DECEMBER
Time is flying, as is traditional of course. Two months feels like an awful lot of time until you have to sit down and write a blog post.
Truth be told, I didn’t actually draw that much; at least not digitally. In December we took a trip to Miami to visit family and absorb the trains and urban fabric. Despite being raised in Florida, I had never actually been to Miami before. I don’t think Miami is terribly known for it’s transit, but it is much better than you’d expect considering.
A sunny day looking at downtown Miami from a train platform, with warm clay tiles in the foreground reflecting the blue sky and sun light cast shadows across them.
I did have time on the plane to squeeze out a little Krampus drawing. One thing I’ve never been particularly good at is aimlessly engaging in drawing a subject or prompt. For example, it’s only recently that I will take a subject, like “Deer” or “Pillar” or “Baseball”, and then fill a page of sketches riffing on that theme. I did this a lot in school out of necessity, but mentally it has never been the thing my brain leaps to, but it is a habit (or rather lack of habit) I have been questioning and trying to acclimate my brain to; I think my inclination was to feel that drawing the “same thing” over and over in different ways was somehow a waste of time (unless of course, it came to something academic like life drawing or master studies).
Over the years however, I have definitely come to feel that just going to town on a single theme for a few pages is an essential exercise for plumbing depth and teaching yourself lessons. I am not sure why this concept had such a hard time sticking in my brain- in fact, it still isn’t stuck there, and I have to build habits to try to make it stick.
Sketchbook page drawing the same character over and over
Sketchbook page showing multiple chibi Francescas
The thing that really consumed my time at the end of December before the new year was finally trying to make a serious effort to pick up C# and Unity to try and move Francesca and I’s personal small RPG Maker project over to Unity. I finally got fed up with RPG Maker, not because of it’s limitations but because of the horrible workflow it forces on you that plug-ins can’t really mitigate.
I made a lot of progress in a very short amount of time! But progress since then has been… slow. This has been the cycle I’ve acclimated to; an extreme spike of interest and education for a duration- a month or so, and then a very long dry spell. But then when I return to it, months or years later, I am able to make a few rungs of progress up the ladder.
JANUARY
On the drawing front, January was also a bit dry, but for good reason; For the better part of the past year, Francesca and I have been volunteering with a coalition of amazing people called House Our Neighbors which was lobbying to create an apparatus in Seattle that could build what’s known as Social Housing- a type of public housing that is mixed income, as most public housing is focused on low incomes. Everyone pays a fixed percentage of their income on rent; about 30%. Naturally, the middler-incomes pay a large amount of money, which goes to subsidize the system. Much like with a 30-year mortgage, the real fun begins once the buildings are paid off, which supercharges how far each dollar goes. Vienna is a popular example, in which about 60% of the population lives in Social Housing.
Anyways, spoiler- we won! In February there was the big election to create the Social Housing Developer. There’s a lot more I could say here (ask me about it if you want), but suffice to say it is a sea change for the US and if done right will be one of the most effective tools in ameliorating the housing crisis now and in perpetuity.
FEBRUARY
Most of February was spent prepping and planning for our honeymoon, a trip to Japan we held off for 3 years on taking thanks to COVID-19. We arrived in Tokyo and spent the night before speeding off via shinkansen to Kyoto, Osaka, and then back to Tokyo. A straightforward itinerary maybe, but not a regret was had. It was an extremely refreshing trip, and without hardly trying I was able to nearly fill a sketchbook.
I’ve gotten back into reading manga in “preparation” for the trip, and inspired me to try free-sketching panels of no particular story. Thinking about the drawings as panels in a comic is a great way to flex expression and composition, and design to an image. I tend to liken it to stream-of-consciousness writing exercises.
Anyways, apologies if this post is short on insights or long on politics. I have a few longer non-recap posts in drafts that I’m slowly chipping away at but good luck ever seeing them :)