Spring into Summer
Velvet blue sky
Containing cotton clouds
A delicate rose
like your lips on mine
Leaping in green grass
We pluck lilacs
and yellow daisies
Beneath a row of orange trees
I redid a square
Xhaska’s new vs old square. As you can see, the old square has very harsh, prominent shading and highlights, and a different eye shape. That eye shape got hard to draw over and over, so I changed it to something simpler. I also simplified and softened the lighting, reserving the high-contrast highlight parts to the eye area. I prefer the way the old square did the hair and ribbon though, the new hair and ribbon look to simplistic and cartoony.
Industrious Illustrating #63 – Looking to Summer
Hello everyone! I ended up not updating for two weeks because of final projects and exams eating up all my energy and time when I wasn’t making new art. But I’m back with one more post before the end of the school year!
Speaking of which, one of my class projects this past semester was illustrating new educational materials for the UMich Natural History Museum. I ended up designing a new step-by-step infographic for using their slides and microscopes. Here’s a sample of what one of my microscope illustrations looked like:
The other artwork I’ve been making recently has mostly been fanwork and commission work since that’s what people pay me to make (and I also enjoy making). I do want to work on more original design work, especially after getting my portfolio reviewed by a mentor and realizing that my design work has a long way to go if I ever want to get work in the double or triple-A video game industries, but I’ll likely have to do that later in the summer after I’m done with my internship. In the meantime, I’ll be selling at several fan conventions this summer — Anime Park this weekend, then Motor City Comic Con (the Spring show) and Colossalcon’s Otaku Craft Fair later this month, and the Otaku Detroit Summer Bash as well as Tekko in mid July!
I’m still not totally certain, but I’m leaning toward not continuing this blog next year. I’ve taken on a lot of responsibilities (especially in the last year) that I have to juggle on top of an increasingly demanding upperclassman schedule. While maintaining this column has been nice for tracking my progress as an artist over the years, sharing it with the wider world, and getting a small amount of compensation for my time, I’ve finally gotten enough traction with getting into conventions and cultivating a dedicated customer base that I’d rather focus more on my art and chronicle my development in less time-consuming ways. But I’ll at least for sure continue to be Digipaint’s event planning admin next year, and I’ll also continue to work on myself as an artist and small business owner. It’s surreal that I’m only a year away from graduating college now, but there’s no way that I could’ve stayed in undergrad forever.
Anyway, I’ll go back to resting and recuperating from all the hard work I’ve done so far this year, and I’ll either see you guys again in the fall or if we ever chat at an in-person event! (Or, a third option, if you figure out what my art social media accounts are and follow my art journey there…) Have a great summer!
Wolverine Stew: Same Stars
This begins with a question
How to thread a handful of years
Through a thousand words
And at first, I went for that
Sunset over Palmer Field
Over the classes where I learned about
Bioluminescence and serpent hoards
And what to do when a screw’s
Let loose through the fan of your laptop
(Which is mostly panic, by the way)
But I couldn’t quite catch the wisps of
Orange giving way to the night
So down I walked past
Two theatres, tonight with no moon,
Halls formed from paper monsters
From which celebration echoes
A courtyard of black-feather leaves
Where first this all began
Where I found a world of
Strange music and a good few
Kind words of encouragement to
Try this all out in the first place
And I kept on going
Stumbling upon the
Pothole pock-marked path
Taken in a parade of maize and blue
Trying to keep the cold at bay
I ended up before the stadium
A family necessity when our weekend came
Where I realized that the screams of a crowd
Are quite contagious
And I smile with the static
Still singing in my ears
But this isn’t quite it
So I wander a little more
And the sky darkens in
The sweet scent of shadowy lilacs
As I turn my attention upward
And there it is
How do I write a goodbye?
How could it hold
Every last thank you for the
Laughter I was let into?
I think of every
Walk with a friend spent trying to
Rot each other’s brains when
They became too full of phantoms
Every evening spent shouting at dice
Made of benevolent stones and troll skulls
With the friendliest chaos one can conjure together
Every post-it note needed to make a
Smile that stood in a window for a semester
And maybe one more that stays a little longer
Every mask I carefully made
As I joined in the revelries of
The one night each year I start to come back
From the ghost I can make of myself
Every strum and song and
Wild of words hustling towards happier trails
Every moment before the lights dimmed
And showed their rising beams of dust
Because each scene was built beforehand
And sung of afterward, the words a flash
Across a screen we all crowded around
Scenes made of plastic trees and hot glue gun thyrsi
Pinprick green constellations and roses, real and parchment
And all the days spent
Going from forests to films
To markets to midnight vaults
To arcades and on across Ann Arbor
Always with those I will be
Grateful to call my friends
All of that
How does goodbye hold all of that?
Well, it doesn’t
So instead, I’ll thread a hopeful “see you later”
Through the thousand words above
And look to the streetlight
That we’ll pretend is a sunrise for now
Because no matter what
For all those memories and people
That a goodbye could never hold
I’m under the same stars as you
aSoSS 25 | Terminus
Here, sign it.
[Reading card] “Thank you for everything, you’re a great teacher and I’ll miss you.”
Angell Hall, 1:30PM, 4/19/2024
often we spend the ends in a state of regret instead of relief. in the corner of my room lies a box of blank paper: memories that could have been made, people that could have been approached, bucket list checkboxes that were discarded. i still carry the weight of the paper, but there is nothing to look back on. instead i am reminded that i could have picked up a pencil and created a masterpiece. why didn’t i try harder? why didn’t i? why? what grief lies behind a touch-starved heart!
so hug your favorite teachers and keep in touch with your friends. smell the sunshine and taste the earth on the air. plant flowers with your smile and paint meadows on your conscience. make the world a better place, even if only for yourself.
The end of the year is upon us! Here are a few more collected fragments from the semester that I did not get the chance to use. Enjoy your summer and remember to look and listen for modest wonders–life is too short to walk with your eyes glued to the ground.
Until next time~
If you were a windup toy, you’d be cranked up to the max right now!
Pierpont Commons, 5:30PM, 2/6/2024
I’m good at slogans, in middle school I used to sit in the car and recite all the slogans I heard on the radio…
Target, 10:00PM, 2/16/2024
I think this bus has a jerking problem!
Yeah I think I had it the other day too.
I remember you saying something like that…
Blake Transit Center, 11:00AM, 2/19/2024
She will attend to any name as long as I call her Cookie… she’s so big! I wanted a chihuahua and [points to Doberman] look what they gave me!
Green’s Antiques, 2:00PM, 2/28/2024
That’s the only non-Newtonian fluid I know.
What about Jello?
Pierpont Commons Murfin Outbound, 7:00PM, 3/7/2024
It’s a bread place, and you’re getting noodles?
It’s a bread place, and you’re getting soup?
It has bread in it!
GG Brown Laboratory, 11:30AM, 3/9/2024
Would you rather have super intelligence or lightning speed?
Super intelligence.
So a hundred times smarter than you are right now.
Oh… never mind then. I want the super speed instead!
Central Campus Transit Center, 7:00PM, 3/14/2024
I’m going to the bathroom. If I’m not back in ten minutes, get a plunger!
Duderstadt Library, 7:00PM, 3/21/2024
It’s for kids with cancer, they don’t have hair so they make wigs for them, and I go in and donate my hair.
Yeah, hair is a commodity for those patients.
My hair is valuable too, ‘cause I’m a redhead. Rare hair color.
City Hall, 2:30PM, 4/3/2024
Fish can’t jump.
Salmon?
No one’s keeping salmon in a fish tank!
Traverwood Library, 3:30PM, 4/3/2024
Witness the Small Life – Long Journey Home
I’M FREE!!! Classes done, critiques finished, dorm packed! Boy, what a semester it has been. A true rollercoaster of epic proportion with all the excitement a girl can handle on a day to day basis.
Firstly, I need to address my mistakes! My burnout brain was apparently so fried that I actually wrote the wrong date for last week’s post! I truly didn’t know what day it was (the prophecies fulfill themselves). Additionally, apologies for the late post! Between getting ready for moving out, actually moving out, and driving 11+ hours, there was a minuscule amount of time to get anything else done. Regardless, we are here! In my chaos of packing up my life into my blue storage bags, there’s been so much happening. From temporary goodbyes to friends to the difficult task of deciding whether or not to keep my various knickknacks or pass them off to others, I’ve been reminded of the multitude of ways we connect ourselves to the world. People, places, things, and memories all make up the different facets of what makes home home. Throughout my journey of intense homesickness and deep fear of change this past year, my relationship to each of these things in my life has shifted and transformed in ways that have been both gratifying and heart-breaking. There’s a duality to growing up and so much of that comes with how our relationship to home metamorphosizes. I feel like there’s never truly an end to this journey of change and that fact scares me while at the same time sparks a flame of excitement in my soul. Although we as people change throughout our lives and the spaces we inhabit will do the same, it helps to remember that there will always be love and support through the challenges of it all, even if it doesn’t feel like it. I find that as people we want to see the best for others, even if they’re just strangers, because we want to see and believe in the compassion and beauty of the world. People change and homes get moved but the existence of love always stays the same.
To take into our next week:
Ins: Limes, the smell of bug spray, remembering to take breaks instead of just giving up, being the early bird that gets the worm, biking, daydreaming on roadtrips.
Outs: Hoarding to the extreme, letting the paranoia get to you, forgetting to patch up holes, taking on more than you can handle, caramel in coffee, not putting recycling in the recycling, cheap perfume.
This is my second to last post for the semester! To everyone wrapping up their semesters, planning their summers, and taking a second to breathe you all are amazing! Remember that even though life throws a bajillion crazy things our way, we will always be there for each other.
