mitsene | Recent Entries

the trees are finally starting to visibly turn, at least some of them. instead of maybe one out of 20 now maybe 1 out of 5 has that 'touched' look. like, someone touched the edges of the leaves with a red or orange paintbrush, and like watercolors the red is seeping into the green. a breeze with a handful of orange leaves crossed the road in front of me on the way to work. today it's awfully chilly - actually had to wear a sweatshirt to work. it's nice. it smells great outside. i've always wanted to record, day by day, when the leaves start turning and how long it takes for them to finally all go before the first snow. maybe i'll actually do that this year.

yesterday i went for a walk through the woods and it just smelled like leaves - there was a windy storm the day before, and the trail was full of fallen branches and leaves. unfortunately a couple trees, too - the usual smaller, weak trees, but also a very, very large tree... this park had at one point probably been someone's farmland, and this tree was standing next to the remains of the house... and it was wider than my armspan - probably about 4-5 feet wide at the main trunk area. it was divided into three main branches, and the biggest one - probably about 2-3 feet wide - fell during the storm. right on top of the trail, too. you could see, though, after it fell that the core was hollow and blackened. it was just.. sad. i mean, i knew it was sick anyway, but.. it was such a big tree, and it's so rare to see trees that big around here...

i took some photos - timed self-portraits - at the park last week. i still have to edit/crop them and get them onine somewhere. i had some ideas for placing hand-drawn calligraphy over them. i also made banana bread last weekend :9 and my friend gave me a free huge tin of vanilla rooibos because she's awesome and works at starbucks and can get it for super cheap. i hope to make pumpkin bread this weekend! maybe i'll make myself a pumpkin cake. i turn stupid 26 of stupidness on monday and i haeetttt ittt >:( i don't want to be 4 years away from 30! then i'm halfway to 60! then i'm dead! ugh! where is my life going!?!

oh, one more thing, before i forget - earlier this year i tried to write a comic where the protagonists see mars through the eyes of the opportunity/spirit rovers during their dreams when they sleep. well, freakishly enough my dream last night was seeing mars through the eyes of the curiosity rover, and "painting" it with colors before sending it back to NASA. maybe that's my cue to finish the damn thing...

i need a fall icon, sheesh.

Have come to the realization that i need to take my time with things. I am one of those people who is always in a rush - always impatient. This applies to my art. I have no patience to sit there and detail something if I'm bored of it. If it's fun, yeah! i can do that forever, or at least for an hour. But my strokes and lineart are rushed. My handwriting is rushed. Get it done as soon as possible and move on to the next thing - that's how my brain seems to work. I don't know where I got the impression that working quickly was a benefit, but I think I need to try slowing down. It's starting to show in sloppiness - or maybe it has been, this whole time.

Whenever I see certain really good graphic designers, or artists with extremely detailed, clean, super-clean artwork, I always think they're the kind of person who is always well-dressed, keeps their workspace beyond tidy; a neat freak. A stickler about detail, every little speck of dust, every pixel. Which honestly I always thought was annoying. I'm a big picture person... I see the forest more than the trees. I always thought, man, who cares if that little line goes over the edge there. Or if that tiny thing doesn't look right. But then the lines add up and the misaligned edges throw each other off, and before you know it, it looks like crap. I'm starting to appreciate the pixel-perfect neat-freak designers for their commitment/obsession with clean design.
I am a messy person but over the last couple years I've cleaned up a bit. When I went back to school - from 2007-2009 - my overall personal hygiene took a huge leap upwards (what is it with 19 year olds and being excessively dirty?) and I've kept up with it - maybe even improved it! I'm on a ten month streak of taking a shower almost every single day. Used to go 3-4 days without considering it. Similarly, when I lost my job last year I had nothing to do except clean the house. Couldn't play video games or draw or paint for more than an hour at a time. So I organized things, cleaned things, painted the office. Nowadays it has become habit - cleaning up after myself when cooking (most of the time), putting laundry in the hamper, folding clothes when they're done, sweeping and wiping down the counters more than once a week. Now I am the nag to Dan's dirty habits! Which used to be the same as mine - but as I've gotten relatively cleaner, it's been harder to have him try to keep up.
Maybe as I have been getting personally cleaner, it's time to apply those same habits to my artwork. Sticking to one piece, cleaning it up until it's absolutely finished. Spending more than 15 minutes on lineart. Fixing up details in web layouts instead of leaving that one annoying thing to annoy me forever.
After all, said and done, I really like the work of the neat-freak pixel-perfect graphic designers. It exudes a professionalism that I need to embrace.

i have come to the conclusion that I am going to autumn the shit out of this fall.

after last year's weather pretty much ruining it for everyone (freak hurricane wrecking the trees, then freak snowstorm just plain wrecking halloween) fall didn't really feel like fall.
ideas:

drinking lots of pumpkin chai
apple picking (not a difficult thing to do when your brother works in an orchard) in september
camping trip already planned for the last weekend in september - seeing purdy trees n such. maple syrup candies. apple cider. etc. (v excited about this)
PUMPKIN pickin' in october
getting a big fat sweater (maybe with a cat on it)
going for walks in the woods 2x a week (i have been doing this since march - it's amazing to go to the same place every week for several months and watch it change)
scarf-wearing will commence
i will probably try to paint my nails with little red maple leaves and fail miserably
halloween clothes on/the week of halloween
oh yeah, furfright is happening, gotta dress up for that too :P
somehow, somewhere, leaves. piles. jumping. yes
it is possible during thanksgiving i will revert to a five year old and make turkeys out of hand-tracings
it is also possible i will attempt to make a vegetarian turkey thing for myself to bring to all 3 of my family thanksgiving stops. homemade chickpea seitan.. thing. with mushroom gravy.

and then it will be winter.
going to work every day doing the same ol' thing is getting kinda monotonous, and my life seems like it's kind of just running all together. all my days feel as if someone's watching me on a nonstop netflix marathon. i think i might start writing on a regular basis again. maybe do one of those 'one a day' comics or drawings or something, so each day I come away with something that happened.

Current Music: pixies

so dan's been busy nights mostly doing sound at a local bar, my friend liz (whos pretty much the only person i hang out with and then vicariously hang out with other people) got a job in norwalk so she doesn't get home til like 7 and has to get up at 6, so we don't hang much during the week. and i've been lots of inspired lately. so i've been drawing and painting lots of bunches as of late and it's really cool. i'm commenting a lot on dA, posting regularly on facebook and tumblr, and tweeting p often as well. and, trying to keep my etsy shop up to date with new stuff. i'm hoping it'll pay off eventually but even if it doesn't i probably won't stop. my doubts and occasional depressed moods aren't strong enough to put a damper on this, which is good - i used to give up so easily. but after every thing, this is what i want to do, and that's that.

Current Music: dredg - the pariah

As awful as I sold at otakon, I haven't been as inspired to work hard towards making my own work sustainable as a career in... a long long long long ass time. Somewhere along the line I had almost given up, felt tired, worn down, like even if i tried it wouldn't happen. But I just.. now, I have so many ideas! So many things I can work on! And I have enough extra cash to put towards merchandise expenses like getting tshirts and stickers and pins/buttons printed. I'm hopeful, and energetic, so I'm adding more to Etsy, more active on social gallery sites, and it seems to be paying off. I got 2 etsy sales 2 days in a row. That's never happened before!

And I'm working really hard on improving my work dramatically in terms of realism and structure. For the last week or two I've been working from life as much as possible (drew a lot of butts leaning over the opposite table at otakon, haha) and if not that, at least using stock photo references online. And while at work I've been looking up tutorials. Sometimes just reading the tips for how to better draw noses or hands sticks in my mind and comes out the next time I draw.

Otakon was very inspiring in terms of seeing other's artwork, and it makes me want to go to another con ASAP! but I know I did that in 2007-2008, and that's how I got burned out of cons. I also really like how at anime cons there's much more diversity of people. So many more women/girls! Makes me realize that the majority of furries, at least that I've noticed, are white gay males, haha. Even though most of my acquaintances/favorite artists in the furry fandom are female, at cons I realize they're really the minority. The customer base is guys. Who like to look at guys. And I prefer to draw girls. For girls. So the market isn't really there as much as I wish it was. I still have a Furfright dealer's table in Oct which I will be blinging out and making look super purdy with an adorable kawaii tablecloth and a GOOD display with nice big prints that you can see darn well.

Anyway, I feel really happy about this. Whenever I've tried to stray away from this kind of work - whether it be web design or going back to school for vet tech or whatever - I've felt terrible. But this feels right. I get this image of a happy sunshine garden meadow when I think about it (so weird, I know). This has to happen, I want to improve so badly.

It’s funny how conventions always make me realize certain things about what I do and don’t want to do artistically. Last time I got burned out of cons, I stopped doing furry art regularly for almost a year. Since then I’ve never been able to throw myself into it fully as much as i did when I was in college or high school. Now I’m trying to prep for otakon, and even though experience from furry cons tells me I’m probably not going to sell a lot of prints or even originals I’m still going crazy trying to make sure I have enough of something just have crap on my table to prove I can art. It’s almost absurd, it feels financially wasteful and I’m sure I’m going to overwhelm my tendinitis if I end up taking too many commissions (which I will probably do, seeing as I can’t turn down any of them out of guilt/need to make up for the $350+ I’ll be spending at this con). I at least hope that I can have some fun while there and see some interesting things.

But in terms of art, I’ve realized something lately. When people ask me ‘what do you paint?’ I almost never want to answer honestly. If I do, I usually sigh, mutter something about anime or anthro illustration and say ‘but I’m just doing it for the money’! If I was a professional comic book artist, I could say ‘oh I color (or write/illustrate) comics for a living!’ and that would be OK. Or I could say ‘I paint realisim and surrealism in acrylics and watercolors’ and that would be OK. Most of the time I fall back on my pseudo-career and just say ‘oh, I’m a web designer’ (which I’m terrible at, by the way – I can do it, but I don’t have the same passion or knowledge for graphic design as I do for painting) or generalize ‘I’m a painter who does web design full time’.

I want to be able to show my art to people and not feel ashamed. I’m not ashamed that I do “stupid’ furry stuff – I think it’s fun to draw silly cat people – or that I tend to end up drawing in an anime-influenced style – that’s much more acceptable these days. I’m ashamed because I’m not at all drawing or painting, in almost any piece in the last year or two (barring one or two examples), up to my full artistic potential.

So I want to concentrate now, dedicated, fully, to painting. From life or references, realistically. I've been looking up lots of tutorials lately, and drawing from references and life a lot more. I don’t feel a kinship to the furry fandom anymore like I used to – anything I draw furry lately has been commissioned or gifts. And I like watching good anime shows, and drawing fanart occasionally, but I’m not Totally Into It. My tendinitis has made it clear to me that doing full time commissioned illustrations within a narrow time constraint is not the life or workstyle that I can do, so I shouldn’t make it my ‘fantasy job’ as I’ve been so used to thinking. I need to up my standards and start submitting to galleries. When I find galleries that actually have realism paintings, portraits, landscapes, I feel envious and small. I feel the passion to paint again. I want to be in there doing that, too.

I’ve kept my distance from the contemporary fine art establishment for so long because I don’t really feel like I fit into it, I don’t really understand a lot of what goes on in contemporary artist’s minds when it comes to bullshitting paragraphs about works. But I’ll find my niche somewhere, underground. On the walls of a tattoo shop. In a van on the side of the road in cape cod. I want to be able to show my paintings to strangers and my family and my mom and be like ‘look how awesome my shit is, you asshole!’ instead of hiding it in sketchbooks and on the interwebs.

I’ll do other stuff too. I still want to finish a graphic novel someday. I still want to keep in touch with friends. And I can’t say for sure what I want to do now. But I just know what I don’t want to do anymore, what feels empty and forced, and what I feel proud of.

Current Location: United States, CT

cant stop internetting

been posting/will be posting more sketches to tumblr for some comic project thingy majiggy thingy. http://mitsarts.tumblr.com/

ugh i dunno sometimes i feel like i'm talking to a void.

Drawing lots lately, getting commissions out of the way so when I start my New Full Time Job that Pays Well tomorrow, I won't have anything guilting me to keep drawing for myself when I get home.

Also I want a nabyn invite :( wasnt sure about it at first but I keep finding artists I really like and haven't seen before on there, and I don't have an account so I can't friend/add/follow them :( weh

I has iPad. For birthday. Brain is exploding. Boyfriend is awesome. Need wacom bamboo iPad stylus. NOW!!!

@____@

Going to cape cod on Monday .. Should be fun!

Yeah... Just testing updates on the iPad... Move along now....