I think I’m pretty well done with the blue ink roughs on the figure. I had his body shape wrong due to putting the book in place before I’d finished with the rest of him and it confused me a tad. The solution was to put the book on its own layer I could switch off and on as I worked on drawing him.

Procreate has a nice perspective grid you can switch on and set vanishing points for. It’s going to help a lot as I draw the bookshelves he’s leaning against. 

Wow…the JPEG artifacts here are really annoying. But I’m just posting these to share my process with whoever stumbles onto this blog. When I post a finished piece I’ll use a better compression algorithm.  

Probably get the inks on the figure done, or close to it, tomorrow. I haven’t decided on a title for it yet.

Well…okay that How To Draw…thing is a bit of a running gag around here and this is a more serious attempt to to do some quality sexy sketching, and keep my mind occupied on something other than how quarantine is making it sadly obvious that I need a road trip Now and I Can’t Go Anywhere!

This one’s going to take a while like the last one did, because the plan here is he’s leaning up against a huge set of library shelves. Dozens and dozens of books. It’s the sort of drudge work I dislike because it gets so boring and I get impatient and then I get sloppy. So I’m trying also to consider this an exercise in artistic self discipline. 

I’m being a tad more Safe For Work here on these than I’ve occasionally been here on the website because I’m also sharing these to my Facebook page, and so they’ll probably show up in co-workers screens. They all know I’m gay, and my employer is fantastic about supporting their LGBT employees, nobody really cares. I’m just trying to stick to a line I’ve drawn about my sexy sketching for the time being so I can freely share. But deep down it’s also, maybe mostly, about my getting more comfortable being an out gay man.

You’d think by now that wouldn’t be an issue, but I came out to myself in the early 1970s, and it’s been a struggle all my life to simply give myself permission to be me. I gain a little more ground every year but it’s never the whole of it. Gay kids of my generation had to hide their desires. The adults we grew into have had to work and freeing themselves from that ball and chain ever since. My cartoon series A Coming Out Story is about the beginning of that struggle. I’m 66 now and it never has ended. I’m actually feeling proud of myself sharing these on Facebook with Everyone and shining a small light on this part of me unafraid (mostly). 

Also, it Is fun to walk up to the line and not go over it. I would much rather be teased than have my buttons pushed.

It’s too late for me to have the young adult life I should have had, that we all should have had. But I can at least nod to it from time to time, look back and relive the wonder of discovering the beauty of men.  Well…of a certain sexy to me type…

@JohnnyGWeir: “I’m sorry to you all for wearing daisy dukes in October.”

Pics or it didn’t happen.