Sorry, I lived in China several times in the GW Bush Era, so I often practiced Chinese. I was too lazy to edit it out. Just ignore it...
I have experimented with different styles including a more Disney-like, or a more anime or cartoonish look... mostly because I was thinking of a manga version for one of my stories... I guess it
s good to be open to anything... right?
Some of these sketches are incredibly painful to me.... In 2007/2008, I was trying to go to CALARTS and my friends in California were SO GOOD TO ME, and even tried to help me...
I kept struggling with my art, and I felt that it wasn't good enough, and I kept getting the proportions wrong because I spent too much time drawing furries/anthros the years before that...
I had several set-backs, including getting signed up for THE EXACT WRONG life drawing class to do a life drawing portfolio class in Cambridge for the Harvard affiliate Adult Education school. I needed a GESTURE quick poses life drawing class, and they put me into the LONG POSES class which was a a waste of time & money... I didn't even KNOW it was THE WRONG CLASS until 5 weeks in when I asked the instructor why he wasn't doing the gestures...
Basically, what happened was my spouse signed me up for the class, and his English wasn't very good, and when he was asking for the classes, he thought he got the right one, but didn't... and 5 weeks in, you can't get ur money back... they also drove a long time with me, and my portfolio all the way in Cambridge Boston and sat in the car at night, even in the snow, just so I could take THE WRONG CLASS.
I was so frustrated, and I often cried...I was so depressed, and even went through some very bad back-stabbing betrayals with a number of NOW ex-friends... plural.
I was also New Age "spiritual" back then, and it just seemed like everything was against me....
Then, literally, and actually, after I had already gone to California in the summer of 2007 and my 2 really great friends were so perfectly wonderful to me, and I came back to work on my portfolio, because CALARTS really liked me, the Economic Melt Down happened, and the Big Bail Outs...
I was devastated.
It was like everything I'd ever believed in was just shredded or nuked, and the fall-out hadn't even hit me yet...
I used to pray, and chant, and burn incense, and meditate... but, when it was all torn asunder, I couldn't meditate at all...
I used to have a Newspaper with the Front Page with the Headline "777" meaning the 777 point drop in the stock market for the DOW by September 2008.
And, from about 2007-2009 a number of relationships just popped off... some had to go, and others went badly without any warning... some people even died, or committed suicide, or lost their minds and became addicts...
When the stock market crashed, I KNEW it was ALL OVER. THE END.... that ALL of my work was in vain and naught... Our business and only JUST started to pick back up.... when everything just fell out...
I used to stay in bed crying from painful overwhelming circumstances... I felt so ashamed, and powerless...
And, when I sat at my business in the mall, with my sketch book trying desperately to DRAW, i was even more distraught to find that I COULD NOT DRAW.
I hope that YOU will NEVER KNOW what that FEELS LIKE. It's the worst feeling to ever experience...
No matter where you go, and what you do, that is always there... when you go into another room to get away from it, you find that you cannot... because you cannot escape it, and you cannot get away from yourself...
People are also incredibly insensitive... because if you have a young child, like I did, its as tho' you do not deserve to have any feelings, or dreams... and they will strait up tell you this to your face.
They will mock and demean you thinking its somehow helping you, and be completely oblivious of how sexist and cruel they are... they are even more obnoxiously rude if they also have a child, or more than 1 child, as tho' in their mind that somehow nullifies it...
They will even stoop so low as to say things nonchalantly like: "Shouldn't you go play with your kid?"
Meanwhile, everyone was leaving the state of Massachusetts that I was somewhat close to.... or lived far away... I had no biological family here, and my real friends (artists) lived far away....
I was very cloistered also....
All of this stuff is just so incredibly personal also.... I don't believe that anyone can understand it...
