A summary:

• There was snow, now there is none
• Visited Gran Canaria
• Some sketches
• Monthly music overview
• My sudoku :-(

Early March was still full of snow even though it had started to melt away a bit already. Then it snowed some more, but now that the month is almost over the snow is also mostly gone, save for a few bigger piles. It's nice to not have to uncover my car every time I want to go anywhere. Also good timing for these fuel prices... Now I can switch to my bike.

Travel

The Gran Canaria visit was grand. I haven't been overseas for at least a decade so it was all new and exciting again. The switch from a chilly home to a warm and sunny beach was a pleasant and a long awaited change, and we got incredibly lucky with the timing. Apparently there had been a storm the previous week and the day after we left it got stormy again. Our visit was just sun, barely even any clouds. Windy though. I wonder if that was just the "spring".

One of us caught a bad stomach bug early into the trip though, so one day was mostly spent on recovering from that. The rest of the trip was spent on wondering which meal would poison the next one, which was a bit annoying.

The TV in the hotel room had one Finnish channel available and happened to watch it while a show called Sekunnit was playing. Seemed interesting, might watch it later. It was a fictional miniseries about a train crash and investigating the aftermath of it.

We rented bicycles for 4 days (one of them was spent recovering 😔) and riding them around the area gave some new views. There were only like 2 or 3 bicycling lanes and I'm not used to riding amidst the cars so it was a bit stressful... I'm appreciating the bicycling roads here a lot more now. But great sights!

Sketches

I've got a few sketches to share, as I don't feel like putting them in the gallery.

I kind of want to make something short for my Tumblr to explain why I disappeared so abruptly. Maybe a minicomic...

Music favs and new discoveries

Green Carnation released a song from their upcoming album, "I Am Time". It's been on repeat a lot since. Idk, something about a concept being personified without expecting it to act like a person gets me.

"in your mind I’m tomorrow
for your sake, I should be today"

I also discovered this band Black Crown Initiate recently and these two songs have been looping in my head even without the music playing. I kind of want to learn the guitar solo for Selves We Cannot Forgive, it sounds very tasty.

"living as the selves we can not forgive
leaving for the selves we can not forgive"

Hanging Garden released an entire album! Ended up liking it a lot, especially this Arise, Black Sun. I didn't know the female vocalist could do such growls 👀👀✨

My sudoku magazine came with one of the sudokus pre-filled :-((

See it here

Guitars are cool. It's especially cool to draw your band-aligned character playing one (or have an AU), as the poses can be very dynamic, the instrument looks good and the players have a tendency to be showoffs. (I also might be biased since I play one myself.)

Every now and then I come across art with a guitarist character and I keep seeing the same few mistakes, so I made this little tutorial to avoid the most common pitfalls. Even with reference images these can be difficult to know without ever touching a guitar, so no judgement here. Break the rules, but know them first!

If it helps, I drew guitars very badly before too.

1. Right- or left-handed?

The most common one I see is right-handed characters playing a left-handed guitar. I assume this is mostly done for the composition, but unless the character is actually left-handed, ambidextrous, or someone like Albert King and plays the guitar upside down, it'll be something that catches the keen eye. With electric guitars you'll recognize an upside down one from the tone knobs being in the way of the strumming/picking hand.

Granted, I've seen some actually left-handed characters being drawn with a left-handed guitar!

2. Floating guitar

Playing without a shoulder strap is fine; only if you're sitting down and the guitar is resting on something (usually your legs). The shoulder strap is mandatory when standing upright, you cannot hold on to the guitar at the same time as you're trying to play it. It's physically impossible. It will not float.

Of course, everything mentioned above here goes out of the window if you're a mage or have more than two hands.

2.5 Speaking of shoulder straps

I've seen many variations of where people think it connects, some quite hilarious. I won't pull examples of those, but generally both ends do not connect to the same spot at the back of the guitar, one end doesn't hang from the middle of the neck, nor from the middle of the guitar.

The back strap button (connection point) is usually located somewhere in the middle of the guitar, in line with the neck. The front one is at the top, on that protruding thing.

Acoustic guitars may have different attachment styles for the strap but just like with some of those fancy-looking electric guitars, I won't be going into that today.

3. Cable

The cable on electric guitars is what connects the sound to the pedals or the amp. I find it can be drawn very dynamically and in interesting ways, so do include it for the extra-oomph 👀. I personally very much prefer the long cables over those that are connected to a wireless transmitter.

In its simplicity, the cable connects to an output jack on the guitar. There are a couple of variations of this, but its default position is somewhere at the bottom of the guitar, side or front.

But what I never see is the cable drawn like this (borrowing my own photos):

This is another "won't know it until you try it yourself". The cable goes behind the shoulder strap to protect the connection in case the guitarist hops around on stage and steps on the cable. This prevents the cable being pulled out of the output jack, potentially damaging the port and destroying everyone's ears in the process.

That's about it

Thanks for reading, and leave a comment if you found this useful!
If this little tutorial helps even just one person, then I've achieved great success ✨

"my flesh is afraid, but I am not"

The cult is built around the mythos of the Queen and they're awaiting for her eventual return. On the surface level is just appears as a religion focused on worshipping the moon, but the deeper levels proclaim her as as the bringer of the new world order, and they — as her loyal followers — will be ascending into an undying glory and greatness.

You know, a completely normal past-time activity to have.

Also the middle guy might be manifesting as a side-character or something, the cleft lip I half accidentally gave them intrigues me.