Found a little sketch in a notebook of Augustus in a field of grass, working on one of her grass notebooks:
I really like simplistic styles but I don't use them very often, even though the theoretical "ease" in comparison to my usual style has a lot of appeal. I think part of it is it can be hard to adequately communicate age like age in these simpler styles, where the big eyes and all tend to make it an easier read as like, someone a lot Younger. But it's important to me that Augustus is in her 30s, and I want that to always be clear. That makes it a little frustrating sometimes when I'm writing because I always worry that the fact that she still lives with her dad might make a new reader think she's supposed to be a teenager, which is why I've kind of neurotically insisted on mentioning her age in so many of the beginning author's notes on the AO3 fics lol.
I'm not quite 30 yet, but I am getting up there, and there's something,,, reassuring? in the vision of being able to see myself in Augustus knowing that when I hit 32 it's going to be Fine when I'm (probably) still living wiht my parents, and not very good at having independent social skills or hitting other typical mid-adulthood life milestones, and still weird and autistic and not very good at coping with or hiding it. Silly, maybe, given that Augustus is a character I made up out of my own head, so it ultimately boils down to me reassuring myself at the end of the day, which maybe doesn't mean a lot, but also it still does.
So IDK! I probably will continue to try to experiment with simpler styles without getting very far with them, but maybe I just need to experiment with them as part of the Process instead of as a final step. As a thumbnail, this holds up pretty well, after all, os maybe I just need to look at it like that -- a midpoint in the experiment rather than a final phase. We'll see if I can sit down and hammer out a full illustration based off this one and figure out how that goes I guess!
OKAY! I finally got some work done, and mostly what I have to say is that sewing clothes is hard!! I did a very rough pattern by tracing the body out on parchment paper, and then doing a sketch of a basic t-shirt. The parchment paper was useful for being able to test the sizing out on the doll before I cut anything out of the fabric (an old shirt that shrunk slightly and doesn't fit me right anymore).
Initially I'd pinned and sewed everything together just sort of flat, which worked well for the body, but didn't work for the sleeves because I'd forgotten to account for the visibility of the seams when I'd pinned things (the way I had it would have had the seams around the arm holes stick out on the outside), so I pulled a few stitches to take the sleeves off. I'm sure there's some way to put the pattern together correctly in a way that makes sense, but I'm not working with the foresight to look up tutorials and pay attention to them ahead of time. Instead, I sewed the rest of the body together, and then put it on the doll so that I could stitch the back closed.
THEN I pulled the sleeves onto the arms and pinned the seam allowances under the fabric by just sticking pins directly into the doll. I pulled the sleeves into place so that the folded edge was right up against the folded edge of the shirt, and then ladder stitched the sleeves into place directly onto the body.
That's the way I'd done the long sleeved 'undershirt' yesterday -- those were sewn directly onto the arms just for ease. Initially I had the idea that all of the clothes would be exchangable, but I wound up deciding it makes the most sense to play it easy and just have this shirt be a base that never comes off. Maybe one day I'll regret that if I ever decide to do a full dress (realizing I never posted the illustration of Augustus in a goth dress on here OOPS; I'll get that done after this), but frankly the felt torso doesn't really hold up enough for anything that would require showing off her shoulders or collarbones anyway lmao. Augustus tends to dress for full skin coverage anyway, so even if she wore a dress it'd be pretty close on her neck, so I'm deciding that it's fine. My plans are to make a flannel overshirt Eventually that I will properly sew together so that it's removable, and then also plan to knit a sweater for her, since I've decided that knitting shirts is infinitely easier than sewing them. If you're sewing clothes on the regular you have my respect -- this stuff is hard!!
Anyway, I'm still working on the head. I have the face painted and am waiting for some glue on her earrings to dry before I start laying out the hair. I feel a little bit torn about it in a way, because I feel like the head perhaps wound up slightly too small and so it feels a little out of proportion with the rest of her body. I've decided I'm not going to stress about this Too Badly at the moment, and I'm going to go ahead and continue with the rest of the doll. BUT I've decided that I'm not going to hot glue the head onto the doll just yet -- in the worst case scenario when the hair doesn't do enough to give the illusion of better proportions, then one day I'll probably remake it, but at the Very Least the current head will be good practice for painting the face and laying out the hair. My matte varnish isn't drying very matte anymore for some reason (i've rechecked like four times that I'm using the right bottle, and I am, but I have no idea what's happened to it) so she's looking a little shiny, but alas. it could be worse!
Uh Oh!! Been a while. I have been trying to working on it and have not been doing A Good Job. There are lots of little ideas in my head but not very many are making it out of there -- I keep meaning to draw more and then, I don't do that. But I have been drawing bugs some lately, so maybe I'll be able to work on this again up here soon.
I did finally get around to painting the skin tone onto the Augustus doll! Have not painted on her face yet but perhaps tomorrow. I will remember to do it. OR MAYBE NOT! But I'm very excited to do her hair, so maybe that will be motivation enough to get it done again. I am doing yarn wefts for her hair, and brushed it all out a very long time ago when I first started doing this, and then it's just been sitting awkwardly on my desk this whole time. So once I paint the face I can finally start gluing it onto the head. Which will be exciting.
Less exciting is going to be the point of the process when I have to finish her body. I did a wire frame and then have wrapped it in quilt batting, and then will be doing felt over that to keep the batting contained. putting the felt is going to be a lot of little stitches -- i'm Good at that sort of thing but also it's so hard to motivate to do it sometimes :/ I WILL GET IT DONE EVENTUALLY. Probably. I want to get her off the corner of my desk and onto a little display corner eventually and so EVENTUALLY i will get it done.
I will also eventually get the rest of the TEXT page up on here so that I can start posting the WIPs and Snippets and AUs that have been languishing away in odds and ends. I have a werewolf AU that I have started and want to post and then also keep not doing that. Wish us luck eventually !!!!
I never really developed much of a habit of doodling which I think is something of a shame. I worked on sketchbooks when I was in school obviously, but I mostly did materials tests and little studies instead of any actually playful doodling. (I managed living alone in college but I wasn’t exactly excelling back then. My health was arguably the worst it ever got, I’m not entirely sure why, and so I did a lot of Rationing of energy back then. ‘I can’t have fun doodling bc I need to save my energy for my Final piece’ kind of thing — I didn’t even really like thumbnailing lol)
Now, of course, I kind of lament this a little. I really like working with Augustus and the Changeling but sometimes I get a little preemptively exhausted or kind of struggle with the executive disfunction of “It’ll take so much work/energy to get another full piece done”, so I want to be able to just doodle and goof around and let things just be kind of playful and ‘see what happens’ about it, but I don’t really have the background for it so I feel very fumbling in the dark about it.
But I think that it’s not exactly like there’s a time limit on learning new things. I used to doodle a lot (so so much) when I was in elementary school because I was incredibly into warrior cats and so I would design OC cats and draw the actual characters and make little comics and fanfic snippets and share them with my friends who also hissed and barked at other kids, and it was fun. And I forgot it a little bit at some point but I don’t think that means it’s too late to never get to do it again.
Admittedly I probably won’t be putting a lot of these doodles into the Gallery maybe. Despite the fact that this is all for fun and I don’t make money off of art anymore and all there’s still a college part of my brain that says “only the best stuff goes in the portfolio”, but I think that this Blog page might double as a kind of sketchbook/notepad thing of sharing little snippets and ideas and sketches as I play around more, because I think that’s fun. :3c and so why not?
Also just as an update I’m also working on making art dolls of Augustus and the Changeling!! I don’t have WIP photos at the moment but I do have the armature skeletons done and have started working on Augustus’s face sculpt. It’s been incredibly difficult trying to find a style to pull this off in, but the good thing about sculpey is that it doesn’t dry until you bake it, so I can take my time with it. I’ll try to remember to post photos of how it’s going soon! (Im incredibly excited to start working on the hair and clothes — I Really like working on small little fiber things !!!
I'm not usually much of a blog person, but I have enough thoughts on this little series of mine that I thought it might actually warrant one for once. These pages are still largely under construction: I have thoughts about what I'm doing, but still need to actually settle down and iron out some of the wrinkles (Currently dwelling on: Color choices, the background, the navigation of the Writing page, etc). I have a lot of things I want to create for this series, but I keep getting a little ahead of myself because my brain has been moving faster than the rest of me can work LOL, I keep thinking I have more done than I do in reality. That's life sometimes. Today I'm planning on focusing on adding some more images to the main index page; I want to fill the sidebar with things, but haven't necessarily decided what yet, and am currently working on a kind of intro illustration for the splash page :3c. Come to think of it, I'll probably also use this blog page to post WIPs... I'll need to get better about image compression if that's the case -- my site is currently hovering just below the 50% storage filled mark as it stands. I'm planning to delete some bulk here and there, or I was before I got distracted away from site organization to revamping this page in particular, but it's still a good habit to try to get into probably.