Goodbye, Purgatory Sketchbook (Patreon)

You were warned I'd probably be unproductive with the end of my Botox cycle, and the subsequent injection recovery. Sure enough, I bottomed out hard, then had my LONGEST recovery stretch ever. This was especially bad, because I had scheduled around my body sticking to the pattern, and my "clear day" activity reduced me to a pile of ash. 

But that's how things have been going. We're CLOSE, in that I keep seeing flashes of how my body could fall into place, but finding a path that doesn't have snags has yet to happen. The med that works has bad side-effects! The supplementary med I was given to offset it didn't arrive for two months, thanks to certain offices dropping the ball a bunch, and it might not help anyway! Cold, dry weather makes me worse, and holidays wreck my ability to get regular treatment! It's not hopeless. All the components needed to get me to "not getting worse" stabilized are there. Just gotta figure out the proper strategy. I'm starting to get over the collapse from rushing back to action too early, but I can't tell you how things will shake out. I might have to revert to the medication with the bad side effects, because if the fallout of not having coverage is just as bad, then give me coverage and let some of the build-up damage start to fade under surface grumpiness!

Because I've been SO shaky, my ability to art has been mostly nonexistent. I still try. I try a LOT, but I haven't shared much. I seriously share absolutely everything I feel I can - if not here, then on Twitter - and most of what I've done can be classified as basic junk, so I don't lose ALL my muscle memory. It hasn't been interesting, but it DID fill and entire sketchbook. It started September 19th, and was finished December 8th. Here are... the THREE pieces I feel are shareworthy from it! 

Above: Sometimes I do Precocious refreshers. I either do a full page of just one character, or draw various members of the class side by side. I left the full character pages in the book - tho some were probably posted on twitter - and mushed up a few of the class pages for the compilation above.

Below: Rhenna from Momentum! I've avoided drawing Precocious because it's not good for my soul to suddenly be so shaky at characters I've drawn for over a decade. Momentum was a scratch paper kinda story in my head, and Precocizing it let me have a way to tangentially touch on Precocious, but do so in a form that wasn't going to crush me if I didn't get it wrong. These are in-my-head characters - who were human! - so I can't really get their designs TOO wrong. The downside, I've learned, is I can't get them RIGHT either. Rhenna has been particularly annoying to me, because a jerky fox girl should be in my wheelhouse! I kept hammering away, and here are some of the better results! (Apologies to the other Momentum characters I attempted. I still owe you some character profiles, and it's awkward to realize those sketches were TWO sketchbooks ago. Oh, I've been unproductive...)

Finally, we have the first and last page of the book. For the first, I wanted to choose someone I was reliably competent at drawing, so I chose Ms Monster! The last page was a dumb joke on Twitter. I wanted to end the book on a bang, and said I'd draw porn in it before I tossed it in the incinerator. Look, I'm a prude and can't draw sexy to save my life, so all you're gonna get is jokes unless I REALLY level up in both anatomy skills and motivation. Still worth the dumb joke, for it was a really dumb sketchbook. 

 May the one I'm working on now have many more shareable pieces!