Last night's drawings

So, it's been a...weird...time for me the last 5 months. Moving down to NC, unsure of what I was gonna do for work(other than NOT going back to fucking retail), knowing only 3 people here(and they live in the same house)...there was a lot weighing on me when I left NY.

But the first, best thing, that I did coming down here was showing up the day after I moved in to this art class. It was an immediate comfortable space, and became a base of most of my new friends here. And I think that, when this is working for me, that I'm at my most productive(I can't wait to redraw and show the western pages I'm working on now). But, back to class...

I was psyched to see that she was the model tonight(one of my favorite drawings with ink and collage is from her last time here). And I liked how the 5min poses turned out, particularly the first one.

Things have been rough for me down here at times, yeah I expected that. But financially has been the worst. This new day job has a policy of an "intern period" of 3 months, which is fine and I get it. But the rate of pay has left me in a really bad space right now, and this is hitting me harder all day every day. And if we can be serious for a second, I'm fucking angry. At them, for being just another company deciding that their employees need to "toughen up" as they simultaneously lay out aggressive hiring/business expansion/new office building spending. And I'm angry at myself, for being as old as I am and STILL in a spot like this.

This is why I wanted to try something with only bold color that still lets me focus on my line, and not end up as a dark mess. So I grabbed 8(I think) Prismacolor pencils and switched them out randomly as I drew. It's been a loooonnnnggg while since I tried this, and I think this helped me a little bit last night dealing with my shit.

After the break, I broke out my box of charcoal. Starting with vine, I sketched out the rough with the intent to go in deeper with compressed. After smearing it with a clear oil bar, I scraped a bit away with a razor blade. I think that at the end of the night, I was happy that this didn't turn into the dark murky mess that I wanted to avoid.

With just 10min left for the night, I went and just approached this last block of time as just a line drawing with an ebony pencil.

Overall, I think I liked zooming all over the map last night in terms of approach and tools. And I hope that this is enough to keep pushing forward through everything else.