Day 22, And Work Continues To Be Awful. Alternative Arrangements Are In The Making, But Nothing's Happening

Day 22, and work continues to be awful. Alternative arrangements are in the making, but nothing's happening quickly enough for it to be better. I might sell prints. This is a possibility.

The prompt today was Urban Legend. I did a mysterious white stag from the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey. It apparently guides lost travelers and warns people of disasters. Again, not strictly a monster, but I feel like there's enough monstrosity going on at the moment, and a white deer that helps to prevent disaster would be awfully nice.

Wiki link to deer legend

Day 14. The prompt today was "living object". I made a golem. I don't have too much to say at the moment.

Day 21. The prompt today was Mesoamerican mythology. I ran into a problem with this one; mainly, there seems to be a huge gap in the scholarship about folkloric monsters in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican cultures. Oh, sure, I found lots of gods and the like, but defining gods as monsters seems like dodgy territory to me. If anyone knows of non-divine supernatural creatures or spirits from those cultures, please send them my way, because now I have The Curiosity.

In light of not finding a huge amount of material to work from, I went with the idea that dogs, and specifically the Xoloitzcuintli dog, was believed to be a guide to the underworld. Now, psychopomps aren’t monsters strictly speaking, and the god associated with the dogs, Xolotl, isn’t a monster either, but there you go.

Dry media to mitigate page buckling.

So I got to see a super cool friend of mine this weekend, whom I haven't seen since 2008, and while I'm really happy about that, I am currently full of all kinds of conflicted emotion.

I haven't the money to go back and visit England, because I am poor, and the visit that was going to happen has been cancelled for reasons. My intention to spend Bonfire Night with friends just doesn't look like it's going to happen, and that is crushing inside. 

Basically, nearly all of my friends live far enough away that getting to them is impossible for me at the moment. I suppose it just burns all the worse when you get to be near one of those friends and then distance happens again. 

I am thankful for the friends that live here, but it still feels very isolated. 

In short: 

I'll level with the world here; I'm still not doing great. My job has turned into a huge source of anxiety, and I'm at a pretty lousy and stand-still place right now. What I want to do is make art; I don't just want to draw pictures, I want to get back to having a studio and making art and showing it.

I've been in at least two shows a year every year since 2007, and this is going to be the first time since then that I've got nothing. I crashed back from living overseas and getting a master's degree to living in my parents' house and working at a dead-end minimum wage job that isn't helping me get out again.  

I'm not sure what to do, but I do know that I feel like a huge burden on my friends and family at the moment. I don't want to be here and nothing seems to be changing. I am isolated and stuck, and I'd kill for something good to happen right about now. 

Day 11, and I think my brown paper sketchbook is getting crinkly from all the ink washes. That's okay; I bought it at a hundred yen shop in Nagano in 2008. The prompt was yokai, which is a bad thing, because I am such a huge enthusiast (read: big freaking nerd) about everything yokai that I got distracted in my Mizuki Shigeru encyclopedias and couldn't decide, which is why I ended up doing two of the most stereotypical yokai choices I could manage. This is an uncommonly skinny tengu,  and chochinobake, whom I accidentally gave two eyes to instead of one. Call it unreasonably high expectations, but I didn't manage to pull off my desired image quality here.

I should probably just do a month of yokai next time instead of a monster challenge. It'd get it out of my system. 

Edit: Herp derp, this is 12, not 11.