Okay so the past 2 weeks were a little wild and I was still recovering from being sick. For my boyfriend's birthday though, we had a chance to go the new art of manga exhibit at the Brooklyn museum. It was super cool! I didn't get too many pictures because my phone died pretty early in but we had a lot of fun! I was disappointed in the lack of manga centered around women, no ribbon, no magical girls. The only women centered manga that really took a lot of space was the Rose of Versailles but even then it was a small part which was very very disappointing. They have like a lot of of giant sections dedicated to shonen like Jojo's Bizzare Adventure and even Inuyasha - I understand that Takahashi is a woman creator, but there was a clear bias towards men, they even had geikomi and some m/m general but there was hardly any GL or magical girls or anything.... Apparently according to my teacher Tom Hart the curator did try but it was the Japanese companies that put the exhibit together.

I was hoping for Ai Yazawa - since she had a whole exhibit with Vivienne Westwood recently - and there was another fashion exhibit in the museum MY FAVORITE DESIGNER - WHO I HAD NO IDEA WAS THERE - MISS IRIS VAN HERPEN. I will go back, since I bought passes for the whole exhibit to return. Apparently Araki was there - I will say his work is super gorgeous in person.

They had a bunch of gacha machines and my boyfriend accidentally I ended up dressing him like Takumi (long black hair and all) so I had have him stand far away when I did a gacha pull for Nana. But I did eventually end up striking gold when he took his Takumi vibes away (It worked) - these cute little gacha record things.

A little bonus Gintoki for those who know.

Some major updates: I finally finished the 250 Boxes challenge, the Vein of Gold is still really fucking hard, and I got my final comics school assignment

So that marks 250 boxes, it took me like 3 months or some shit, but I think there's a pretty sizable different in my line confidence and how accurate they are to the eye, which is interesting. I've had terrible ass fucking art block for a lot of this so how it applies to actual construction and drawing is questionable to me. But I do feel like it was worth it, and honestly it does feels like a decent warm up exercise.

Then I have been continuing the Vein of gold, it's pretty hard - I've been doing my narrative timeline by talking it in, which I find easier now. And the stuff coming up from my narrative timeline is very... interesting. The stuff and patterns that I'm discovering are... illuminating but shit idk hurts my feelings.

The final count-down begins:

And so with the last 2 weeks of October upon us - I am entering the crunch phase of the quarter for our final assignment. It is to create 4-6 pages "in dialogue" with a comic from before 1990 (I was born 1995 so comics that I grew up with were mostly excluded here). I decided to pick the Rose of Versailles. I'm actually working on making some comic references anyways - and my comic is kind of already a big reference.

(Shojo beat magazine readers stand tf up)

Unfortunately, it's much too late for the reference but I figured I could make some other fun references

(Black Butler is still too late)

I did however, realize I could make a reference that would finally land I think when I thought about the OG - Rose of Versailles. It fits well because like, I'm already working on a ballroom scene for Astarion and Veluthe's Infinite Adventure - and then of course, I got to be the first tester for Blampow this week. meaning that now I especially had a good reason to continue my comic - and I made a promise I absolutely would finish it by the end of the year.

Looking at some of the comic thumbnails I think it's a pretty natural fit!

Character Design & Paneling: It's all angles

After all of that these past 2 weeks were really a lot about learning character design. A lot of it was focused on shape language (which I learned quite a bit about from the korean course I started taking back this summer) so I won't repeat too much I learned here, because it was largely about how you can use shape to emphasize personality traits.

I will share some of the art I did for the assignments - like this one I did based on some shapes they gave us.

and this one where we had to pick a character to change one core feature - I chose Astarion of course - but letting his hair get longer. It's very.... 90s visual Kei. Y'know?

Other than that though - we focused on paneling this week - ignore my shitty handwriting ok

How to design page compositions and playing with like focus on characters - what I learned was that characters are rarely straight on - except in manga, which apparently breaks this rule literally all the time - it was actually really funny, my teacher was like you never do this, except this manga is.... (this kept happening as he looked at manga) This isn't shade but, it is a little funny.

Anyways - we got an assignment to draw a panel with like a zoom out shot, mid-shot, and then close up between characters of two characters trying to convince each other. I think I did a good job.

Going back to that final assignment and the Vein of Gold for a bit though

So this is the crunch week. I love crunch, my best work is done under pressure - thinking back to my hackathon wins and finals back before I dropped outta college. It's the AuDHD way (although I wish it wasn't). My hope is that I would complete 10 pages. I can do this. I am stupid, I will crunch through this. I can do this, I will do this.

My problem is I keep like.... circling the comic but for some reason not doing it idfK WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY BRAIN AAAAHHHHHHHHHH.

(I have been like this since like July - according to the transits and my zodiacal releasing - Saturn, has been stationed on my Venus - the rule of this year for me, EXACTLY in July which literally I just found out is likely the cause of my fucking perma artblock.)

I recently started doing some like, advanced data analysis (basically think like excel sheet python on steroids data analysis) on astrology stuff - and I've been working on my narrative timeline which is a comprehensive narrative of my life. After doing more research (do you see a pattern here) I found out that the research shows that the people who are able to overcome their PTSD are those that are able to create a comprehensive timeline of their trauma - literally narrative therapy. And so I've been doing the narrative timeline, just going and talking straight into the phone as a way to avoid self-editing and then running these notes and comparing them with astrological transits and....... hoo boy.

Julia Cameron accidentally tricks me into doing trauma therapy once again as I do the Vein of Gold, as you are to write a timeline of your life. God fucking damn it.