T-shirt designs for Horde of Notions Podcast

test your limits—but check yo self b4 u wreck yo self

I've been pushing myself hard to try and keep productivity levels high with respect to art, now that I've re-immersed myself. Honestly, it's been difficult. I'd rather lie in bed eating salt-n-vinegar chips and watching Pirates of the Caribbean with the baby and Elliot than get up the gumption to crank out another sketch or alter or painting, most of the time.

The feeling after completing an art project is, however (and always has been), a real nice high. The sense of accomplishment I get...especially if I've challenged myself with a piece, is very satiating. There's a lull that immediately follows putting the last touch on a creation and in that still, quiet moment, there is a high concentration of contentment. Your adrenaline is slipping away and there's just a few breaths of time to be honest with yourself before real life comes rushing, crashing back in. I imagine it might be similar for high level athletes and gamers, writers, certainly for musicians...anyone who pours their whole self into something for a time, knowing it won't last, working towards achieving their burning vision with a certain amount of desperation.

Never being able to finish something or having to rush-finish a project, falling short of expectations...due to the demands of family and work is obviously excruciatingly frustrating. "So as soon as you get a family and have no time, you know exactly what you want?" was how my brother put it the other day while we caught up over too much Evan Williams. It's true. Real-life demands force you to put a premium on your time. It's easier for "what I truly want to do" to filter out in an intense, high-stakes environment than back when I was doodling and dawdling and asking daddy to pay off my Discover and had only mildly interesting college classes, the "luxury" of lots of Adult Swim couch comas and endless amounts of Me time.

The funny thing is, I never would have been inspired to create art again without Elliot and my son around. Family is what made me want to be me again, made me want to be alive again, in the first place...So I find that the components of my life that motivate me are also those which make claims (rightly) on my energy and attention. I guess that's the way grown-up life goes and I just need to get better at managing these dynamics.

I'm great at being compulsive and boozy and moody and snarky and forgetting to eat/sleep when I have a goal in mind and I've got my beret on with pencil clutched feverishly in hand...I'm good at that desperation often romanticized in depictions of "great" artists. But I'm not convinced I have to play that character for me to scratch my creative itch. I'm pretty sure I'm capable of more.

What I really need to overachieve at is being kind to the people who inspire me, the people who make me feel like I've already achieved greatness when all I did was make pancakes.

And with that...I'm out of time, so here's a peek into that last couple weeks' worth of work.

Wolf Paladin in process for Joel, FNM bartender at Guardian Games here in Portland.

Sketch for Preordain alternate concept, thinking about trying as a watercolor painting to go a bit Guay in my skillset.

Another experimental alter, for Elliot. Had more success w/thinning paint, but still gouged the card when scraping off material lol. Next up, Borderland Ranger, on the suggestion of Mr. Froggatt.

Much thanks to the husband (@Hackworth) for taking the pictures, in low light late last night when he should have been sleeping! At least baby didn't wake up...

Till next time, may Magic be your sword.
-MJ

Moxy Makeovers: Stoneforge Mystic

In the last article I mentioned how I used to have this prejudice against Stoneforge Mystic, who's since become my bosom buddy. Miss Mystic simply had the misfortune of being everywhere on the scene when I decided a few months back to really get serious about being a contributing member of the Magic community. If I see anything enough times, it gets irritating, no matter how benign, interesting, or desirable it was initially. The exceptions to the rule are my son's face, my husband's face, and maybe Angelina Jolie's face. Oh, and porterhouse steak. And NY steak. Or rib steak. Okay let's say the rule doesn't apply to food...steak.

Certainly it did apply to Mystic's face. Right off the bat I didn't like the art, partially for the mood and partially because of individual elements in the piece.

Yoga-ing vegan chick about to be smashed by two red-hot all-beef meatballs.

I mean, there are plenty of Mike Bierek works that I do really like, such as these:

Meat-eater.

And one of Elliot's favorites:

It may be petty, catty girlfight type-pickiness (it absolutely isn't @mikelinneman-style "Annals of Academia" art critique), but I simply had a visceral reaction to Bierek's depiction of Stoneforge Mystic. She's proven herself to be a true butt-kicking babe, so something inside of me resented her being represented as a public accountant in lotus position. The practical way to solve this problem was of course to reason with myself: "MJ, you used to be in public accounting. Why hate? Mystic has the same haircut as your auditor friend Sherry. In fact, she looks a damn lot like Sherry. You didn't hate Sherry. Sherry did yoga every morning when you shared that hotel room during training, remember? You didn't mind that, did you? How could you? You were already downstairs in the hotel bar having a Bloody Mary with breakfast."

The reasoning worked well enough so that I could deign to play Mystic, as is obvious from Poisonblade. However, I've always enjoyed impractical solutions as much as I depend on the practical ones, so this time my inner voice said, "Just paint a new freakin' Mystic if you have to complain so much about the old one!" This was followed by a snicker, and a "Ha! See if you can do better," to myself, under my own breath.

Vanity works in mysterious ways...not so mysterious here. The fact is, I couldn't identify with Bierek's Mystic and I wanted one I could identify with. In general, I've found that every artist has a decent amount of vanity, so that he or she often incorporates autobiographical personal themes and regularly makes aesthetic choices from a gut-preference standpoint in their work. If it's not as obvious as creating a Sim City avatar that wears the same style of clothes as you, or playing Amazon in Diablo II Expansion (wow, am I dating myself or what?) because she's blonde too, then it might be simply that when you draw a hot babe, she usually has tilted eyes and dark hair (guess what, you're an Asianophile like the rest of us!). In other words, color theory and art history aren't the only influences on artists. Sometimes, the moon is big because it just looks cool. Sometimes the corrupted angel is standing that way because a girl who broke your heart stood that way, once, and it's emblazoned in your memory. And sometimes (and this is the sinful height of vanity...), sometimes that fern/lock of hair/piece of cloak/urn/shadow/cat inexplicably in frame/huge mountain/cloud...?/burst of fire is there simply because the artist messed up, and the !@#$% needs to be covered because we don't want you to know. The great thing about being an artist (and don't you deny it) is playing God with your creations that are at the mercy of your crayons.

I have a strong preference in art, aesthetically, for women with delicate facial features, expressive (almost aggressive) eyes, long hair, and voluptuous builds (whether petite or amazonian). I was terrified to start painting my Mystic because it's been years since I took up a brush. And my compositions never turn out simple or straightforward; I regularly, almost willfully, push my concept beyond my capacities. This is great for growth, but hard on my spouse (I turn into a raving harpy) and hard on myself, as I usually find myself feeling burned out after just one project, and physically drained.

Here's to seeing if age has made me more resilient. While I do have a limited fine arts background, this is actually just my fourth time doing an oil painting. Unsurprisingly, I made all kind of newbie mistakes. With this project, my main error was jumping ahead to do too much detail (I always want to touch their faces prematurely) before I was entirely happy with 1) the background, then 2) the body shadows/paint coverage and 3) the lightning/lighting on the Hammer. Luckily I was working with oils, so I could go back and erase/blend as many times as I needed to. As I tweeted last week, for a couple days I thought I'd biffed so hard on her facial shadows that I had concluded she'd have to have a Phantom of the Opera-style metallic mask and I'd just change her outfit and boots to be more Mirrodin-like to hide the error. I elected instead to wipe the offending shadows off, and redo the face.

Turns out the whole debacle improved her visage quite a bit, and at the end, everything came together just fine.

Let me know what you think.

Till next time, may Magic be your sword.

-MJ