oh boy, it's the end of June! that means the year is almost halfway over. weugh.
honestly, i'm kinda looking forward to the latter half of the year. the first half always seems to go by so quickly, but late summer and autumn and early winter is always when the real party goes down. maybe i just like cooler weather, i dunno. right now, we've got 95 degree (Fahrenheit) weather outside and it's been hell. it sucks and i hate it with my life.
but anyway. this month i've actually had some pretty cool ideas and done something new that i think is pretty neat. behold:
usually when i draw things in my spare time, it's either on the computer or using a pencil, and with both of those techniques, if i make a mistake, i can just erase it. what i wanted to do was challenge myself by using pens instead, so i would just have to keep rolling with any mistakes i made. i hear this is a pretty good exercise to improve lineart, which i would like to do. so all month i've been slowly chipping away at filling up a page of this huge sketchbook i got for my birthday last year. not all of the doodles are from this month - a couple are from months and months ago - but most of them are.
something else i wanted to try out was drawing something other than simple cartoony characters, and my first idea was to do something kind of inspired by street art. specifically the type that's like big letters and vibrant colors, you know what i'm talking about? i chose a funny thing Socpens said once for my first experiment with the style, and i don't think it looks bad! definitely very simple compared to what i'd like to make one day, but for my first try, not bad! it was very fun doing proper hatching for the shading and whatnot, but it also made my wrist hurt a bit. i think the doodle underneath about my wrist hurting is my favorite thing on the page.
the other thing i want to present is this idea i had a couple weeks ago, and it made me really excited to think about. i was watching this video, because it's one of my favorite videos ever, and suddenly i had a brain blast. this video makes research look fun and rewarding. in all my school days, research was never fun and rewarding. it was always half-assed and miserable, but i'm not in school anymore, so now research can be whatever the fuck i want it to be. i was thinking about this one morning, and i started writing a document:
like it says here, this will primarily be a research project and not a creative project, but i do think making some YouTube videos about my research could be fun. it's a topic that i'm really curious about, would love to learn about and appreciate further, and hey, if learning about this stuff inspires my creative endeavors, then that's an epic Chavez moment. there's a veritable banquet of information waiting out there, and i'm starving. that could be my catchphrase.
of course, like usual, i'm having trouble figuring out how to start. i think a good thing to do is figure out how the hell researching something works in the first place, which i have a plan for. there's a book called The Craft of Research, which seems like this giant brick of a book with a 300+ page count, and it seems just right for me. i'm thinking of asking for it for my birthday next week, and until i wrote this sentence i forgot that my birthday is next week. another interesting thing about this time of year.
i don't usually have birthday plans because i've always been too tired for them, but this year i do have a couple. me and my mom are gonna make a tiramisu in leiu of a traditional birthday cake. i've discovered that i'm a real fiend for tiramisu, so i'm looking forward to that.
last second addition here, please enjoy this picture of Spooky sabotaging my doodling earlier.
