Reporting from 4am

It's been a long couple of days.  Not for any definite reason.  I've been fairly productive, but not on the one thing I need to be producing.  The last panel of this book thing is just sitting there in semi-completion.  Tomorrow after work I am confident that I will finish it in a whirlwind of activity, but I've been confident of that whirlwind appearing for days now.  We'll see.  The only whirlwind I've been reaping these days is the proverbial.  I did do this-



I'm definitely doing a lot more animals these days.  Looking at all the sketches I've done over the past few days they are all beasts of some variety.  Should be interesting.  As someone important once wrote to me, "somos animales salvajes" so it fits.  I'm sure that'll be my theme for a while.

I did this too.  It's been in the works for some time, and I like the way it came out.  The thing as a whole started in June, and is now eight feet long.  I'll probably finish it with one more thing to round it out to ten-


If I do another one it'll be pretty sparse.  As I said previously the whole landscape of the thing will move around a lot more outside of this single plain, but with this thing as the center.  I'm going to have another hostel show in February and I think I'm going to focus on these things with the green field/grey sky configuration.

The world at 4am is a weird thing.  I feel like nothing moves.  It's an odd period of stasis after the initiation of the wolf's watch at 3am, when crazy things start happening, and the waking of the early risers at 5-5:30.  Every day I feel like this.  I thought I'd write about it because it's 4:30 and I'm procrastinating.  I need to go to sleep, as a matter of fact.  Work tomorrow.  New Years Eve I work the overnight by myself.  It's going to be hellish, and I plan on striking down upon all interlopers and ne're-do-wells with iron and steel and the streets will be washed with their crimson vigor.  I probably won't report again before then.  Be seeing you.

Yuletide

Well, it's become that time again.  Yuletide.  I'm at work.  This has become a longer running tradition than most.  It's been tumultuous over the past few days.  I got to see Agalloch live, which was amazing.  Met up with some old friends and had our faces melted off by brutality.  It was good.  My brother came into town that night, we shot the shat and ate with my roommate in an all night diner where I consumed the worst sandwich I've ever had.  It was a good time.  The next morning I got some terrible news from him, but I'm not going to ramble at length to the world at large about death.  I used to handle death better.  Maybe not better.  Differently.  Ever since I did what I done to my dog, things have changed inside my head.  In any case, godspeed.  You will be missed more than you could have known in life.


I've been throwing myself into other business.  This is the second to last panel.  One left, and it's a doozy.  This one turned out alright.

Brother Bear's slow march, as the reality sinks in.  He's off now, finished with all of this.  The ages of struggling culminated in this grizzly business, and he isn't interested.

I've been to work on a lot of things.  I'm house sitting now, spending christmas in a giant empty house with nothing but a cat to yell at me, and the solace of giant movies warming my blood.  Things were better last time I was here.

Being that I'm away from home, I'm away from my scanner so I can't post all of the things I've got going.  It's more than usual, actually.  I've been doing things with other mediums and methods.  Using dip pens and starting to use gouache for certain things with mixed success.  Tonight I picked up some clay for the first time in a very, VERY long time.  I've since decided that it's something I want to do more of.  I sculpted a bust of Brother Bear with an eye patch.  Maybe not the same brother bear.  But I want to do a bunch of those.  It turned out pretty alright-

More to come on this.  I plan to paint this as soon as I'm back home.  I anticipate a Sunday sojourn to the art supply store to waste more of my precious gold coins on stuff to transform into other stuff.  Clay and clay tools.  I'm going to need a bigger desk.

As always, I had big plans to paint up a Yuletide card this year.  It didn't happen, yet again.  Ah well.  There's always next year.

I'd like to say that things are looking up, but I'm still just staring into the middle distance these days.

So close, so close

These are coming slower, but generally it's because they are more complicated.  This one came out mighty fine if I don't say so myself.  I'm disappointed that I wasn't able to use this cutaway view more often, I like it for some reason.  My scanner is dying, so it's a little blurry.

Brother Elk informs the security council of his own plot.  Mostly, this plot involves letting a bunch of people kill each other while he relaxes in a library getting drunk on expensive scotch.

I've got a lot in the works right now.  For the first time in a while.  That's a good thing, because at this point I definitely need the distraction.  The tides ebb and rise again.  Fuck.

Anyway, two panels left.  The last one is going to take time, but I'm looking forward to it.  I won't have time to work for the next few days, but after the 23rd I'll be house sitting, watching giant movies and painting my ass off in the company of Captain Meowmers the Hollering Cat.  Next time I update here I'll be there.  This has been pointless.

Bury me at sea where no murdered ghost can haunt me.

Recent times have seen me crushing the jeweled thrones of the earth beneath my sandaled feet.  Or if not of the earth, at least the jeweled thrones I've constructed in my own brain.  As my progress on the painting portion of this thing I've undertaken reaches it's final stages I'm finding ways to stretch it out.  I managed to finish one more panel and start another before digging up some other old crap to finish and get excited about again.  Two and a half (ish) more to go and I'm already distracting myself.  Here's the one I completed-


Brother Cat convenes the faithful.  After claiming the council's mantle from the dear departed Brother Lion, the old pureheart, Brother Cat set about enacting his bloody agenda.  It'll end in tears.  Or decapitation.  Probably decapitation.

I also cooked up another panel, long in the works, for the long as hell, multi-panel thing I cooked up at the beginning of the year.  I've decided that I'm going to frame this a little differently.  Instead of one long progression of things, I'm going to do a bunch of stuff like this what will lay out in a landscape of sorts.  Really it's just a way to make all of my inane one-off ideas somewhat cohesive.  Here is this-


And it'll turn into other things.  So far, I've got 3 24x8" stretches of this done, and an idea for a fourth.  BUT it will move in other directions.  Such as this one-


In total, it looks like this-

 You can't see it, because the scan cut off, but the beginning portion of a bear's snout creeps into the end of the last frame.  Fourth panel will be bears.

 The Stegotine and a few others already fit in line.  More in the works follow this green ground/cloudy sky format, which I find it be an easy background for me because I'm lazy and I like the colors.  So we'll see.  The end result of this will really just be my room being dizened with the things, and hopefully it will look like I'm surrounded by a march of monsters.

In other news, an old fire has been kindling in my guts for a while now.  I am on the verge of becoming a monster again.  Living where I do makes it easy.  The late night panhandle will thunder at my step and the trees will shudder under my fists.  Or else I'll just hurt myself again and become even more bitter and hateful.  I'm going to wait until the rain abates, but I'm doing all my preparatory action for retaking the reigns of Bajiquan.  Proof positive that I never relinquish love, no matter how much it destroys me, right there.

I had this dream

Last night I had a very vivid dream.  As I am in the mood to procrastinate, I am going to type it out here while I smoke on the stoop.


I was running through thick reeds.  Oak trees hung overhead, grey and green, and over those hung heavy thunderclouds.  My hands and feet padded on wet earth.  I broke through a line of cat tails into a riverbed, boarded with with great boulders and hanging with thick grey lichen.  A ribbon of water ran through the middle of the bed, a few feet across, and in this lay the form of some great hulking beast.  It was dead, or nearly dead, it's thick brown fur was matted with mud.  It lay motionless and partially submerged so that I couldn't make out exactly what it was.  I stood next to it and plunged my hands into it's body.  It's insides were warm, but it didn't stir.  I felt something sharp and hard inside of the thing, and pulling hard my hands came out holding a pair of antlers.  They were covered with some kind of semi-translucent humour, yellow and pungent.  I knelt by the stream washing the things off.  The ends were jagged, and looked as if they had been broken off with some amount of force.  I held one in each hand, raised them above my head and brought these jagged ends down on my skull, fixing them in place on my brow.  I didn't die, which would generally be the expected outcome after perforating one's skull with a pair of pointed objects.  They just fixed in place.  I proceeded up the river bed, loping from rock to rock against the flow of the water, seeing faces peering from the tall reeds on the bank.  All familiar, these faces.  Some of them were looking at me, some of them were preoccupied with whatever reeds have to offer. I proceeded on my way along the water.  I woke up feeling like I had been asleep for years.


Last night I also experimented with gouache for the first time.  I said I was going to hold off on showing anything until these book panels had all seen the light of day, but I'm stalling.  This is what I did-

It turned out alright, though the colors got slightly messed up in the scanning process.  I think my old flatbed is on it's way out.  Bah, oh well.


In other news, there is no other news.  Things continue, and things stop continuing.  My pervasive misanthropy has reached a fever pitch.  I'm feeling pretty good about that.

On the ever progressing process

I have definitely, at this point, missed my "finish in a week" self imposed deadline, but with 4 left to go I still feel good about my progress.  Especially with how the second of these two turned out.  I've done some other things as well, but I'm not going to show anything else off until these are done.


Brother Bear, after conferring with his elder, gives his decision.  Kill everybody.  How could that go wrong?  I hated this one, especially the bear's head, from the point when I put ink on it initially until I finished the last line.  Now I kind of like it.  Especially the bear's head.  Parts of it still look like complete shit to me, but I'm not going to point them out.  Now it's like Where's Waldo, but instead of looking for some asshole in a stupid hat you are looking for where I fucked this thing up.


A pine box full of dog heads, a letter of challenge, and the final breaking of a mind on the brink.  Brother Cat knows he can never match the Bear for skill with a sword, but the intractable wheel of fate is rolling directly over his neck.

So this process continues.  I'm still staring down the barrel of the writing portion, but I'm slowly coming to grips with that.  I've drawn myself a timeline.  Organization!  I'm getting there.  My poop is slowly getting itself into a group.  I'm still plagued by the ol' black dog.  But I do feed the thing well, so maybe it'll work out.

On business

And I'm busy again. Distractions, distractions. But welcome ones. I bought some gouache at the goading of my friend New York Dan, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the hell that business functions. It'll have to wait until I finish these last six panels, but I plan on trying to do classy things with it. We'll see.

Brother Cat protests the Bear's challenge to the head of the security council. Tragically for him, his pleas fall on deaf ears. All that owl is thinking about is eating mice.

And Brother Bear sets off. Showing my hand a little here, but this is one of the last panels. After his tragically climactic battle against an old friend gone mad, he sets off toward parts unknown. There there may be dragons, but behind him there certainly be vipers.

Two more down, six more to go. And some of the more interesting ones at that, so I'm happy to get my ass back firmly in gear. I finished reading a book recently, which I would gladly cast into the sea. "The Man Who Was Thursday" was written by GK Chesterton in the early 20th century as an anti-anarchist novel/religious allegory about how fantastic England is. I knew it would piss me off, but being considered a classic I decided its paltry 200 pages would be a welcome break from the blocks of Russian prose I've been happily slogging through (plus considering the persistent influence Chesterton's inane politics have on politics today, I figured it'd be interesting to get to know the enemy). It wasn't. It wasn't clever, it wasn't witty, a predictable story, and worst of all chock full of appeal-to-pathos Christian anglophile horseshit masquerading as cogent arguments. It bordered offensive. One thing is certain: Chesterton loves England and not Chinese people or Blacks.

Bah. Otherwise, I've been chasing phantoms. It never ceases to amaze me, the way I can extrapolate a whole string of maybes and misinterpreted hints into a load bearing structure, and then become utterly destitute whenever it crumbles around me. I am an idiot, it's true. But I'll chase on, nonetheless, because the end is ultimate and impetus is real. Irish cad, author and playwright Brendan Behan once said, "The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink, and somebody to love you." The latter of the three is the real trick, I suppose, because I'm eating goat and drinking scotch as we speak. I wish you were here.

On doing things and otherwise

Well, it's that time again. Since I last updated here I have been doing things. I deleted my social networking garbage for the most part, which was a long time coming and has definitely paid off. I lost contact with a lot of people who I don't really know. This is just fine. I don't even contact the people I do actually know. There is obviously something wrong with me. Jackpot.

It was a friend's birthday recently. I only know the birthdays of four people (october 24th, december 2nd, july 5th, march 24th). If you don't see your birthday on that list, don't let yourself get too depressed. In any case whenever one of those people has a birthday, or someone else who is also awesome and I find out what their birthday is, this is what I do-

Seeing as this birthday person is a one who might not want information paraded around the internet, I have excised the name from the image. But I still had to post it somewhere, because I'm proud as shit about how it came out. I'm going to ship it off on Monday or Tuesday, depending when I rally myself to hulk out of my spire and shamble down the the post. Anyway, onward!

Progress on these panels has been going again. After a short period of not doing a damn thing I'm back on top of my game a little bit. Maybe not top, but at least climbing. I told someone I'd be done in a week, and I fully intend on meeting that goal.

Here we see Brother Cat's irrational and inadvisable reaction to the goading of Brother Badger. The Badger predicted as much and if he can manage to survive this thorough seeing to, he is one step closer to pressing Brother Bear into action. And Brother Badger is a man of action.

And he marches. After letting himself get duffed up by a handsome murderer, Brother Badger makes his way to Bear's workshop. So long as he can retain ownership of of his precious vital humours. Here's a bit of trivia: The house at the back with the long casement window is the same house in which, one day after these events, Brother Cat pleads with Brother Owl of the security council. That image is next on the docket.

So I've got 8 more to go and then appendices. That and the writing portion. I'm nervous about that part. I had someone to work on it with, someone with a poetic turn of mind whose writing I love, who I felt could definitely improve my clinical prose, but everything there went south. I've slowly come to grips with that. Not exactly. I still hold out hopes for a sign. I still can't stop thinking about her. I'll still paint something for her birthday.

Anyway, I'm not sure if I've described exactly what all this crap is leading up to. Essentially, there will be 31 images and 31 pages of text linking them together. The story is in place, though these things have not been presented in any kind of coherent order. But the whole thing, presented in book form, will be followed by two or three appendices: the first being a series of naturalist style sketches of the animals that live in this world (all of whom will have human heads), the second being a retrospective section surrounding the conflict that precedes this whole story by about ten years (against a bunch of squid), and the third (which I'm still unsure about) being about the religion that these fancy beasts have (in which all of their gods are just regular animals). I've got a lot of ridiculous ideas about all of this ridiculous garbage. If it falls on any portion it'll be the writing, but I'm going to try my damndest.

I've learned the hard way time and time again that trying your damndest isn't necessarily a path to success. Failure, repeated and persistent failure, also teaches a lot of valuable lessons. I just wish these lessons made this shit less painful.