Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which Today's Art is... Prestigious

Today's art was brought to you by Z, who bought me a coffee and asked for a DEDBERT drawing! I was, as always, very excited to draw my boy, so here he is channeling his inner Zatara and performing some magic for us!

"Prestige"; colored pencil & micron pen; 2022

Dug out an old sketchbook of mine to do this. Unfortunately, this sketchbook is too chonky to go in my scanner (if the thing is works again...), so I had to snap a pic and upload it.

I love how he always looks faintly bored with anything he's doing! He's just so... mono-expressive, and yet that single look conveys so much lol!

If you'd like to have a say on what I draw next week, feel free to buy me a coffee over on Ko-fi with a message telling me what category you'd like to see next. This week's was "DEDBERT", for instance!

Available categories are:

• Animal
• Vegetable
• Mineral
• Dedbert
• Location
• Geometric
• Word

Anywho, minor self-advertising aside, I'm looking forward to sketching and writing more this month.

Yes, it's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), so I'll be working even harder than usual on my various manuscripts. I'm hoping to make some real headway this month, too.

I'm not, however, ascribing to the, frankly insane, wordcounts recommended by some people doing NaNoWriMo. No, your manuscript does not have to be 80k-100k words long for the love of God.

You're not Stephen King.

You're don't need to write 1200 words a day. You don't need to avoid sleep or food or hygiene to get your book done.

Just... write.

Just sit down and write a sentence.

Will you finish your novel this month? Probably not. It's an unrealistic expectation for a world where a lot of aspiring writers work 40-90 hours a week.

Just write one sentence after another as often and as long as you can without causing yourself undue hardship. Don't skip meals. Don't skip sleep. Don't skip hanging out with friends. Don't deny yourself your life while you're writing.

Your book is in you. You're just putting it down into writing. It's not as scary or complex as you think it is. You can do that. You can write your book.

And so can I!

By the way, if you're more art focused and feel a bit of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) with NaNoWriMo, then you could try writing/drawing a graphic novel of some sort? They're usually much shorter than a novel, but that's because you're cutting out most of the visual detail in the writing process and putting it into the art process! I still recommend writing out a script for a comic or graphic novel - that way you have a plan for what you're going to do!

Heck, if you're an artist who wants to branch out into writing, you can also use Visual Storyboarding to help you work out what you'll write! Basically, just storyboard out a scene, image by image, and then try to write out what you just drew - describe it! Writing is just describing life, whether or not that life you're describing is or was happening in the real world.

Anywho, that'll about do it for me. I'm a little bran-jellied from the art and I'm gonna try to figure out my next move in my manuscript.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC