exam time stress induced drawing

instead of studying like a normal person! I guess it’s better than procrastination via doing meth or something.

Two little comics for ya, one from Chinese class (weird and hilarious shit always happens when you throw a bunch of 18-21 year old Asians together, plus our really young teacher) and one to say, to all of you stressed out, overworked, underfed and exhausted college kids out there, HAPPY FUCKING STUDYING. Laaaa~ When my professor posts the slides from that lecture onto Blackboard, I am so screencapping it and putting it in this post.

see you next week if the bags under my eyes haven’t sagged to the floor, incapacitating my movement.

$5 Commissions & new short (possibly continued) comic

I’m getting better at this whole regular updating thing!

Great, awesome, exciting news: this summer, I will be an administrative assistant in the art department at Scholastic, yay! Children’s books! Bright, primary colors! ART! YAY! I’m super excited for this job, which will give me more insight into my potential future career path… which is why I am neglecting my due-in-two-weeks lab report to draw and blog and write. WHOOPS. We had some funny answers to our surveys, though… even though it was mostly just fill-in-number-scales. Anyways, onward!

I’ve been doing little $5 doodle commissions, mostly of people’s characters. If you’ve ever wanted some artwork from me, they’re still going on. Just drop me an email!

So there’s that.

More srsbsns wise, I started drawing a comic. It turned into an autobiographical comic about something that happened to me in high school. I don’t know if I’ll continue it, because I think it stands all right on its own as a two-pager, and I’m not sure if I can write about it the way I want to, still, but we will see. Breakups happen, and they suck, but this one in particular left a really deep impression… although, if it weren’t for this breakup, things would have gone a whole lot differently. It definitely worked out for the best, but it’s one of those things you still think about from time to time. This medium is the first to somewhat accurately capture what I wanted to capture.

Plus it was great incentive to play with this new thick-wobbly-nonstraight-line-panel style.

Next week: more comics, Wendy dying in class, no more puppy (she’s going home today, BOO), probably an angry drawing or two. See you then!

self-deprecating comics and a few Lolitas

Glad I got back into the swing of scanning and uploading my drawings again, and glad I’ve taken time to do some more drawings/comics! I went to MoCCA Fest this weekend, and apart from meeting the lovely Betty Felon of Fashion Tips From Comic Strips, I also chatted with quite a few artists and got some inspiration. If you guys are up to reading about it, I blogged it here (ps: follow me on Tumblr for the frequent Paula Deen/Hayao Miyazaki/random writing/comics reviews spam)!

On to the drawings! I don’t think my mom ever wanted me to become a comics artist, but oh well! Here’s what the rest of the kids in my college have been up to:

I am also prone to fits of raeg. For previous raeg, see here; same reason, same problem:

In contrast to the RAEG, have some lolitas:

I thought about how much high school sucked in my psych lecture (we were going over SPSS… I probably will have no idea how to do the statistical analysis when it comes time. But my data suck anyway. I can never become a researcher, alas) :

Last, but not least, have a comic of the Boy:

Paula’s Kitchen From Hell

The muses must be smiling down upon me (either that or I finally realized that I will have more hours to draw if I don’t sleep, and in my insomniatic delirium I produce masterpieces) but OH MY GOD a new blog post in less than a week after my last one! What is this world coming to?!

I’ve only just begun to re-realize how good it feels to draw for yourself and to just break loose and have fun. Forget how much those pens cost (I think I’m more productive when I use a fine-point Sharpie than when I use my “good art pens”) and give in to your imagination.

Except in my case my imagination looks something like this:

It’s the Butter Queen herself, with Saladfingers to boot! This should not be surprising, seeing as how every time Neyrelle and I get together for dinner we end up  quoting Paula from this video: 

You’re welcome. It will now be stuck in your head forever. Here’s some visual reference for Neyrelle’s and my tea parties:

I have to give the boy some credit; he puts up with me making Saladfingers noises at him. For that, he gets a drawing. But no, really (also I was in dire need of perspective/background practice and I have a pretty good memory of what his cafe looks like) :

Alas, the right wall doesn’t bend like that. Next time, wall, NEXT TIME I will get you for sure!

Neyrelle and I stayed up all night watching Avatar, The Last Airbender, one lovely night during spring break. I love Toph!

On Saturday, Mike and I went to lunch, to Tokyo Rebel (where I gazed and touched and cried blood and tears because I haven’t made nearly enough to afford one of those gorgeous Lolita dresses yet) and then to a bagel place where we sat down and drew self-portraits of each other. I adore his use of color and his collage work; GO LOOK AT HIS ART RIGHT NOW.

Last, but not least, a preview: I’m currently working on a new comic for class (and by Thor, it will be finished this time) and was playing around with this character’s outfit:

If I’m this productive within the next week and can manage ANOTHER update, it will be a miracle. Here’s hoping. Hope you guys have a lovely week! Don’t forget to get your eight hours every night, as I’m sitting here yawning my head off in the computer lab and desperately wishing I had a cup of strong tea.

daily comic: blah blah blah

Happy Monday! I ended up skipping lab because… well… uh… no excuses, really. Just a sleepy college student.

quick note: Wendy writes about NYCC

hey guys, I just wrote a short piece about my weekend experience. You can read it here; pardon the shitty formatting in the first paragraph.

Hope everyone is having a good year so far. (:

Adventure Time! And other bored class doodles

I have been alternating between hating everyone in physics and hating everyone in world cultures; class has really been a sorry affair so far, but things are getting better. I made a friend in physics and we make jabs at freshman philosophy majors (not aimed at all at the freshman philosophy major who sits behind us and makes allusions to obscure forms of psychoanalysis that he says don’t work, namedrop, namedrop namedrop, Freud Camus Aristotle Sophocles Socrates Aristophanes Sun Tzu Laozi etc.)

World Cultures recitation, however, was lovely on Wednesday. Our TA, Ayako, said she had a treat for us– that we could spend fifteen minutes in class quietly reading from Kenko’s Essays in Idleness and then we would, GASP, get to go outside, enjoy the beautiful weather, and write little diary entries for half an hour, inspired by Kenko’s observational style! I was so happy. Except my happiness was nearly spoiled by the kids in my class who “did not understand the assignment”; “is this going to be on the exam”, etc. DIE. Anyway. Here are some more doodles from class and from late night ideas fueled by chocolate cupcakes and fried sesame seed dough things.

I love the cute stringy |: face style of Adventuretime.

I also still have a fondness for blazers and loose socks, the byproduct of too much anime in high school:

And clothes. I think I saw this somewhere on Yesstyle.com

And a random super-fine pen comic I doodled in writing class.

I hope class is less stab-inducing for everyone else!

in-class idleness

this semester I am taking a physics and astronomy class (astrophysics… big important term!) that’s really an excuse to mash ninth grade earth science with eighth grade physics equations. I am not a science person… but COME ON.

My other classes are also doodle-friendly.

Here is the majority of my three weeks’ productiveness since school started.

I’ve really been wanting to draw Lyra and Pantalaimon on the banks of the world of the dead for awhile now and got around to it in fiction class.

I am shamelessly lazy/drawing challenge day 28

Oh school year, how you do eat my motivation, my dignity, all my food (whenever the year starts my eating schedule goes haywire and I either overeat, forget to eat, or eat at sporadic times) and my dreams (no sleep for the fail!). That and I’ve been really lazy with updates as I work out my day to day routine… I’ve drawn a lot, but they’re all in my notebook (the byproduct of boring lecture classes. I might as well just buy sketchbooks for every single class).

in the meantime, here is a squinja (squid ninja), a horribly belated drawing for the drawing challenge day 28: anything you want. inspired by my lovely friend Michael Horwitz who drew the original squinja in his notebook.

Thinking Thinking Thinking

First of all, I present to you an adorable picture of my dog: See how ridiculously happy she is?

Truth be told, I haven’t updated this blog in awhile because, well, I have not been ridiculously happy. Or happy at all, for that matter, and I would hate to let people know that I get sad sometimes. It’s silly, but still, I wanted to preserve the image of a cheerful girl who always smiles and finds magic in life. Well, whatever. The truth is I was miserable for the last few weeks because it seemed like my life had come crashing to a standstill. There was nothing exciting going on, nothing new, nothing magical, and I couldn’t find anything magical to make out of the mundane, boring, bland situation I was in of just trudging along day by day waiting for the sky to give me a sign.

But one day a few weeks ago I woke up and realized it’s not all that bad. Maybe it was the calming bookstore I was in, full of the smell of incense and the sounds of soft music, maybe it was my ginger tea, maybe, maybe, maybe. Whatever it was, something in my brain clicked into place.

see we learn in psych class that nondepressed people actually have an overexpectation of how much they can control and that depressed people are actually the right ones–that they see a situation for what it is and how little control they actually have. But having an illusion of control keeps us happier. Because when we think we can control a situation we have more of an incentive to get what we want. And sometimes I think all these studies are just made up. I get into a mood where I question how real everything is, and ultimately the conclusion I always draw is I don’t know, and who cares, as long as I make the best of things, of where I am, of what I’m doing, then whether I really have control or not is irrelevant. Paint a big fat red “Whatever” on everything. Yet I haven’t stopped caring. Maybe not caring to the point where I’m always putting myself in an existential crisis, but just going with the flow.

I don’t know. I guess I should apologize for neglecting my blog for so long, but I don’t feel that way. I didn’t want this blog to become an online chronicle of everything I would say to a psychologist of HOW I REALLY FEEL ABOUT THINGS OKAY because let’s face it we always say things through filters. See me one way, see me another, nose pierced, not pierced, either way I’m still Wendy. I’m done bemoaning the fact that nobody understands, because people understand. It’s not that hard to understand another person, is it? All you really have to do is listen. Not hear, listen.

I’ve written a lot of letters lately, both in my head and out. Postcards to friends across the sea, silent monologues in letter form of HOW I REALLY FEEL ABOUT THINGS OKAY to a boy. That boy. Hey goat boy, you know who you are. If you’re reading this (betcha you’re not) here’s HOW I REALLY FEEL ABOUT THINGS OKAY: that even though I’ve heard it a thousand billion trillion times I finally realized it. I can’t save you. You don’t want to be saved. I’d wager that you’re either content where you are or too ambivalent to change your situation. You certainly don’t want a nosy girl in the way of whatever. Also, I don’t think you listened to that mix I  made you, nor will you probably ever, and that’s also okay. I’ll let myself have the occasional thoughts of wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-we-were-closer but as each day passes those thoughts become less and less frequent and someday they’ll be an echo. You’re just a boy I loved, part of my college memories. I can tell you you’re a stupid goat boy all I want and it would still be like sliding down a window. I can see A and B and C about you that would be so so so wonderful if you would just rethink and reconsider, but that’s not my place to decide, nor will it ever be. it’s okay though, fate has funny ways of working, doesn’t it?

you said life is hard and you’ve certainly seen lots of hardness in life. After, I would think about how hard life was, too, especially when I was depressed and sad, when someone elbowed me on the street and knocked me down and I would have to get back up and dust myself off, I would fight back tears and think God I hate people. When I saw how vapid and shallow girls could be in my classes I thought God I hate people, and when I heard boys bragging about their sexual exploits I thought God I hate people. After awhile of thinking God I hate people I realized there was no point. What’s that going to change? It’s commonsensical, of course. So I’m going to stop trying to change people, to fix them. They’re not jalopies. They’re people.

And then I cheered up, and now I’m happy. Just like that. Of course the situation changed because I wanted it to change–you have to want it bad enough. A few weeks ago I wanted to leave all of it behind, college, and finish everything as fast as possible and move on, move on, move on. Well, I am moving on, but slowly, one step at a time, and it’s not an easy process, but it’ll happen eventually. I just have to be patient with myself, and so should you. You should all be patient with yourselves. Patient and gentle. When your body doesn’t react the way you want it to, be gentle, please. Say, “That’s okay,” and walk on, and keep walking. You’ll get there, I promise.