Hats on Hold

Yeah, yeah, it was bound to happen. When you have the attention span of a caffeinated puppy, it was pretty much inevitable. I'm not done with hats -- they're too much fun to make! -- but they're going to be on hold for a while, as I've bounced to other things. I would like to point out that before I bounced, I made 27 hats (no, I haven't posted all of them, obviously). So while I may not meet my Hat A Month posting goal, I have certainly made a year's worth of hats in quantity.

I'll get back to them, I have too many Plans not to.

Terrifying New Project

For an online class about gender and comic books, I had to draw a comic based on a personal experience with gender. I'm no illustrator, so that was pretty tough for me to manage. However, the assignment did start me thinking about another project that I've been working on in my head, something so personal that I'm not really even comfortable sharing it openly yet.

In the class chatroom, I was talking to another student who encouraged me to start putting things on paper (even if it was just random brainstorming) and get it off that mental back burner. So yesterday, I worked on it, pretty much all day. What I have to show for hours of work? Six hand-written pages, that I then distilled into 2 pages typed into a Word doc. That's it. *sigh* I obsessed over naming; every name was chosen deliberately, and I needed 21 names.

Then I decided to hit up our new Half Price Books store to see if they had any good books for learning to draw. I ended up with:

How to Draw Comic Book Heroes and Villains by Christopher Hart,
and How to Draw Manga V. 1 by Ben Dunn* -- I found things in both books that I thought would help,
and since it was Half Price Books, it was reasonable to get both.

I don't know what my style is, if I even have one, but both of these offered some basic mechanics as well as particular styles. I already had a sketchbook that I bought for this purpose (before I bought those books, before I started the class). So I guess now it's time to work on figure studies. The writing may always come more naturally to me, but if I can make the images I have in my head come out on paper, then maybe I'll be able to translate it into something that's really mine.

The fear comes into play when I'm honestly afraid to try, and possibly fail. This particular creation is the convergence of a number of things that are meaningful to me, so it's incredibly personal, and why I have only entrusted some of the details a couple of people. It's fragile yet...

When I have something I'm proud of, I'll share it, but until then, this project is under wraps.

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*Ben Dunn's website doesn't seem to be working, or I'd link him, too.