Emblem

The problem with liking a sketch is feeling I might inadvertently ruin it the next day when I added on. So I was overly cautious and stopped short.

Phoenix Face

I got on the phone with my friend Rainer and while we were talking, I doodled away the way I used to all the time back home in Manila, just filling paper with sketch after sketch of nothing in particular. This is a typically shaded super-hero face, usually used in X-men to show that a super-heroine was going dark with power. Yeah, I drew me a ton of Phoenix drawings back in the day (and apparently here too!). But I really like the line quality of the ballpoint pen. That only happens when I don't really care about the drawing so much as the act of drawing, absently, while distracted (i.e. the phone call).

Leap

Yes, yes, I know - nothing to write about. Frankly, I think I was too busy watching online anime. Why do you think I took so long to post it. But hey, it counts as a drawing for the day. You have good days and bad days. Seems I have been having more of the latter. Meh.

Earthy

My recent use of brown colored pencils seems like a good direction, but I really wasn't having it and stopped short on this particular sketch.

B(L)ack

I wanted to see if I could render relatively accurate anatomy with more or less gestural lines. I seem to be really into simple linework lately - whether through laziness or desire, I'm not sure. Maybe a combo of both.

Boots

I asked a friend to look into buying some boots for me in London, so I sent him a rough sketch.

Green

This is a horrible drawing, but I was trying to do it to the beat of Scritti Politti's Perfect Way, which my childhood friend Senen posted on Facebook (we were/are major Scritti fans). He had such a happiness about him in the video, and I was trying to capture it before the video ended... so, kinda ew with the results, but oh well...

Man, he looks like a lesbian...

Swurly

This lighting configuration brought to you by memories of Michael Golden in Avengers Annual #10.

Swurl

I seem to be indulging in this looser doodling style of late. It's less involved.

Los Sweaters

I'm kinda having fun with this drawing - I've been cleaning up the linework (although I have to say I think it lost some of its energy with the refinement) and have been playing with color combos. These are for yesterday and today. First, above, is the cleaned up figure from yesterday, while below are a few color variants I was toying with.

Lost Sweater

I kinda finalized the drawing (rough as it is) with color, then forgot to save my file! So this is the only version of it in this color. I guess it's done.

Loose Sweater

I was watching a music video on the tvs at the gym when I ran tonight (65 minutes - woohoo!) so my mind was wondering a lot to the visuals on the screen, as well as what I actually saw in my head. This was one of the things I thought I saw. Well, at least the beginnings of it.

Flowww

This was just a gestural drawing that I decided to fill in. I kinda like it as a doodle.

Yammy

I thought I'd just swirl some strokes and see what would develop. She looks like a purple yam.

Abort, abort

And some days you think you'll continue on the streak you started with a few days before. And also, no. This croquis was dead in the water before I even started.