Thanks Sami from Flickr!

Snow is falling, acting as prelude to the bitter cold that is arriving in a few days. I’m tired of cold weather, and sometimes, I’m tired of the snow even though it’s so pretty. I’m not a fan of winter; it’s depressing and drags on too long. All the bleakness makes it hard for me to feel fervent, which, if you think about it, fervent sounds the opposite of what it truly means. Anymore, I just feel so down and hopeless and it’s hard to find that silver lining or little glimmer of joy.

The other day, I had a therapy session with my boss. It sounds strange to open up to your boss, but it was one of those things where the flood gates literally opened and I didn’t know what to do. I told her about why I wasn’t teaching, talked about how screwed up the university system is, and how I feel I was going nowhere in life, which I truly feel. She told me that I needed to stop doing that and that I need to wake up every morning and say to myself, “I’m going to kick [butt] today!” Easier said than done. I feel as if there is so much missing in my life. I’m not allowed to teach at my university even though I’m above qualified, and it feels like I’m just going to be filing paperwork for the rest of my graduate school tenure. I see other people getting the teaching positions and they’re all cut from the same cloth: sucked up, kissed butt, and were so sugary sweet and amicable toward the professors that if it was time to actually argue against something, they would be afraid to fight their own shadows let alone their own beliefs. I’m not teaching because I felt a play a professor wrote was weak and I unjustly received F’s on papers for that class for no reason. I got a B in the class because I was going to repeal my grades. But now, I’m a pariah in the English department because I said something was not to my liking in an assignment that I was suppose to do that for. I would never change my actions, however, but to not give a person a chance because of an opinion is ridiculous. I hope all the G.A’s at my university crash and burn, because suck-up Eddy Haskells need to just disappear from society because this world has too many of them. Where are the people who stand for something? People all say they stand for something, but if they get picked up for something, it’s screw everyone else, it’s all about me, me, me and the fact that the professors (or insert anyone here) love me more than you and I need to suck up more. Personally, I despise all the people like this and there’s no room for them in my life, even if the person was once close to me.

For me, the above has been a bad experience and has really destroyed me. I can’t write as well I had in the past. I can’t function well in daily life without having some ounce of bitterness within me. I feel worthless, hopeless, and broken. I have a lot of anger within me and although I try to be “cool as cucumber,” sometimes that doesn’t work and thoughts of the professor who ruined my career appear in my dreams and creep into my thinking on a daily basis. I think that’s why I want to take the job is Japan and forget about graduate school for awhile. I need to get away.

Since that whole incident, the need to travel and see the United States and the world have really been prevalent. I just feel like I need to walk away for awhile and unwind by exploring the world around me. I need to break free from the traitors and toxic people and just see things from a refreshed world view. I want to see Savannah, Georgia and experience REAL southern food and charm; Kyoto, Japan, Estonia, feel the ocean at the Carolinas, Florida, and the California coast, what a tumbleweed truly looks like in Oklahoma~ I want to experience Canada, catch a Yankee game in New York! I want to see the stars in Big Sky Country (Montana), and see Santa Fe! Maybe I can go and find my roots in Italy and dance in Tennessee, work at Disney World! I want to live for once instead of going through the motions of daily life! I’m tired of living this life. I want to break free.

My life doesn’t even feel like my own, and right now, I know it isn’t. My mom pretty much runs the show for me. Whenever I gain some sort of autonomy, she takes it right it back by taking away more of my freedoms. I feel like I’m dying a slow, horrifying death. A lot of my mom’s grasp, I think, has a lot to do with the fact that she never got to live her life the way she wanted and that all her other kids left and created their own lives. I feel as if she wants me to be as miserable as her and wants me to become her.  I don’t want to be like that! I feel like a mouse trapped in a mouse trap. I writhe and scream and I can’t break free. Someone needs to release me from the trap. My tail and my paws are trapped and my death is slow and agonizing. I am bleeding. My eyes glaze over and lose life. I can feel my organs shutting down, lung function ceasing. There’s no help. The person who trapped me watches as I die and force feeds me words of “love” and protection. That person tells me it’s okay and that I’ll survive if I listen to what she has to say. I’m dying and that person refuses to see. Set me free… set me free…

I want to live on my own and experience life as not just a daughter living under my parents’ roof. I want to be a wife, someday. I want to be that before I take flight, because I want to know I have some sense of security. Plus, I love my boyfriend very much and I don’t think he’d betray me. Besides, he has expressed a need to see the world, also, so I would like him to accompany me.

I also feel depressed because I am a bit on the impatient side, but I’m trying to change that. Tala knows what I mean, so I won’t get into further details.

I want to know what life has to offer, and I feel like I’m slowly dying inside. Like my boyfriend said the other night, “I want to touch a hot stove in order to learn to never touch it again because it burns.” I want that! Besides, my opportunities are up in this little Podunk town. I have been cut loose because I am a threat to the system at my university. “Only non-threatening people allowed,” reads the sign at the graduate office door. I guess it’s time to take my show elsewhere…

Aside from all this negativity, I do feel hopeful about something, and that’s my relationship with my boyfriend. Since school let out, we’ve been working on a lot of things and talking more. We’ve also been working very hard for things, and I think we are more willing to help each other. I hope so, and I hope things continue to get better from here. More and more, I realize how much I love him and how much I need him in my life. He’s a great guy, flawed like me, but still great. I admire the fact that he has great drive and work ethic, and I hope he uses that to his full potential. He’s a writer and a darn good one. I hope he never abandons that for something lesser than that. You’ll be hearing a lot about him someday, I guarantee that. I wish I had the drive he has half-the-time, but like I said, I seem to have lost my spark for a lot of things. I hope I can get it back. If only I could teach… if only I could get married and see the world!

I wish to unclip these wings…

I will end my post with some song lyrics that I currently resonate with. The song is by Reba McEntire and is titled “Is There Life Out There.”

She married when she was 20
She thought she was ready
Now she’s not so sure
She thought she’d done some living
Now she’s just wondering what she’s living for
Now she’s feelin that there’s something more

(chorus)
Is there life out there?
So much she hasn’t done?
Is there life beyond her family and her home?
She’s done what she should
Should she do what she dares?
She doesn’t wanna leave she’s just wondering is there life out there?

She’s always lived for tomorrow
But she’s never learned how to live for today
Oh she’s dying to try something foolish
To do something crazy or just get away
Oh something for herself for a change

(chorus)

There’s a place in the sun that she’s never been
Where life is fair and time is a friend
Would she do it the same as she did back then?
Oh she looks out her window and she wonders again

(chorus)

Oh, she doesn’t wanna leave she’s just wondering is there life out there?

I decided to create a digital character and see how far I could go in a drawing tutorial. First a little sketching. Then some line cleanup. Lay over some lineart. Erase the sketches beneath. Add details. Add color. Do cell style shading. I don’t get how professional digital artists pull that off in 6 hours. I worked on this guy for 6 hours and I was able to get the lineart done only. Now at 11 o’clock, I’m yawning too much to even see my keyboard. Since I’m on break, I want to see how far I can take him. Maybe I’ll even add a background.

When drawing or painting, the artist has a boatload of choices. Painters can choose between watercolor, acrylic, and oils. Sketchers can use graphite pencils, regular pencils, or go straight to pen. Digital artists can use a mouse, tablet, or pen tool. You can even combine different tools. For instance, you can start off with graphite pencils on drawing paper, then scan the drawing with a really good scanner, and then use the pen tool to replace the rough sketch with smooth lines. You can even print out a piece of digital art, fix a mistake, and then scan the image again.

There are lots of different approaches to all the different effects that artists go for when drawing. For instance, when using a traditional medium like a graphite pencil, you can cross-hatch, make short dabs with the pencil, or you can make really short sketch-marks. With digital art, you can fill certain parts of the picture with a shade of grey or a darker shade of a particular color, or you could use screentones. Some of these techniques are faster, while other techniques are felt to be faster for some artists. There’s really no rules with what you use and different methods can be combined.

I got this whole blockhead man thing going. By drawing the head initially as a box, I just might be able to draw a 3D head. Getting the box 100% right isn’t a big deal, since you’re going to erase the box anyway if you’re using this technique. Really, all the parts of the drafting stage are there simply to give you something to easily expand off of.

Then I drew arms. The arms look out of proportion, but that doesn’t matter because I can always fix it later. I drew what I was going to make a spear or wand. I drew circles where the knees would be, but that’s not so important if you’re not drawing bent legs.

I’m using a tablet by the way. I used to scan drawings that I created using drawing paper and a graphite pencil. Sometimes I drew with a really fine-pointed pen with really black ink so that I could ink the smallest lines. I made sure that I paid a few extra dollars to get a really good pen, so that I wouldn’t be stuck with something that would dry up halfway through a stroke.

After getting the guidelines done, I started crafting the body. With the limbs, I drew two ovals that come together at the joints. I drew an oval for the face on the front of the box and I drew the forehead on the top part of the box. I connected the top and bottom part of the body with curving lines where the waist is at.

Since I’m using a graphics program with my tablet, I’m able to do each step on different layers. Since I really don’t need the guidelines anymore, I deleted the guidelines from the character. Then I started drawing the wingspan. Yesh, he’s going to be an angel (or something).

Then I continued drawing the wings. I’m not all that experienced with drawing wings, but I tried

Next, I started drawing the face. I drew eyes, even though the hair I ended up using completely covered the eyes. But its important to draw all features so that you can more easily draw the features in the right spots on the face.

Then I got lazy and decided to plop hair that I drew earlier and liked on to the head. This hair looks really faded. But don’t worry. I am going to go over that hairdo with a pen tool. You might notice that the face vanished too. No problem! I posted the hair on a separate layer and I can use my trusty eraser tool to erase the part of the hair image that covers the face. Tada!

I also drew a cape for good measure. This was done with curving lines that curve outwards.

I had four other pictures, but I just discovered that there’s something wrong with them. I’ll have to redraw them some other time and add them to this post. For a general idea, I created a new layer. Then I used the pen tool to create paths that I then stroked using the smallest paintbrush. This is done by clicking on one point to create a vector, and then clicking where you want your line to end and holding. You can then move your mouse around in order to give the line a curve. I guess theoretically you could draw the entire character this way, but I found that characters drawn this way always end up distorted for some reason. So I’ve been drawing each individual curve instead. I then went to the lower layers and erased the messier lines beneath.

As you can see, I also added clothes and details to the wand. This guy is almost ready to be refined, shaded, highlighted, and colored. But there was one last thing I wanted to fix for today. For some reason his hand was abnormally large and his feet looked kinda on the large side. But no fear! I used my trusty lasso tool to create a selection that I wanted to resize. Then I clicked and held the box in the bottom-right corner and dragged the mouse towards the center of the selection until the hand was the size that I wanted. I rinsed and repeated for the feet.

So there ya have it. He’s not exactly perfect. If you squint, you can see all kinds of problems with his legs. He’s not exactly looking realistic yet, but I’m going to keep working on him to the extent of my abilities, maybe even give him a name.

Till next time, I bid thee adieu

Alex