I told you kids I art sometimes, right? I do. I art all over any available surface. Comics, paintings, doodles, anything having to do with actual paper and I'm there. (Tablets remain beyond my ken, as I made the rookie mistake of buying a photoshop suite that was amazing and promised me I could create whole worlds but was actually a cruel, cruel joke, swaddled smugly in layers of buttons and options that I am not certain were even in Earthen language. Made an equally amazing coaster, though, so not all's a loss.) Sometimes I have an idea as to what it will be, and in comics, what you see is about 90% of what I originally intended, i.e., me doing something ill-advised and silly and the somehow unpredicted outcome, or, the misadventures I have in the ol' dating game (and if you're getting a feel for what a bundle of sunshine and whee I am, imagine what out there is attracted when I raise my head and let loose my mating call into the Nebraskan tundra.)
Then there's the flash art. I use this term loosely, and I think it can elsewise be called "pin ups" by people who have actually trained or have attended any sort of art class, um, ever.*
*Not me.
For whatever reason, when I start drawing a large picture for a story, it goes all... wandering on me. And what I planned on drawing just won't. goddamn. appear.
FOR EXAMPLE! To your right, note the man in the bathroom. His name is Dutch, and he is attached to a story I'm writing. Said story sprang fully formed as though from a box of instant mix one early morning when I was driving in for a 0500 showtime (so what I say early, we're talking God did not intend man to be awake during these hours early. Those weird and shifty hours that look like the Man Himself had only just roughed out some lines and along you come, barreling through His unfinished work, and what follows is the nagging suspicion that you should not be out here and something much bigger than you is regarding you, and not in a friendly way.
Also, I was SUPER tired, because gearing up a holy pally for PVP is arduous work on Darkspear server, where the ratio of Ally to Horde is 6 to 1.
But there was fog out there, and Nebraska, while home to the squared root of every conceivable nasty form of weather there is and a few there aren't, is not often home to fog. Fog reminded me of the coast where I'd done a goodly bit of two year's tech school, and it was jarring to see past come creeping into now. I passed two people that night-day: one some dumbass chick with her brights on, going the other way, and one can only assume she was only practicing to go into the bright light for when she inevitably crashed for being s-m-r-t about how water and light reflections work... and a dude in a pickup, who turned onto my road and accompanied me for a few miles. Somehow, just seeing that other guy in the other lane made me feel a little better about the creepy night-day thing.
But why? I'm an avid reader of Stephen King and his contemporaries, and this setting is more than likely not "stranger saves day with highbeams" as much as "false sense of security regarding simple-looking blonde men in trucks." And yet, it was a comfort. Maybe it was just seeing another person out and about, like the unofficial military axiom* of "if you're going to be wrong, do it in a group; it's harder to punish everyone if everyone's doing it wrong," or maybe it's the same reason you go into your parents' room when your dreams yield snakes and strange men and not the oft-promised visions of sugar plums. (I'm 28 at the end of the month, and I wouldn't know a sugar plum from a squirrel shitting in a hat at this point. Whoever wrote that damn poem owes me at least 10 of them and a pound of whatever marzipan is. I envision it to be like taffy.) Regardless, I found the company of a stranger almost protective in nature, and the rusty spring of my brain toaster prompty popped up a half-warmed story-tart.
*This axiom being a corollary to the main military law of "if one effs up, EFF UP EVERYONE ELSE WHO WAS IN THE MILITARY AT THE SAME TIME," and is much less liked, hence the informal invoking of the corollary in the first place.
And that thing up there is the best I can do for the guy. Whatta ripoff, eh? I've been experimenting with watercolor pencils, trying to get that blendy, faded and yes, watery look to them, but that? That looks like I drew a bathroom, and then dropped this in one. What say the nonexistant peanuts in my gallery? Return with haste to the water-based acrylics of my youth? Keep fighting the fight with my poo-pencils? Or take a damn class? The choice is yours.*
*Not really. Night class art school? I know recreational drug use when I hear it, winking face made of punctuation here.
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