bonus update

As many people may have come to realise, or are now being notified as such. I have been drawing a lot more recently than I had in the last year or so at least in terms of cartooning. I spent a long period of time where when I was drawing, it wasn't cartoonish in intent nor was it really subject matter that lends itself toward anything but my view of stark realism.

Another thing people may not have noticed or realised is that my old portfolio site at Twisted Matrix went down. Like a ship in the night hitting an unknown reef whilst its crew slept it sank. I had no idea it had gone down or the permanence of such until I was notified that it "didn't work" by a person I had sent a resume and a link to said portfolio. All queries as to the reason for this have turned up no response. I assume this was an informal, if not somewhat rude, severing of ties between myself and the lads at Twisted.

As a result, I did lose a small amount of work that had been on there from my ibook days of which I had not copies elsewhere due to hard drive problems with the ibook in its later days combined with my move to the West and subsequent sale of most of my worldly possessions (including said ibook).

This combined with my hiatus from cartooning has lead me down the path where I've lost any sort of my original distinctive qualities in cartooning. Many of the cartoons I have tried to draw recently are just pale imitations of my favourite artists of which I read daily. My original style had been cultivated with great greediness in high school and early college days largely through the very hermitted stance on art that I took which lead to me having very few, if any, connections to the art community (largely: if I don't look at it, I can't copy it, so anything that comes about from the font of my mind is mine and mine alone). I had dropped these barriers naught but a few years ago when I had finally settled upon a style that was both my own and pleasing to myself.

Being those floodgates are open, there is no closing them, and being I have forgotten through disuse the very style that made my art mine, these last few brief forays into reentering cartooning have left me feeling sad and lost. Nevertheless, I bought some new brush pens this weekend, and I'm hoping that in lieu of my foregoing list of end-of-year demands upon myself, I can bring myself to painfully trudge through my old sketchbooks (yes, I still have them hearkening back to junior high when I largely spent my time drawing mutants and odd dinosaurs) and see if I can glean any sort of feeling for what was once my own hand. This is likely what I will do today when I get home instead of sleeping because this is one of those things that aches in the pit of me much like the feeling I used to get during looming deadlines of large school projects I had nary started. The sort of ache that keeps one from sleeping and makes both mind and body restless.

Hopefully more to come.