Thoughts about drawing and how I do it

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There are so many ways to do art, so many styles I don't even know the name of. Sometimes I look at a style and think I would like to try it too. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. And sometimes I do and find that maybe that style is not for me. For example, I love looking at pages filled with various pieces. You know the one, where you'd have a flower, a tree, a hand, a cube, a pinecone, and a chair all on the same page, slightly overlapping. I think it looks awesome and I would love to do it myself, but I can't, it throws me off. When I draw I need to have either the page carefully sectioned in advance or have the whole page available only for this one subject I'm drawing.

What I ultimately want to achieve by trying out these styles is finding my own style. I think I am there, maybe, but not yet. Drawing is a work in progress, I wouldn't want to be stuck in one spot, I want to keep developing. And finding own style requires seeing other styles, taking something from here and there and adapting various techniques. Plainly put, making it as you go. 

Online cat people suck

Yancy Min

Full disclosure: I am an online cat people.

Whenever you try and ask for advice online relating to a cat, you encounter tens of comments telling you how bad of a cat person you are. You should have done that, you should do this other thing, you should definitely not do this, are you crazy? 

Here's the thing. This person comes and asks a question, from this we can deduce that this person might not know, if they would know maybe they would not have been in the situation they are describing. Or, they don't have the resources or the ideas to do something one certain way or at a particular time so they are looking for alternatives. Let's stop assuming the worst. Just by asking that's a huge important step, it's clear they want to learn and do better. 

So, cat people online, chill, help if you want to help because you are not achieving anything by making someone feel bad for asking. Actually, you do achieve something, you make people reluctant to ask, and then they don't learn and then the cats suffer, not because of ill intention, but because of adversity. 

...

Good talk. 

Calendars, am I right?

Photo by Windows on Unsplash

I recently discovered this wonderful thing called 'calendar'. But what's the great thing about this calendar, apart from telling you what period in time you are in, it also allows us (a.k.a. me, I'm sure there are more aware people out there) to jot down an event or a task we want to do. Isn't that wonderful? So this is what I did this week, I created tasks for myself. Some that I want to do daily, others once or twice a week, others once a month. 

What's great about this system is that it might actually work. I tried all kinds of versions and I discovered that I work better when I set a task to be done some time in the week, not in a definite time slot. It's more open ended, if you will. I also allow myself to not finish a task. That's okay, we all have bad days, or days when we just can't bring ourselves up to do something no matter how small. So I don't beat myself over for missing a task and I'm not punishing myself for not completing it. Unless the punishment is fun.

Beloved Enemy series

They don't look like that at any point in the series, but I kept seeing this image and I like it a lot.

Soooo, I watched Beloved Enemy, a 15 episode Chinese series made after a BL web novel. Light novel? Not sure, a novel of some sort. I recently joined a discord channel thinking it's BL novels focused, but instead I got BL series and I thought, why not. So off I go watching BL series. Beloved Enemy is not the first I watched, far from it, but it's the first time I, for some unknown reason, wrote down my impressions for every episode. I don't know why I did it and I had no idea what to do with it, but then I remembered I have a blog, so here I am. This post is going to be a massive spoiler. Like huge, the whole show is going to be spoiled, I am not leaving anything out. Except for the review, once I copy/paste every episode entry, it's going to be spoiler after spoiler after spoiler. Don't say I didn't warn you.  

This post is going to go like this: synopsis, perfectly innocent review, some series/novel spoilers, spoiler fest, and what I think/hope happens next. 

my reading journey

[art by Marta Milczarek]

Lately I've been reading a lot. With the lockdown going on and staying a lot at home, I've had a lot of time that I had to fill up somehow. So what better way to do that than reading? My preferred genres right now are LGBTQ+ (Romance), Mystery and Crime. I squeeze in other genres here and there (right now I'm reading a Slice-of-Life Fiction book), but those usually take more time to complete. I am, after all, taking a break from reading right now to write this while I'm only 23 pages in.

A while ago I started thinking about the books I used to read when I was little and then later in high school. I think those books helped shape my preferences for now. But let's go even further back. 

I think I always liked reading. When I was little my mum used to tell me stories at night and I still cherish those moments. If I think about it, I can feel the curiosity, the interest, and the warm comfort enveloping me in those moments. From then on, I don't remember ever not liking reading or wanting to lose myself in a made up story, being it by reading or imagining all kind of scenarios myself.