Thursday

I have had a not-so-great drawing week.
It's a mental thing- my mind feels very strained. Drawing requires focus that my brain just can't seem to muster up energy for. My mental fatigue is pretty severe.

Work is very busy.

Daya was gone from Sunday to Weds visiting a friend which was nice and lonely at the same time.

***
Leah brought a model in for the Thursday Reuters Art session.
Here are some 1 minutes:

20 mins

20 mins, Leah's cat joined so I added her in.

This model is one Leah uses a lot and loves but oh man does she move around.  All the time. During the pose.

It's normal for models to shift (the really good ones don't move much at all) but this lady moved constantly.  She stood up during the pose, she stretched-- the end of the pose was significantly different than the start even on a 20 minute---hey look I know modeling is difficult (I did it in college), and you're never allowed to blame the model for crappy drawing, but I found her movement to be excessive.  So many times I was looking back at her for something, and she was completely out of the pose.

I'm also used to working from live models. So I know what to expect and how it goes.

This lady was cool but she can't hold a pose at all.

She was outdoors and the sun was glaring, so was difficult to see.

*****

I have been slowly transitioning to facing that my online home for the last 16 years, Wetcanvas, is really truly dead, another casualty of 2020.  It has been dying a slow and ugly death for years, due to an out-dated website.  The promised support and upgrades never happened.

Well, the company who owns the site finally "updated" it, and if this is even possible, the new site is worse than the old one.  They made the terrible decision to run a forum on Wordpress instead of vbulletin.  We lost almost all the history of the site in the process.  The new site doesn't work.  It lacks basic functionality. Everyone who hasn't already left is leaving.

I have met some amazing people on there and learned so much over the years.

It's taken me about 2 months to really face this in a concrete way because I'm so sad about it.

For the time being I'm still there, mostly just talking with fellow staff.

It's like Wetcanvas died, went to Pet Sematary, and came back all bad and wrong.

16 years is a long time to be part of a community.

Facebook and Instagram are not the same.  Nor are other art forums I have seen around.

I guess everything comes to an end at some point.