Good Enough is Enough

I honestly thought I'd already posted these, but I can't seem to find them. I was probably waiting until the collection was "complete".

1. Socks
Drawtober 2022 was off to a rough start. I think I might have even been the one who suggested "socks" as a prompt because it seemed like a cute idea. And I hate this. I still think it's a cute idea, but I rushed the execution and just everything about it is sloppy and annoying.



2. Apple
And I hate this one even more. I had this idea in my head that an apple done entirely in glitter pen would be amazing, but my color selections were too limited and even after experimenting with layering, I couldn't get it to work and I'm just pretending this is done because I give up on it.


3. Memory
This is the first one I like. It's not "good" as such. The perspective is all wonky for one thing. But since it's evoking childhood memories, I think it's fitting that it's done in a childish style.

I keep meaning to make a post about art supplies. Not like formal reviews, but just notes of what I liked and will buy again and what I will definitely *not* buy again and what didn't really work for me but might for others.

Art supplies are probably my biggest impulse-purchase expense after junk food. (The fact that I have likely spent more on Doritos and Oreos than on markers and sketchbooks, is itself pretty sad, but probably true.)

I just ordered two more sketchbooks that I absolutely do not need. (Why am I so compelled to buy sketchbooks faster than I can fill them up?)

And I've recently thrown out a few things (two markers for being defective, which I mentioned in a prior post plus one marker that I just used up) which had me thinking. I've also misplaced a favorite pen that didn't even register as being a favorite until I couldn't find it.

But every time I think about writing a post about art supplies I think to myself that I should take pictures, which involves uploading pictures, and I'm lazy and it never happens. So this is me nagging myself to do it already.

Pictures to upload: Tombow markers (Tombow makes a ton of things that are completely unlike each other so I kind of need a visual to be able to make clear "this one not that one".

things to discuss...

alcohol markers: Copic vs Blick vs all the others, brush tip vs bullet tip (I'm finding myself preferring the hard tip instead of the brush tip which seems to be the opposite of most art YouTubers that I watch).

current favorites: Fudenosuke pen, Le Pen, 4H pencil, erasable colored pencils, mechanical pencil, Talens sketchbook, my trusty Pilot pens...

things I hate: I'm so rageful about Crescent Rendr sketchbooks. If I hated everything about them, I wouldn't hate them so much. But I'm beyond annoyed that I like the paper and hate the binding so much that I can't stand to draw in them. It's like they are taunting me.

Oh and I recently gave away a couple of Pentel Pocket Brush Pens to a friend because I just cannot get the hang of drawing with a soft brush. (I kept the black one the idea of continuing to practice in the future, but I gave away the sepia and dark gray.)

There was more than this. So much more than this. But I'm too unfocused to sort it out and I need to get ready for work.

Should I just update this as one big masterpost discussion of art supplies or should each topic get its own post?

Public Service Announcement for anyone who uses alcohol markers.

So there are a whole bunch of competing brands for alcohol markers, but a lot of the cheap ones use the same color name and numbering system, which has lead people to suspect they are using the same ink and just changing the name on the barrel for some reason. Most of these cheap alcohol markers are fine and even this bad experience hasn't really dissuaded me from buying random art supplies. (I have a handful of favorite art supplies, but otherwise I'm not terribly brand loyal about things.)

I'm very glad that I saw a YouTube video from someone who had the same experience not long before this happened so instead of imagining I was going crazy, I went, "Oh, I bet it's that thing I heard can happen" and tested it out on a larger swatch. Thus this only damaged the back pages of my sketchbook that I use for messy swatches and no harm was done. (The person whose video I watched on YouTube had some artwork ruined and was thus justifiably distraught.)

So the brand mentioned in the YouTube vid was Ohuhu which surprised me a bit because while they have a reputation for being "cheap", they are very much a brand that's been pushing their YouTube advertising and thus not considered a "knock off" brand really. However, Ohuhu *is* one of those brands that shares the same color name and numbering system with a bunch of clear knock-offs so I think there might have been a bad batch of ink at some point.

Anyway... what sometimes happens is that the marker will go down looking normal and days later a yellowish stain appears on the *facing* page as well as the page behind. It's some kind of chemical reaction that affects the paper that touches the ink even after it's dry.

So I had swatched out all my "TouchNew" markers and then a few days later noticed a little rectangle of yellow on the page opposite the swatch. I matched it up to just two of the markers and did a larger swatch to test for sure. (Super lucky that out of a large set only two markers were bad.)

This is the blank page opposite my swatch page.


In addition to swatching out the markers that I was pretty sure were the bad ones, I also swatched a "TouchYouchYouch" (who names these?) marker with an identical color name and number, which did not transfer any staining to the opposite page.

So, just some advice, if you are going to buy cheap art supplies, swatch them and give the swatches a few days to test if any chemical reactions have occurred on your facing pages before you use them for art.

(It really starts out subtle so like a day or two after my test I was questioning whether I was imagining things, but by day three it was dramatic enough that if you tilt your head to the side, you can even sort of see the letters "T.NEW" inverted on the page.)

I'll upload some photos later (including photos of some of the paintings that resulted from the sketchbook) but for now, here's the whole thing.

I played around with digital coloring it, but other than the rainbow icon, I wasn't happy with any of my coloring efforts so I'm leaving the original in the sketchbook monochrome.

Lots and lots of mixed feelings about this sketchbook. I loved the binding; it completely opens up flat. It's softcover which I don't like as well as hardcover, but then it was thick enough that that mostly didn't matter. I have this weird tactile aversion to the paper; it felt like a thick newsprint to me and it just annoyed me. I mostly only worked on one side of the page because there was a lot of bleed through on the pages (not just from obvious things like alcohol markers, but also other pens). Wet media wrinkled the pages somewhat, but not as bad as some paper does and some of the watercolor pages ended up being my favorite. The brand was Picadilly and it's pretty cheap so I can't say anything too bad about it. Final verdict: Worked well with pen, ink, and watercolor. Okay for pencil. Sucked the life out of markers. The open-flat binding was fantastic.

This sketchbook also spans all of 2020, which was a bit of a rollercoaster. I donated a lot of money I could NOT (edited to add the "not") afford to political causes and bought a lot of political stickers. (I hate feeling that voting with your dollars has more impact than voting with your actual VOTE, but I suspect it's true.) So I covered up a lot of the back-sides of pages with bleed-through by putting bumper stickers on them.



You can see more of the political stickers in this video, but fair warning that it will give you motion sickness because I'm terrible at trying to take video. If anyone does struggle through the video and want a better picture of something that I didn't include, just let me know.

(Some of these were posted on my old account and I spent a bit more time editing them back then. The ones I photographed recently, I just don't have the patience to edit the photos some some pictures might look a bit wonky.)
01 02 03 04
05 06 07 08
09 10 11 12
13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24

digital edits of Venom fanart:

For a story about Venom sampling a variety of human food...

For a story about Venom eating a drug-dealer who if I remember correctly had drugs in his pocket...


miscellaneous babble about art

( 03 )

( 04 )

( 08 )

( 12-13 )

( 21 )

( 22 )

I really need to weed these sketchbook re-caps down to a like a top-ten list or something. I always feel like I'm including unnecessary crap, but sometimes even the mediocre drawings have stories I want to tell (i.e. M*A*S*H signpost).

I started this sketchbook meticulously recording which art supplies were used on each piece and I seem to have ended it not paying attention to anything. The blue plant people were clearly done in a variety of media because only the blue and black bled through to the other side (so alcohol or oil-based markers).


I always misremember this one being in a larger sketchbook because I tend to have it in my head that I need a larger page for realistic drawings, but this size sketchbook actually seems to work pretty well for this.



And just to prove that I'm not just using this cataloging-old-sketchbooks project as an excuse to avoid new artwork. Here's a drawing I did yesterday and then digitally colored. (I'll admit that I haven't done much new art lately, but I'm slowly adding pages to sketchbook 15 and sometimes even working on sketchbook 14.)

I also combined all the thumbnails into one post for better organization: Sketchbook 4

I'm still a bit conflicted on how best to handle these old sketchbook posts. A thumbnail-only post feels more efficient, but sometimes I just want to babble about things and I like the way the larger sizes look. So ... expect more inconsistent formatting.

The master list of all of my sketchbooks post shows you how far we have yet to go.

Ugh, three versions of this and none of them are good. I would have been much better off just making up my mind (ha!) and picking a single design so I could spend more time doing it right.


One of the problems with these sketches is that I had this stubborn purist attitude that sketching anything out with pencil first was cheating. I felt Inktober had to be entirely freehand ink and I never did really get the hang of that brush pen so everything just looks sloppy. (The general idea was that the "angular" dragon and the "swollen" dragon were the same dragon before-and-after a hearty meal.)


I still own this bottle. I should try and draw it again and see if I can get the angles less wonky. For the most part, I like the look of this, but it's just slightly off.


I don't seem to have given enough thought to perspective on this one.


Playing around with ideas for the "broken" prompt. I thought a broken doll would be a cool idea, but I didn't follow through on it. You can see a tiny sketch of the one I decided to go with. At this scale, I don't think you can tell what it's supposed to be.


This was such a cool reference photo and I have no idea who the photographer was. (Found via a google image search and I don't remember if it wasn't identified at all or if I just failed to put the effort into looking.)


So there it is, 2018, my first and possibly last ever Inktober. The drawings done with the Pilot pen ended up being my favorites.

This is one of my favorite sketchbooks despite the fact that I don't think it was even intended as a sketchbook. I think it's supposed to be a journal maybe? I bought it in a Celtic-themed gift shop that didn't have any art supplies so it definitely had journal vibes at the time. And it was SO PRETTY that it was one of those things that just sat there and never got used because I didn't want to ruin it. (I don't save journals long term because I am inevitably overcome by the cringe so I knew if I wrote anything in it, I'd end up destroying it eventually.) In 2018, I finally decided to give Inktober a try after years of watching others talk about it. And I realized this was the perfect "sketchbook" to do it in. (This ended up being not only my first Inktober, but the only such challenge I have actually completed.

Here's the cover from different angles to try and convey the pretty shimmer of the embossed cover:



It even had beautiful endpaper.


You can see why it was so intimidating to make that first mark.



I desperately wanted to love this Pentel Pocket Brush Pen because I'd seen so many other artists gushing about how great it was. Every now and then I still dig it out and it does have the advantage of being very quick. If I want to loosely scribble something out, it goes much faster than those sketches where I get it into my head that I need to crosshatch every little detail with tiny lines. But ... I just never got the hang of it. I can't do anything neat and controlled with a brush so it's always sloppy (and in a way that is very much not deliberate so I can't even hide behind "it's just my style"). Oddly, I never really fell in love with the micron fineliners either. At any rate, this was mainly a lot of testing of new art supplies in anticipation of Inktober.


Trying out ideas for "star" and "spell" ahead of time.


Also experimented with ink and dip pens, but ended up mixing-and-matching a lot of different media. I love the look artists get when they specialize in a specific style and media and really master it and yet I can never make up my mind what I want to do so I'm mediocre in dozens of things instead of getting good at any one thing. I started out fully intending to have this be black-ink-only and then thought about black-and-purple, before very quickly surrendering to any and all colors. So day one of Inktober, I actually did TWO drawings just because I couldn't make up my mind.


So here's part of the thing I hate about these monthly drawing challenges and the thing I wish I had remembered before I decided to do one again in sketchbook 14. (I already hate, hate, hate sketchbook #14 and while there are reasons related to the sketchbook itself, another main reason is that I got it into my head that I was going to do one of these challenges and to "motivate" myself I pre-filled all the prompt names. I don't mean I made a list, I pre-wrote the NAMES of all the prompts on the pages in giant letters so those pages are kind of ruined if I don't draw something that at least slightly relates to the prompt. And then I was instantly unmotivated to so anything, so now it's almost a year later and I've only filled up a handful of pages.) Ahem ... here's the thing I hate about these monthly drawing challenges, you not only have to draw something every day, but there's this social pressure to be clever with the prompts. And I was all-in on this first attempt. For "Tranquil" I thought of the "Sea of Tranquility" on the moon and I was so proud of myself. But durking Inktober a gazillion other people are all drawing the same prompts, having the same "unique" ideas, and then executing the idea ten times better. I embrace the "don't compare yourself to other artists" advice, but it's hard to maintain that when a planet full of talented people are all doing roughly the same thing at the same time.


Another day of making extra work for myself because I couldn't decide between purple and black and wasn't happy with my first attempt. (I also started to regret that I couldn't stick to a theme, because I ended up doing a lot of dragons and it would have been cool if I could have thought up a way to incorporate dragons into all of the drawings, but ... hey, just glad I actually finished this at all.)




My favorite is of course just a nonsense doodle that I spent comparatively little time on.



I've always been weirdly fond of these faux-industrial doodles. I never have any idea what these are even supposed to be.



More art spam will follow, but I have errands to take care of now.

I swear this is the last one from sketchbook #3 and I'll try to be more reasonable about how many photos I post from sketchbook #4.