Some shittles. What’s that, the view from the deck of an airship? Can’t tell.

Just doodlin some kind of fantastic-looking  industrial scene. Fantastic in the sense of fantasy, not quality work. Started warping the whole canvas and trying to play off the same colour palette I made previously. Pretty dry looking, somehow needs more moisture.

Yes, recurring thing with me: lil dudes riding on robots. Just doodling and trying to find interesting textures.

A dude I work with, who is actually good at this sort of thing, recommended making a brush with one soft end, one hard end. Sortof like so:

The big smear at the top there is the actual brush shape. Basically it leaves your strokes with a soft side, and a hard edge, and depending on your stroke-speed and spacing, it sets feinter hard lines and right angles (more…)

I suck at painting. But here I go anyway.

It’s mind-crushing to contemplate whether it’s really possible for someone to get much better at something they may just lack natural aptitude for.

We’re all in love with the idea that we can better ourselves, so I’m suspicious of just how true it is. But I’m not sure there’s an alternative really. You kind of just HAVE to be optimistic about this stuff. It’s optimistic naivety or bust.

I’ve been a Heartbreaker for fiffteen years, ever since I first emigrated to Europa. I remember watching the news reports when I was a kid. The Chinese landings. Cracking through the ice. The oceans below. It was life! It was intelligent! And some of it, we learned, was angry. Never forget, they started killing us first, the Balaenoptera chaoticus. First blood belongs to the Chaos Whale.

As much as the other races are subservient, the Chaos Whales are vain and domineering. They’ve been kings of their world for millennia. Then we arrived and shattered their worldview.

Unlike the other marine mammals, the Chaos Whale feeds off the the hydrothermal vents that pock-mark the crust of Europa. They can stay down there for decades. We don’t have submersibles that can withstand the pressure. We have to wait for them to come to us.

Their skin is impregnable and dense. Bullets, harpoons, explosives? Won’t scratch them. Short of poisoning the water or mini-nukes – something we’ve only done twice, at untold cost to the ambient life – there’s only one way to take them down: intravenously.

We wait for the beast’s attack, then rumble the water to disorient it, and I get launched at the dorsal fold. Once I’ve drilled my way in I crawl to the nearest arterial vessel. Their deep, rhythmic pulse only pumps blood once every nine seconds. I get to the heart, deploy my batteries, and then the hard work begins. It takes hours. When I finish, I sleep. I always have such fantastic dreams. I’m still asleep when they cut me out.

People ask if I feel sorry for the aliens I’ve killed. “No,” I reply. “I’m a Heartbreaker. You don’t want your heart to get broken, don’t fall in love.” And then I laugh.

Just more ink.

Heartache is hard.

Just continued efforts inking this big ugly zombie-blasting scene. Trying to be fast and loose, seems to be working alright. Zooming back out on a loosely inked bit of art tends to improve the look of it considerably, I’ve found. Maybe that makes sense.

Couple of computer meltdowns and roadtrips later, and we’re back.

Working on a quicker, scrappier style of slapping ink over these pencils. The pencils themselves I’m just about done, but before I sign off on them I want to know how well they’re acting as a guide for the way I want to go through with ink.