Almost Normal

It’s in my head! I know I need to do it! Even my Mom is wondering where it is! I know it’s just a matter of sitting down and DOING it. My list of excuses are:

My brain is so tired from all the learning I’m doing at SCAD!
It’s too easy to give into brain-vacation gaming when you have another gamer to give into it with.
Seasons 1-5 of LOST were SUPER Addictive!!!
My time management skills are CRAP!!! (What day is it?)

I know none of those are valid reasons for not doing my comic, but they are the demons I’m battling currently. Plus, if you check back to the comic before Thanksgiving, Dalia said she wasn’t going to stick up for me anymore, and I don’t think she has! Where are you Dalia???

I need a deadline. Someone set it for me. Not Martin.

It’s time to have a Lonnie heart to heart. Lonnie, let’s be honest, you’ve been watching a lot of TV and playing a lot of World of Warcraft since school started. We both know that these are you default fear handling mechanisms. You’re scared that you’re not good enough or motivated enough to do this school thing. You’re scared that moving in with your boyfriend at the same time you started a new school experience was a mistake. You’re scared about a lot of things.

Let’s remember though, Fear is not your master. You are the master of your fear. You ARE good enough. If you don’t believe this, listen to something you do understand, money. Your scholarships say you ARE good enough.

Stop worrying that your relationship isn’t blissfully perfect. Every new relationship has its ups and downs. You and Martin are very suited to each other. You know this. Don’t let your stress and fear get you down.

Now, while we are at it, let’s talk about Fear and your decision to major in Animation over Sequential Art. You’re scared that if you major in Sequential Art you won’t find a job when you graduate and you’ll be tens of thousands of dollars in debt with no way to pay it back. The indicative word here is “scared”. If Fear is the governing reason for choosing Animation, it is the wrong one. So how do we resolve this?

Let’s talk. Point number 1, you’ve wanted to draw comics since you were a junior in High School, almost 16 years ago. Your dream was to attend the Joe Kubert School and go draw the X-Men when you graduated. However, you’ve also been in love with 3D renderings since you were 13 years old, nearly 20 years ago. The idea of taking something from your head and turning it into a visually tangible Three dimensional object has fascinated you since that exhibit on holograms at the Museum of Science in Boston.

Is there a way to combine Sequential Art and 3D Modeling? Well, the Concept Art for Games minor teaches modeling and applying textures. And if you still want the option to work in Films, you could always take the storyboarding classes as your Sequential Art electives.

Well, it sounds to me like you know what you want to do. You want to be a Sequential Art major. Remember, your first love is characters and their stories. And stop negating your strengths. You know you can do this; you just need to set your mind to it. TV is not more important, neither is World of Warcraft. You can tell yourself this all falls into spending time with your boyfriend, but you’ve got to balance that with working working working.

I want to compliment on what you’re doing right. Good job going to that club fair and finding extracurricular activities that suit you. I think the sketch club and the Sequential Art Society will be very good for you. The Art History Society will be good for you as well, even if French art films aren’t your thing. The discussions make you think, and we all know how much you love to think about things! Now don’t forget to get started on your term papers! No waiting until the last minute on them.

Finally, get back to work on your comic! People enjoy reading it! Even your Mom is wondering where the next strips are! Get to it girl!

Oh yes, and stop talking to yourself. People are going to think you’re crazy.

Hey all!

I have just finished my first week of classes at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Overall it’s been a good week. I feel a little out of step with the other students since I’m living off campus with my non-SCAD boyfriend, only have two classes, and am around 10 years older than most of my fellow classmates. I like to believe that strangers are just friends I haven’t met yet, but there’s quite a gap to overcome in meeting people.

The first class I’m taking is an Art History Elective, Myth, Bible and Symbol in Art. I’m loving it! The material is interesting and I’m even looking forward to my projects! The first project is to make my own religion, and the second is to compare and contrast two artworks of the same mythical or biblical story. I already know what I’m doing my religion on, and I’m pretty sure I’m going with the story of either Pygmalion or Narcissus for my paper.

My favorite visual of the week came out of this class. We’re studying Greek Mythology currently and we were looking at a Greek vase depicting a young Zeus with neat, dark hair and beard giving birth to Dionysus from his thigh. I asked if the Greeks usually depicted Zues this way as opposed to the Renaissance tradition of painting him with flowing white hair and beard. Our professor explained that, to the Greeks, the Gods represented a perfect form of Man and the perfect age in Greek society was between 16-24. He said to think of King Leonidas in the movie “300“. I added, “With a baby coming out of his thigh,” to that. Everyone laughed and another student said, mimicking Leonidas from the movie, “This… is… a BABY!”

All joking aside, I am really enjoying this class and find the professor the be interesting and enthusiastic about the subject. I’m very happy I gave in and took this 8 am class. It’s the only one of it’s kind offered this semester.

All is not hearts and roses for me at SCAD though. I’m in my first studio class this semester, Drawing II. Now, I’ve taken Drawing II, III, and Illustration at Tunxis, my previous school, but my portfolio placed me in the Drawing II class at SCAD. I am battling some serious personal demons in this class. First of all, I know I can draw. If you ask me to draw a wagon, I can draw you a wagon and it’ll be a really good wagon too! However, if you put a wagon in front of me and say, “Draw that wagon exactly the way you see it, reproducing it’s angles and proportions correctly,” the wagon I put on that paper looks like a little kid drew it! I cannot perfectly reproduce the object in front of me to save my life! If my proportions are right, my angles are off. If my angels are right, my proportions are off! I don’t understand how these things could be mutually exclusive like that! There is just something I’m not getting. I can feel it darting around in my brain like a caged animal trying to find its way out, but it just won’t click! I was so frustrated when I got home today that I lied down on my bed, squeezed Horse with No Name three times (He says “We love you Lonnie, we believe in you” in the voices of 15 of my friends back home) and just let some tears fall.

The thing is, I made a point of telling my professor that I’d already taken Drawing II, and now I feel like I’m shaming myself and my former school because I’m having such a hard time with stupid observational drawing! I am determined to do it the way she’s teaching us and not be lazy about it, but my fear and my short cuts keep showing up in my drawings. I know there’s value in what she’s showing us, the results will be a much more technically correct drawing, but I am having trouble letting go of the idea that I’m supposed to be good at this already! This is not going to be an “easy A”.

In my mind, if I can’t learn to draw, and be the best of the best at it, then I might as well throw away all the money I’ve spent in school because I’m not going to find work after. There are a whole lot of “nots” in there that I need to work out of my brain. Worrying about money and jobs is not going to help me draw any better.

What’s better than 3 free days at DisneyWorld for Christmas? How about FOUR free days at DisneyWorld for Christmas! (Well free as in Mom and Dad paid for our hotel room as Christmas present.) My youngest brother is interning at one of the DisneyWorld Hotels through the holidays. Martin and I are heading down there to spend Christmas with him. Originally we were supposed to go from the 24th-27th, but Matt mistakenly made the reservations till the 26th. I thought that meant we were only going for three days until I got his text this morning, “What time are you going to be here?”

He made the reservations for the 23rd-26th! We communicate very well in my family. So, with two hours notice, I’m off to DisneyWorld for the Holidays! You guys will still get a comic, but it was drawn in 30 minutes and colored in less than that! Today was supposed to be my comic day.

I’ll be twittering from my phone while we’re away, but I don’t have one of those fancy data plans that lets me actually check messages, so I won’t be able to reply to anything until I get back.

Have a very Merry Christmas!

It is weird. Over the last two weeks I have forgotten that I am a web comic artist. I did not realize I’d forgotten this until today when I was told that Obsidian had drawn the Almost Normal me into the background of Wednesday’s Commissioned Comic. I was amazed and flattered and excited to be included in his work this way, and also a bit surprised. I said to myself, “Why would O choose me? Who am I to be that special?”

Then I remembered, “Oh right! I am a Web comic artist! I am part of a community of other web comic artists! How could I forget this?”

It seems to me that in order to be a web comic artist, or perhaps any kind of artist at all, you have to spend a whole lot of time living in your own head. This includes spending time on the internet. When I’m on WoW or chatting through Facebook and Twitter, I don’t just see text and graphics, I move through the screen into the world in my head. Here all the people and characters I interact with online exist in a tangible form, not just as pixels on the screen.

My move and the Thanksgiving holiday caused me to take a two week vacation from the world in my head and spend quite a bit of time interacting with the people and things that exist in the “real” world. While normally I’d see real life friends for a bit here and there, for the last two weeks I have been surrounded by the people I love, eating good food, having great parties, and getting the best hugs and well wishes for my journey. For the last 7 days I’ve been living with my boyfriend, which is quite an adjustment from a long distance relationship where we spent most of our time with each other in our heads by phone, Skype, or Ventrillo.

Spending all this time in the real world has been great, amazing, and awesome, but it has really thrown my comic ideas into a spin! For one, all this real world communication has made it really difficult to hear Dalia, Despair and the whole host of other characters in my head. Maybe they are just being quiet and taking all this newness in. Maybe to them it’s like watching a compelling film about a fantastical world they don’t exist in. Maybe once things settle down and they’ve processed our new environment they will start talking to me again. Until this morning, I didn’t even know that I missed them. Until then though, what do I do with my comic?

My comic was originally supposed to be about me. Up until 2 weeks ago though, the characters in my head were much more interesting! Now, with all these changes in my real life, I feel compelled to move Almost Normal back closer to the direction I initially started in, but I also find myself considering my fans and the characters they have become attached to. Do I move forward in this new direction, or do I try to continue with threads that I started before my move?

I think the answer is to just do what feels right now and don’t concern myself with what others think. Dalia and Despair are a part of me. They may be quiet right now, but they haven’t gone away. I’m sure they’ll make their way back into the story when they see fit. For now, it’s time to draw and work with what comes out.

Thanks for listening to my musings. I look forward to getting back into the swing of things here.