‘Person At Beach On Cloudy Day 4’ || A Sketch & Not Really Sure What To Make Of It

Last night, I had planned to take a break from sketching for a bit — although I had in mind a perspective that I wanted to try out — and jump back into writing. It had been almost a week since I have properly written anything (ever since my breakdown) and I felt that I have rested enough.

My friends and I got onto Discord and chatted for a bit and at one point they got to playing an online game together, which I wasn’t a part of, so while they were using the voice channel to communicate their strategies, I jumped into writing. I picked up an old story that I have started but have not continued in a long while, thinking that it would a good place to get back into writing again.

Things went well during the session, until my friends started engaging in conversation with me as they played, which, while definitely not their fault, definitely pulled me out of my writing state, so I saved what I managed to write (yes! I managed to write something at least!) and picked up my sketchbook — since sketching is about one of the few things I can do while engaging in any sort of conversation.

And by the end of the night, this piece was born.

Until now, I still don’t know what to make of it. I wanted to see how things would look at a different angle/perspective and I did it… only the result isn’t what I expected. This was perhaps one of the few accidentally abstract-looking pieces I have turned up in my life… and I am somewhat strangely happy that I did.

‘Person At Beach On Cloudy Day 3’ || A Sketch & The Sizz Aesthetic

Yet another angle, this time just over the shoreline, looking inland, while our protagonist stands now just at the water’s edge, contemplating.

Here, I still worked with the same extreme-top-horizon approach, only that I shifted the point of view round to the front a little. The cliffs in the background remain as they are, as do the sea mist. The one element I have added in here is the sea foam.

Working on the sea foam took some time. I remembered having deep conversations with my friend on Discord on the human thought process while doing it and then later when we left the chatroom, I was still working on it while keeping my mom company with our lifelong discussion on the mysteries, perils and beauties of human relationships and interactions as she waited for my dad to come home from work. I finished before he came back, and went straight to sleep after posting on social media.

I have since received a few feedback (surprisingly, much less than ‘Person At Beach On Cloudy Day 2‘ — though it doesn’t really matter) and one pointed out how the picture bears resemblance to some of the stuff they have seen on the ‘Sizz’ subreddit (only with less distortion).

My first encounter with the term, and I have since learned that it is a specific aesthetic that evolved from a combination of German expressionism, American film noir and Japanese are-bure-bokeh styles. Here is a link to the wiki page explaining the aesthetic in greater detail.

Something new I have learned today! 😀

‘Person At Beach On Cloudy Day 2’ || A Sketch

So I did another sketch again last night, and it is still on the same subject, only from a different angle with the same extreme-top-horizon approach. This time, we are looking down on our main character from above as they stand by the shoreline, all while the sea mist builds in the distance.

This was a little practice on using negative spaces, and I was actually quite happy when someone on tumblr actually pointed this out to me.

I enjoyed making this one as much as I did making its predecessor. I might just go on for a while with this until I think it is enough.

Click here for ‘Person At Beach On Cloudy Day’.

‘Person At Beach On Cloudy Day’ || A Sketch & Finding Salvador Sobral

It had been a while since I have properly done any illustrations, and after the whole thing with this, I thought it would be a good time to. Before yesterday, I managed two with Autodesk SketchBook on my phone, which were fun explorations of the digital medium (something that I may return to eventually).

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  “Man At The Sink”

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  “A Doodle”

I wanted to go on for a bit more, but I didn’t know what would be my next subject. A haze started to come over my mind and I knew better than to force it now, so I just left it at that.

Then, as I got to talking with my friend over Discord last night (as we quite regularly do nowadays ever since the pandemic), our conversation brought us to the subject of the Eurovision Song Contest, and I remarked on how a lot of the recent winning songs, though representing different countries, have mostly been in English — except for the 2017 winner, ‘Amar Pelois Dois‘ (written by Luisa Sobral and performed by her brother, Salvador) which is in Portuguese.

I gave it a listen, and I could not believe my ears. It was perhaps one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard; a supple melody soaring through Salvador Sobral’s gentle pipes over delicate textures and harmonies. I have since looked into other songs by Salvador and Luisa Sobral, and have instantly fallen in love with the both of them.

The mood set, the fog in my mind parted and I saw the picture that I would like to try making. So, I picked up my sketchbook and pencil, and started sketching while my friend wrote his novel in the background.

The Heart To Write: A Personal Lesson On Being Authentic ( + VLOG #9 )

A lesson on writing, I have learned this week, and a really important one at that.

Earlier in April, a good friend of mine sent a link to a competition by a local publisher, calling for short fiction submissions for their next anthology, which has a horror theme. This was the same publisher who held the competition that I talked about in this post. And no, I didn’t win that competition.

Anyways, since the deadline was to be at the end of April, I initially wasn’t so keen, because of the short time I had to properly write something.

However, later, I turned back on that and was seriously considering participating. You see, this was a pretty well-developing publisher for young authors in our country, and I would very much want to be published with them. Imagine, the recognition and the validation!