I just heard about MCR going to wwwy 2024, I’m hoping this means they’re going on tour again and/or that they’ll do album concerts for their other albums too (they’re doing the black parade at wwwy). I’m not a black parade hater or anything, but I really really love I brought you my bullets. I got to see them last year so it wouldn’t be the end if the world if they didn’t, but I would love to see them again. In other news I’ve been promoted at my day job, which is nice, but I never really wanted to get super invested there, especially since I haven’t been working on my portfolio as much as I would like. I’m starting to wonder if it’s burnout or just a result of shitty things happening around me. There’s been a lot of illness and death in my family the last few years. I’d also like to work on this website more often. I feel like I learned so much in the frenzied few days when I was first making it and then just forgot everything...
This piece was created over about five and a half hours between July 29th and August 5th. I was planning to do it in colored pencil at first, but I knew I wanted to work on blue paper and the colored pencils just weren’t popping. So this is my first real soft pastel drawing. I tried it at school a few times as a kid, but we never used the right kind of paper so I had some pretty intense bias against it until my mom picked it up a couple years ago.
I started with a preliminary value study, but honestly it was more of a fur practice. I don’t have a lot of experience drawing fur and hair has always been a weak point for me.
Once I started with the pastels I wasn’t really loving how the bear was turning out. I wanted to do a kind of iridescent effect I’ve been practising in colored pencils and it just wasn’t going my way. I think it’s a mix of being new to the medium and working with such a large point (I keep my colored pencils super sharp). Rough and ready is what I tend to fall back on though, and that’s where I went with this. I started liking it a lot better once I had the chair in and then the ribbon was just a little extra contrast with the subject.
This might be the beginning of a series on 80s/90s toys, I haven’t quite decided yet. I’m really happy I got this one done though because it means so much to me. The bear was the last gift I received from my favorite aunt before her Alzheimer's took a turn for the worse. I see it as a kind of portrait in absence.
