Gretchdragon

After a long hiatus, I'm back.  

2016 sucked for many reasons, including sending our soul cat Marra back to the stars.  Tshirt designs and a poster was all that got created for a while.

Then there was a happy accident that got my creative side going again, and I've been greedily learning ProCreate.  The iPad Pro with Apple Pencil is now my favorite way to draw and ink and I'm really delighted with how well the results print out.  There's also been the acquisition of a LeClerc Nilus 45" floor loom (dammit Tara) and I'm now weaving to use up all the yarn I'm spinning.

We also have added to the household a snow Bengal named Kohala, who will shortly be acquiring a little buddy.

S.H.I.E.L.D. is very much a fictional organization (Thank you Mr. Steranko!), but it appeals to some very real people.  And some of those people got started early on putting together a fan site for the new Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. show on ABC over the summer.  About the same time, my beloved 14 yr old rescue Bengal got diagnosed with chronic renal failure; sometimes the warranty on the parts wear out sooner than expected.

Anyways, to help distract my mind before bed I was hopping onto the chat forums.  One of the fans there, Agent K, was talking about some vet stuff and quite cheerfully chatted with me about Marra's recent bloodwork.  We chat casually anytime we're both on.  Well, as it turned out, Marra started having difficulties keeping weight on, and I discussed my concern with Agent K who did a little looking and then came back and suggested a specific type of steroid that is safe for aging kitties with renal issues.

This weekend Marra started doing poorly, not eating much and her weight went down a few more ounces.  I took her in Monday morning as she was clearly in distress; looks like she had a massive hairball attack.  I mentioned Agent K's suggestion to Marra's vet and she is doing research to see if we can try it.

So I can truthfully say that S.H.I.E.L.D. is helping my ill kitty get better!  And if you think about it, that's quite the accomplishment for a fictional comic book organization.

HUGE thanks to Mr. Steranko for the idea in the first place, and huge thanks to Agent K as well!

While reading Bleeding Cool this morning I stumbled across this link, rubbed my bleary eyes, and read it two more times to make sure I was really seeing it.  www.bleedingcool.com/2013/09/1…

Whut?

It appears that the misguided soul in question defines the human species by their genitalia and reproductive status.  Now, last time I checked, the possession or lack thereof of specific organs is not an indicator of one's total capacity.  We all know plenty of males who will never have kids.  We also know plenty of females who will never have kids.  But the production of kids really only qualifies you for two things:  1.  Being able to definitively prove you had sex and 2.  Being able to call yourself a mommy or daddy.  We ALL know PLENTY of people who had kids and yet still can't get a grasp on the whole parenting thing.

There's not a single manual I've ever read that states "You may not do X unless you are the owner of a penis".  Hell, with today's technology, I can even pee a name in the snow!

I do not identify as a feminist although I graduated from Mills College; my world view has always been that if I'm interested in doing something, I'm going to go do it and anyone who has problems with my gender will be either summarily ignored or run over.  I hold a pilot's license and attend the Oshkosh Fly-In; I can weld, run a lathe and a mill, and all the power tools are mine.  I drive a 4x4 truck (and will move to something smaller for financial purposes).  I've played coed ice hockey, driven combat robots (you know them as Battlebots), and played paintball against other guys.  I surf fish, build stained glass windows, enjoy photography, draw, and even knit.  None of these pursuits is hampered or enhanced by my tits or my unused uterus.

I remember holding my goalie gear and watching another women's hockey team playing before my game.  Some early-20's male walked up, giggled, and said, "Oh how cute, girl hockey!".  Then he watched for a while as the team effortlessly and smoothly avoided collisions and took off with the puck.  His face slowly lost its grin and before he left he said, "Those girls could skate circles around us.".  Indeed, they could have!  If you've ever spent time at a hockey rink you'll notice that the male teams tend to specialize in short, hard pushes and a lot of collisions.  The women's teams tend to specialize in paced endurance and finesse skating, dodging around other players rather than going for the hit.  It many ways it reminds me of Russian hockey vs US hockey.  Two teams, one male, one female, knew each other fairly well and we decided to share our practice ice time together, and WOW, that was a beautiful thing to watch!  The guys taught the gals how to hit and take a hit; the gals taught the guys how to pass properly and how to feint and skate around people.  Combining the teams resulted in BOTH teams learning new skills and improving overall.

The point here is that while either gender tended towards a playing style neither side was locked into any playing style or even the ability to play at ALL by virtue of their gender.  Indeed, the skillset of either gender was *enhanced* by including the opposite gender.  And so it is with the vast majority of pursuits...there's very few pursuits denied to anyone by virtue of their gender; most of the time people don't participate because they're not interested.  The airplane doesn't care about the gender of the person flying it.  The weld doesn't care about the gender of the person flying it.  We have reached a point in our evolution where we are so very, very much more than the organs we were born with, and people who make claims that "that gender shouldn't" should be summarily laughed at for having a complete and utter lack of imagination.

Since I was a little kid cartooning was always my thing.  I did cartoons on EVERYTHING.  If you carefully scrape off the wallpaper in my room in the house I grew up in, I even drew cartoons all over the wall before we wallpapered.  When I got back into art later, I focused (perhaps a bit too much) on realism.  I'd been hunting online for a cartooning tutorial for some time and stumbled across Paris Christou and Toonbox Studios quite by accident.

These incredibly affordable and detail-rich tutorials were exactly what I was looking for!  I can now sketch up cartoon characters that look solid very, very quickly and crank out my own variations just as fast.  Paris does a fabulous job of explaining what to look for, what to emphasize, how to color line art....pretty much everything your little heart desires.  He's also super friendly and answers questions.  So these days I spend my lunch hours sketching along with his tutorials and building up my chops!

Thanks Paris!!!!!
You can find Paris here on DA:  toonboxstudio.deviantart.com/

Back in 2011 I was cruising around DA and stumbled across a piece by John Moreshead.  The pencils were simply stunning.  This guy was GOOD.  I went to take a look at some of his other stuff...Catwoman, Hellboy, the Hulk, a bunch of really amazing pinups.  Tasty, tasty pencils.  I favorite'd a lot of his pieces and did a very sloppy job inking one of his Catwoman pieces, learning quite a lot about how not to ink in the process.  

John worked in Las Vegas in the construction industry as his primary job; after work he liked to relax drawing pinups and tattoo flash.  Tentatively, knowing how lacking in skills I was, I sent him an email expressing my appreciation of his work.  He sent back a very kind response and, encouraged, I fell in love with a Hellboy piece he had done and vowed to do a much, much better job inking it than Catwoman.  He inspired me; if he, a construction industry guy, could do such a fabulous job, perhaps there was hope for a software industry geek like myself.  Hellboy occupied me off and on for the next year as I moved from project to project, never quite hitting completion on the inks.

Peripherally I had noticed that John had stopped posting new work, but hey, neither was I and people get busy, right?

It wasn't until over a year later, December 2012 that I FINALLY finished the inks on Hellboy, and I was pretty darn pleased with them, too.  They were leaps and bounds ahead of my botched Catwoman job.  Deciding to post the inks here on DA, I went to go remember who "JM" was...and to my consternation discovered that the original pencils had somehow vanished from my favorites.  Fortunately I had credited him on the Catwoman piece and dug it up for reference, only to find....that all of John's art was gone and his account had been deactivated.

Well, that was peculiar.  But I'm a software geek, so the first thing I did was plug his name into Google to see if I could find him.  And that was how I found out that John Moreshead was no longer with us.  Sometime shortly after the last email I had exchanged with him, John had passed away suddenly at 32, on Oct 30 2011.  I was rocked.  All that talent, all that artwork...lost to us.  Thus spawned a hasty scramble to try to find as much of John's work that I could in order to preserve it from extinction.  And, the Hellboy piece was now my primary piece to fully finish in color as a way of saying thanks to John's memory.

We never met, just tossed some electronic bits at each other, but DAMN that dude could draw, and I find myself periodically wishing he was still around so I could ask him questions and bounce some ideas off him.  Hellboy is the first piece of his I've taken into color...but not the last...and it's my way of saying Thanks, John, for the amazing artwork, and the inspiration, and you are not forgotten.  Thanks, man.  We miss you.