phantom-inker

...let me explain in detail what it's like.  It's not that you don't have anything you can draw.  It's that:

• Your ideas are meh.
  
• All your old ideas were meh too.
  
• Any new ideas you'll ever come up with are meh.
  
• All ideas everywhere are meh.
  
• Your art is meh.
  
• Your skills are meh.
  
• Everything you do is meh.
  
• The world is meh.
  
• Everything is meh.
  
• You're meh.
  
• Maybe you should move to a remote cabin and take up basket-weaving.

Muse — the weird crazy artistic part of my brain responsible for pretty much everything you've ever seen me draw — normally YELLS INTO MY EARS all the time.  ALL the time.  Things to draw.  Things she wants.  Things I need to DROP EVERYTHING AND START DRAWING YESTERDAY.  She's bratty and loud and insistent and impatient and that's why I have way, way more incomplete sketches than finished works.

But right now, she's laying back on her couch behind me, bored-scrolling through social media on her phone, popping her pink bubble-gum, isn't yelling, is barely even talking back to me, and is mostly answering "meh" and "whatever" whenever I try to engage her on anything.

Artist's block doesn't mean you don't have ideas.  Artist's block doesn't mean you've forgotten how to draw.  Artist's block just means that every idea seems dumb and boring and bad — and that makes it really hard to want to pick up your pencil (or mouse).

I found out today that passed away from complications of a stroke.

www.furaffinity.net/view/28153…

I knew she'd been fighting cancer for a while, and now this.

I never knew Mavra as well as I wanted to, but I knew of her for more than 20 years. And every time I interacted with her, she was kind and caring, and had a ridiculous and delightful sense of humor. Finding people who have the centaurkin vibe is rare enough; finding one like Mavra is even rarer. She and Argon were the grand dam and sire, and now they're both gone.

I always hoped I'd eventually be good enough she'd one day request a drawing from me. That wasn't her style, of course, but I hoped. Sadly, it'll never happen.

Rest in peace, Mavra. You'll be missed.

For what it's worth, I've been hacking at my "roll for drawing" JavaScript — you know, the scripty thing I built that writes random character descriptions like this:

A pinup of a centaur girl.
She has wavy hair, tied back.
She is a dancer, and she is with another girl of the same species.

It has lots of new features, new ways to describe the characters, and even some little bits of worldbuilding in it now too.

Feel free to give it a spin, and as a reminder, you can do anything you want with the results!  If you get any descriptions you really love, you're welcome to share them here, too.

Linky --> tiny.cc/rqzqvy