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heyyy you know what I did? I started watching supernatural after being peripherally aware of the show for years and then these happened. oil on canvas, 9x12”

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I actually ended up doing an inktober piece every day so here are some of those from later in the month. Next year I think I’d like to do something narrative or at least themed for every day but this year was mostly just about whatever struck my fancy that evening.

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some sloppy inktober exploits thus far - while I’m not really proud of anything I’ve done I’m at least actually keeping pace this year?

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another in the long-running series of ~ooh look, the human behind the dolls~ photos that I’ve done in my time in the BJD hobby

Liesel is a Soom Cass, and Alfie is a modified Migidoll Ryu

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baffling doodle dump of the week, ft. an embryonic original character concept, JC Leyendecker, and Aaron Hotchner

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trying to do more color studies because I avoid color too much (also name a more iconic duo I’ll wait etc)

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a quick Spencer doodle from the same image as last time, this time in color

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another quick Reid doodle because by golly I am dead set on learning how to properly draw this face??

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doodle dump of the week! As you can see, a certain TV prodigy from a long-running crime show has been on the brain. Lots of things are in flux life-wise, but the main upside is that I now have more time and space to draw, even if it’s just fanart, and that makes things a little more hopeful on my end.

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This one’s a bit different for me - it might be the first thing I’ve made all year that qualifies as a good faith attempt at a full on illustration. It doesn’t feel incredibly finished to me, so it’s something I may revisit, but I think it needs to sit for a while before I do, so I’m sharing in its current state.

Walking home one day, I was doing my usual “dodge everyone around me and keep my eyes fixed on the ground” thing and I looked up and saw something I haven’t really been able to get out of my head. One thing I've noticed while living in a big city is that that the speed of experience changes based on your mode of transport. On foot, the city swallows you up under air conditioner units and scaffolds and subway grates too, if you’re wearing the wrong kind of shoes. Exhausted air screams up at you, seething from the ground. Sometimes, the a train conductor’s voice carries up too, and the city is rather literally screaming at you. The city is undeniably faster on foot than the suburbs ever are. That day, I was packed four deep in a puddle-ridden bottleneck next to a construction site that encroached onto what little sidewalk there already was. I just wanted to pass and get home.

But there was this girl - a woman perhaps? I would hazard that she was in her late twenties or early thirties, but I don’t know that she ever got to be a woman. I don’t know how much of her had been present for the passing of biological time. Her skin was sallow, but perfectly even. She had bones - I could tell because she sat upright quite easily, with her hand fixed with what I’d call poise if it wasn’t so deathly still. She was the color of translucent yellow wax, dripped layer over layer onto a human armature, and her limbs had a puffy, amorphous quality you would see if you tried to obscure a sculpture by pouring layers of the tallowy stuff over it. I thought she was a doll at first. There was something wrong with the way she was dressed - her clothes were neat and color coordinated, but not quite of this era, not worn in quite a contemporary way. She did not dress herself this way of her own volition. She might not have had much in the way of volition at all, as she stared through all the stimuli one New York city block has to offer. She was very much not there as she was wheeled by. I don’t remember who she was being pushed by. A man, perhaps. I don’t remember the wheelchair either. It’s odd, but as I walked home, I thought to myself that I had glimpsed death.

Again, the city is fast. I couldn’t have seen her or her caretakers for more than a second. It’s been more than a month since the encounter, and it’s gotten away from me completely as I’ve re-accessed and rewritten the memory from too many playbacks, but this is what I could put to paper. It doesn’t feel real at all. It feels like an exercise in failure to try and capture it, but perhaps this combination of text and image arrives at something of the feeling nonetheless.

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Alfie, once again. I’ve been thinking about the accusation (?) that artists simply create one meme over and over again, and I think that’s true with me and how I’ve photographed Alfie over the course of nearly a decade.

Alfie is a heavily modified migidoll ryu, mods and faceup by me

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I’ve been planning out an actual drawn comic featuring these characters, so I pulled out the dolls for a photoshoot to kind of explore some tonal/visual ideas that I hope I can translate into drawings. Here are Alfie and Nell having some kind of Highly Surreptitious Business Meeting, I think.

Alfie is a modified migidoll ryu, Nell is a modified migidoll jina

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A few more of Alfie. I can’t seem to get out of the rut of shooting him with his face turned away, looking inquisitive.

Alfie is a heavily modified migidoll ryu

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I wrote this comic last summer but somehow sat on it for almost a year before I felt like it really crystallized into something I could make. And I’m glad I waited, because this feels a lot less timid and more complete than the last comic I made. I don’t feel like I have a lot to say about it either, since it is a comic, and last time I checked, comics were supposed to do the heavy lifting on the storytelling. I think I said what I want to say with this one.

I will say that this is probably best read directly on my blog rather than on the dashboard, just because of the size.

Content warning: brief depiction of racism and use of racial slurs

Thanks for reading!

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Hey! I made a video where I talk about all the art-ing and doll-ing and drawing that I did last year. Some of this might not be news to you, but there are some oil paintings and comics in there that I haven’t shown elsewhere before. Take a gander if you’re into that sort of thing.

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These are from over the summer last year when I was moving to a different place and packing things up, but I never got around to thinking about them until now. This is actually the contraption I put Alfie in when I have to move. It’s really kind of bizarre, like a lot of the stuff that’s made for dolls.

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This set didn’t turn out super coherent, but it was an attempt at playing out the first meeting between Alfie and Nell.

Nell is a modified migidoll jina, and Alfie is a modified migidoll ryu. All customization done by me