A Good Run of Art

Somewhere between 1 1/2 and two weeks leading up to, and including, Christmas, I went on a pretty epic art run.  I drew a few sketch cards & a couple bigger pics of favorite wrestle ladies, and started a big random DC Comics group shot Chrimmus night, thanks to dad having one of his big comic encyclopedias handy.  I also did 20 NSFW pics over the span, mostly concept work for an idea I had.  You… won’t be seeing any of them here.  They aren’t that good anyway.  Sorry to get your hopes up. 😛

Aside from the group shot (no photo taken yet, not that far along anyway), I will show you the SFW stuff though!  You can still fap to it if you want.  I won’t judge (much).

First up, here’s ridiculously beautiful, the delightfully geeky, Japan tour-bound, New Zealand-based future wrestling legend Evie!

I’m not saying I’m in love, but, uh, maybe.. \(♥o♥)/

I have had a crush on Evie since the first time I drew her.  This is not unusual.  I am a lonesome bum and I almost always get brief mini-crushes on the pretty ladies I like to draw.  But this crush, it just don’t wanna go away. *le sigh*

Keep moving.  How about another beautiful and talented and geeky rising wrestling starlet I may or may not have a crush on?  Hit me with dat sweet, sweet Hania Huntress sketch

Hania Huntress, who is TOTALLY not an unmasked Saturyne..

Someday I will draw the She-Wolf far enough down her badass body for you to see her epic abs, but alas today is not that day.  Shame too, because she was rocking them in the pic I drew this from.

Now onto the sketch cards…

ECIII..

Ethan Carter III, whom you may remember as Derrick Bateman if you watched NXT.  He is an entertaining feller.

MMA legend Bas Rutten..

I opened up the twitter suggestion box at the beginning of this run, and my brilliant punster/MMA guru friend LegKickTKO chose him.

The Estonian Thunderfrog. Let that sink in… ESTONIAN. THUNDERFROG.

It was late, so I only got two suggestions.  And this is the other, from D aka Heinekenrana, aka one of the coolest people EVER.  Estonian Thunderfrog is amazing and one of the best reasons I can think of that you should support indie wrestling, by the way.

Roman Reigns is Papa-Romeo-Echo-Tango-Tango-Yankee. Pretty.

The Shield’s spearing machine/pretty boy/heavy/monstabeast Roman Reigns.  You are all now pregnant.  Even the guys looking at this.  Especially the guys looking at this.

NXT’s Tyler Breeze..

Speaking of pretty boy wrestlers, though in a less macho, more selfie-taking way, presenting Tyler Breeze.  The glittery gel pens don’t show up so well in scans, but trust me, the background is full of sparkles befitting such a superstar.

KANA..

KANA is a pretty big star in Japan and the ‘Murcan indies.  I’d been meaning to draw her for awhile.  She happened to become a topic of conversation that I had no involvement in, that nonetheless spilled into my timeline during my art binge, so she got drawn.

Hey, it’s Evie again..

Oof, right in the feels.  I feel like I’m going out of my mind when she crosses it.  And I kinda like the way that feels.  Closing out this post and the year 2013 with a sketch card of Evie, because I can’t not…

And now that I’ve made a fool of myself, onward to 2014!  Happy New Year, everybody.

Until our next…

Ryno, The LCS, and a Jumbo Pack

We have a new card shop in town!  I remember dad telling me about it a couple months back, that the local paper profiled the owner.  Anyway, I had a chance to stop in a week or so ago.  It’s a little sparse, and super tiny, but it seems like it might end up being one of the good ones.  Better to get my Topps packs for mall sketch carding excursions from there than at retail anyway.

They didn’t have a lot to choose from outside of an unopened Panini Crusade box at $20 a pack or $120 to buy the box outright, all three series of the aforementioned 2013 Topps baseball at the same price as retail, and 2013 Topps Jumbo Football at $11.95 a pack.  So I grabbed a football jumbo just because that’s a thing I can do now, which pleases me to an unhealthy degree, and this:

Ryno auto..

They had a small stack of them for $10 apiece.  So worst case scenario, it isn’t legit and I’m only out $10.  But if it’s real, while not a card, this takes care of my Ryno trifecta at least for the time being.  I have his Topps & Fleer RCs and some early-2000s Donruss bat card.  So yeah, I’m not getting his auto on a card for less than $30-40 if I’m lucky, so this old flyer thing will do. 🙂

And how did we do on the pack?  Enh… Let’s take a look.

Base..

Some nice action photos scattered throughout.  So good in fact I want to rant about the pointlessness of the photo variations, but it just boils down to this.  Of the 50 variations, only a half-dozen or so have a noticeably better photo, so what is even the point???

Rookies..

Pulled a pretty solid group of rookies though.  DeAndre, Gio, & Ertz are already making significant contributions, and I like Cordarrelle and Ball to start making bigger impacts next season.  And Travis Frederick has a magnificent beard.  Tremendous.  Now howsabout dem inserts though?

Eric Decker 1000 Yard Club..

Nothing special, but I feel ’em on the design.  The back has his stats from each game of the season and adds them up at the bottom.

Romo 4000 Yard Club..

The same but with QBs.  Poor Romo, probably the single most simultaneously overrated and underrated quarterback to have ever played the game.

Hakeem the Not-Dream..

Dang, this Hakeem Nicks mini was so forgettable (looks nice enough though) I literally almost forgot to add it.  Anyway, unless someone else would like to claim it, I suppose I will set it aside for BA Benny.

LOLTrent..

Excellent design (just needs a border of some kind, in my opinion), but, err… moving on.

DeMarcus Ware Legends in the Making..

This card is just classy as balls, and it might not even be the best looking insert in the pack.

Jim Kelly Gridiron Legends..

And that is because of this beaut of Hall of Famer Jim Kelly.  Some real nice inserts in there.

Fred Jackson BCA parallel /399 + base..

With a 3:10 chance, I didn’t pull any hits.  But I did get the this pink Breast Cancer Awareness parallel (according the back of the pack, camo and BCA both parallels fall 1:9 packs, or roughly one per box).

The back..

Not the best player, but I saw Sportscards from the Dollar Store likes the Bills, so maybe the best two cards in this pack and the rest of my Bills might finally have a destination in mind.  We shall see.

Not bad overall, and I’m still just stoked to have an actual card shop again.  I mean, there’s another place downtown that still has cards, but that hasn’t been their bread & butter in years.  There’s also that infamous place at the mall I may have mentioned on rare occasion as having crazy overpriced stuff.  But yeah, this is a very cool development.

That’s all for now.  Thanks for stopping by.  Whatever I have to say, I’ll try to start saying it a little more often.

Until our next…

Something Changed

I didn’t understand it immediately, but now that I’m ready to sleep, I finally get it.  See, tonight I colored several old sketch cards.  I finally busted out the markers again after an extremely long hiatus.  After I finished, I noticed how much worse I’ve gotten at coloring during that stretch.  I did color a few things with watercolor pencils between marker usage, but even that was rare (four-ish times total).

The thing about this realization is that it means I actually used to be fairly good at it!  I rarely ever liked how it turned out, and I could get sloppy & botchy at times, but looking back, I could blend & shade quite well.  This is such a strange, and strangely exciting, feeling.  Through all the shit I’ve been through, and fighting like hell to become something resembling a semi-functional human being (still got a looooooooooong way to go), I’ve never been able to look back and see anything good or worthwhile in the rear-view mirror of my life.

It’s weird, even though I’ve fallen off dramatically, realizing I was decent for awhile… And that whole time, I was hating myself and 90% of my art the entire time I was doing this good work.  I still do, and I might always struggle with my total lack of self-confidence.  But this made me realize, I got to ease up on myself a little bit.  I’m never quite going to be normal or be able to work a regular job for any length of time or whatever, but that isn’t the end of the world.  I can always do better at life, but I need to chill the hell out a little bit.

I didn’t get good at coloring sketch cards, or keep at it long enough/frequently enough to, because I was so hard on myself.  If anything, hating and feeling like a failure made it harder to do.  So yeah, this probably isn’t the first weird little realization I’ve had like this, and who knows if it will stick, but I guess it says a something positive that I even noticed it, and extrapolated something good that I can potentially use going forward, from an actual failing.

Beats kicking myself for failings nobody else will ever even notice or care about, assuming they’re failings that even exist at all.

Hey colors, why u so flat? 😦

 

Unhinged

When you’ve been alone forever

How are you supposed to feel

When you aren’t beautiful

Or amazing

Or special in any way

When you’re just you

And then someone from forever away just blows your mind

Like, every time

That all it takes is just seeing their name

For you to just all lose control

You don’t really know them at all

And they know you even less

They probably don’t even care about you

Who are you anyway

You’re just some random jackass

Nothing special

No potential left to blow

Little hope for the future

That’s all that’s left of you

But what does it mean

When someone just makes you feel completely stupid and insane

And you never want to lose that feeling as long as you live

What is this feeling

The chemical reaction they cause in your messed up little brain

Why is it so exhilarating

Why are you so scared to feel this way

And why are you so afraid to lose that feeling

What does it mean

Why can’t you let it go

Don’t you wish they would just shoot you down already

Wouldn’t that make it easier

Don’t know

Just don’t know

I feel so completely unhinged…

Return is Imminent

It has been way too long since I posted anything, and I’m not even sure how many tweaks I’ve made to my collection at this point, let alone how many have actually stuck.  But I’ve still been updating my lists on occasion and scanning stuff.  And despite my own computer being barely functional at this point and not being able to temporarily borrow mom’s spare computer because her laptop is doing strange things, I have every intention of blogging with a certain degree of regularity again in the near future.

I may also have another project or two on the horizon, but we’ll see how that pans out before I have anything.  The point is, regardless of what I write, I need to do a whole helluva lot more of it.  I don’t have an eta for when business will start to pick back up around here, but barring something going severely wrong, it eventually will.

I guess that’s all for this dispatch from the desolate hellscape I call a life.  As I wander off wistfully into the pre-dawn haze, I leave you this morning with this magnificent sketch card by everyone’s favorite pony enthusiast.  Behold!

Ernie Banks Sketch Card by Dayf..

Let’s play two…