Posted on

Old feelings

I didn’t draw today.
Also, I’ve edited this post like 30 times in the last 4 hours, because I either keep rambling or say too many downer things.((Why, hello, anxiety!))

I finally stopped procrastinating on buying the wedding rings! I did it! I bought a nice pair of silver and gold rings that will be engraved with our names and wedding date by next week! :D
I also got myself a new roll of blue masking tape and a delicious ice cream <3

Of course my brain decided the whole thing was enough mental effort for today, so that was mostly it for today.
I managed to mail the cake person today about a quote, though! And had a good chat with a good friend.

I… keep things in for a long time.
It is a thing with me. I rarely ever let things go, good or bad, when it comes to people; I remember fondly all the people I loved or enjoyed hanging out with, I keep interpersonal regrets forever and I also tend to hold (small, petty) grudges till the end of time. ((I think I’ve only ever grown indifferent towards one person in my whole life. One. I often forget this person even exists, tbh.))

I’ve learned with time that my feelings are on me, though. The people that provoked them are in no way responsible for them, let alone of the fact that I hold on to them; in fact, it’s actually very likely that the people I may have had issues with in the past don’t even care about me at all anymore or maybe they don’t even remember me! So, it’s rather pointless to keep those negative feelings, even if they’re just only mildly negative.
The regrets, however… those are harder to let go.

I’ve noticed that most of the time, though, my issues come not from what people have ‘done’ to me, but from my own insecurities being reflected and sometimes amplified back to me, triggered by whatever it is that happened. And when I’m hurt for being disappointed by people I cared about, in the end it also comes back to me as I question my own judgement and behavior about why and how I choose to get close to certain people.
So, when looking at everything, it’s all on me and what *I* feel, think and do, and not on the people those feelings are associated with.

Been thinking about that.
It’s actually a bit easier to let things go when you realize most of the stuff comes from yourself anyway.

Posted on

Keeping up

Today was a short morning.
I woke up with my alarm instead of before it, and was slow and sleepy all morning… I got extremely distracted and behind schedule.

I was supposed to go pick up wedding bands, but, once again, late morning… and forgot my nephew was coming over for lunch((He comes over once a week now, to play God of War and to leech some food, since he’s been living in a student dorm sort of thing and paying for his own food with his part time job for a couple months now.)) and the apartment was a disaster zone, so I better spared myself the anxiety and decided to leave that for tomorrow; I also procrastinated on sending a message to the lady I got recommended for the cakes. Will have to do that tomorrow morning as well.

Instead I played around with an old drawing and did a bit of digital value/grayscale painting with a hard brush, to keep up with the practice/study streak. It was pretty fun!
I don’t know if I dig the hard brush that much, but I’ll try finishing the whole image like that.
I tend to be rather scared of grayscale/value passes on illustrations, for some reason… I used to do them when I was I college, and sometimes I’d do them for certain things, but in the end I decided it was an unnecessary extra step. Wrong. It’s an important step! And good value passes look really pretty, so I’ll try making some of those more often :)
After lunch, I finished another old character profile art for this RPG and started another.

I didn’t get as much done today as I wanted. I don’t really like it when my brain is all for finding excuses to get distracted… I think it’s probably part self sabotage and part laziness: laziness for obvious reasons, and self sabotage because I had a lot of things to do and I kept getting anxious and threatening to scream and abandon ship.
In those cases I take a deep breath, grab some pen and paper and make a list. I never get to do all what’s on the list, but I try and it helps me get less overwhelmed and be more confident on being able to handle things.((I hate that I get overwhelmed with so little… My theory is that I’m just permanently almost-overwhelmed, so just a little bit more sends me over the edge “Orz))
A good thing as well is to just start/resume the routine. No matter how late it is, how screwed the routine is, doing *something* instead of sending everything to hell helps a lot. In the end, it may not have been a 5 billable hours work day, but it was a 3 billable hours day and not a 0 one!

I still very much lack discipline.
I seriously need to improve on that area.

Posted on

Practice

Today was a slow, lazy day~ Then again it was a holiday, so it’s allowed.

I took the chance to do some pre-work coloring practice (that ended up being what I did most of the day anyway) while looking at Glider/Guraida’s old Len/Rin art.
The result was lovely and I had a ton of fun! The end result didn’t end up looking too much like Glider’s art, but it wasn’t 100% my intention to make a copy of it anyway :) It took me a couple of hours on and off, though… way more than a practice/warmup should.
((The problem is mostly my lines… My sketches are too messy and the lines too thick, while Glider cleans his lines before coloring (and renders over them at the end), meaning I end up painting over them *a lot*, which takes longer…))

I did get a bit of work done before bed and after getting home from hanging out with mom and my MIL to plan decoration and arrangements for the wedding ((It was 1/4 wedding talk and 3/4  mom and MIL socializing and talking about life, though, because of course it was.)).

I also said ‘screw it!’ and bought the Leyendeker artbook.(( It should arrive in like… two months because shipping from the other side of the world + crappy post office 9_9;  )) I knew that if I didn’t buy it now, it’d spend another year or so on my wishlist. I excused it as a work investment :P

My day was pretty uneventful beyond that, and I was so engrossed with coloring and then going to see mom (and cooing over the dogs when the moms were talking), then coloring some more, that I didn’t really muse about anything…

I just hope my drive to practice and study styles sticks! I’m very excited about trying things now! :D