Blog - Mage Punk Archives

VVoid Wed NES: Set 1

by Tables on January 30, 2019 at 5:05 am

Welcome to a very special edition of your regularly scheduled Wed Nes Day!

A while back, while attempting to make headway on some project, I was cursed by creative block; as my kind tends to be from time to time. Nothing special; the usual unrealized creative exhaustion that comes at seemingly arbitrary times. My inability to put thought to paper was both maddening and frustrating. I could spend a paragraph ruminating over the little details and all the possible causes; but the short and sweet is that I wanted to draw but my soul just wasn’t having it. So I gave up.

Staring into the blank scrap of paper before me, I picked a spot, and put brush to paper. Only this time, I wasn’t really trying to draw anything; I just wanted to practice pure technical skill with the tools I had on hand at the time. I started with one mark; then another; and another; I worked until the sheet was “complete” and no more marks were needed.

I thought it looked pretty cool in the end, so I attempted another.

After the first few, I approached these without the mentality of trying to draw anything in particular; I was simply practicing technical skill with my favorite drawing tools.

: Map of the Void #2

: Map of the Void #3

: Map of the Void #4

: Map of the Void #5

: Map of the Void #6

: Map of the Void #7

: Map of the Void #8

: Map of the Void #9

For those of you that appreciate a vague sense of scale.

I honestly really dislike abstract art on it’s own. Too many so called “artists” use the term “abstract” to describe their art in place of ever actually developing any real art skills; and it’s demeaning to those artists that work hard to really improve in their craft. That said, Abstract art has tons potential as a design element in practical applications as well as in therapeutic uses for people with anxiety.

For someone with artist block it can be a good way of channeling unfiltered creative energy into something productive when your hands will let you do little else.

That’s it for this set! I was originally only going to post 5 in this first set but since Void begins with V and VVed Nes has TWO V’s in it I opted for the 10. You can catch a new set of these here every 5th Wednesday this year on the gap between night and morning.

The Void hour if you will.

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Sunday~Monday: Everyone Likes a Good Butt

by Tables on January 14, 2019 at 11:07 am

Posted In: Art, Blog, Sketches

It’s late but here you go! Jake and Chloe showing off those tushies.

There you go. A Short Sunday Post for Short Sunday Shorts.

A post as short as these dukes hugging Chloe’s cheeks because I’m a little distracted at the moment. More butts to come in the future.

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Wed Nes! A Look Inside the Smaller Sketchbook!

by Tables on January 9, 2019 at 10:43 pm

Posted In: Art, Blog, Sketches

So! Until further notice, I’ll be queueing up one page from Big Sketchbook on Sundays (1 page for the 1st weekday) and four from Little Sketchbook on Wednesdays (4 pages for the 4th weekday).

I started drawing in this book near the end of 2017 but this is definitely my 2018/2019 book. You can catch my older sketchbooks here on every other Thursday.

The ice-breaker page! Nothing says don’t worry about it like some marker swatches and a doodle of everyone’s favorite ever-grinning and mischievous felidae.

Playing around with a very inky rolling ball pen. I considered resigning myself to filling any empty space in my sketchbook with a big crying Ches★.

Webs and Swatches and Look A Cat!

I used to use Copic markers for a while until I decided they weren’t really the marker for me. There are so many colors to choose from and I feel like I spend too much deliberating over what colors to choose. I don’t have that problem with Faber-Castell because their palette is much more selective than Copic so I can be more decisive while working on sketches.

Death and an Early Map of the Chaos Megalopolis.
Look! A Cat!

Death, made of Dust. Always wears a welcoming face.

The great walled megalopolis, Chaos City, and the land that surrounds it.

And here we are!

I actually drew that picture of Death last week to avert the shame of having a blank page when today rolled around. It was only supposed to be a quick doodle but I got carried away. But that’s just how drawing works sometimes.

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Sun, a Day in Space: First Post of 2019!

by Tables on January 6, 2019 at 11:57 pm

Posted In: Art, Blog, Sketches

In keeping with the theme of Time taking no breaks in 2019, here’s the 2nd page of my current sketchbook. I wanted to start this year’s posts last week but between car troubles and insomnia wearing me out, I just couldn’t make it happen.

In the future, long from now
The World, Orbyss, crumbles to pieces
Land, Sea, and Sky become one.

That’s it!

Just as the 2019 year rolls in blunt and bothersome, so does this page outta my sketchbook. Also, really late. Back in October I came up with something I call Interstellar Mage Punk. You’ll hear more about that later but for now, this is me pondering the world in that part of The Timeline.

* * *

Edit (01/07/2019): Ultima Thule

I wanted to include this in the original post but time was short and I really wanted to make my original deadline. On January 1, 2019, the space probe New Horizons successfully completed a flyby of planetary object Ultima Thule; now officially, the furthest object in our solar system visited by human spacecraft.

A Boomerang (or wiggle stereograph, as the Wiki calls it) of *(486958) 2014 MU*₆₉, or Ultima Thule for those of you that don’t do number names. 2 frames=a 38 minute flyby shot.

“Awesome, a pair of rocks,” you think to yourself, probably.

It’s an ancient pair of rocks found in the Kuiper Belt, one of the outermost parts of our solar system. This is the belt where, just past Neptune, Pluto and two other extant planets, Haumea and Makemake, are located.

Ultima Thule (the names of the big rock/little rock respectively), is a contact binary object; not unlike Pluto and its largest moon Charon. They’ve been in orbit of each other for so long and so closely that they eventually became the single object pictured above.

It’s a formation that probably took many thousands of years to happen. You can go ahead and forget everything you knew about long distance relationships. While 2019 may have gotten off to a rough start, we can take some solace in the fact that it also began with humanity taking a small flyby peek at a love story possibly as ancient as our home in the vastness of space.

You can click here to read NASA’s article about the recent New Horizons flyby.

You can click here to see New Horizons’ Twitter and follow for updates on its journey through our cosmic neighborhood.

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It’s a Sun, Last Post of the Year Day: Mage Punk! Young and Old!

by Tables on December 30, 2018 at 12:57 pm

Posted In: Art, Blog

Alrighty, everyone! The end of 2018 is upon us and with it comes the time to prepare for the next year soon to come. 2018 has without a doubt been a trying year like the ones before it. It’s been a long year, leaving little room for thinking the next will be any better.

The blind hope that time will eventually yield a better future only leads to despair when the world starts falling to pieces. Unfortunately, the world looks pretty broken already and we can’t trudge along hoping things’ll just magically get better. Pretending that the days ahead wear a different mask from the days behind us, is probably the epitome of failing to learn from history.

Fortunately, most stories that I’ve seen have been of various successes others have had in their 2018. They’ve been about carrying the momentum of those successes into the 2019 year. There are many acknowledgements of the coming difficulties ahead. An awareness that things won’t just suddenly ease up just because the clock strikes 00:00:00 01/01/2019.

There’s no breaks between 00:00:00 and 00:00:01 and 00:00:02 and that’s simply the crux of time’s unrelenting flow. The important thing is finding your way of flowing with it. I’m gonna do my best.

I didn’t intend to be so wordy on the matter but I was writing last week’s Christmas post and got a little carried away. So without further adieu, capping off our year is:

Mage Punk; Young and Old

Look at them! Jake is always tiny no matter his age!

Keeping to Young Jake’s general silhouette, I wanted to get a feel for the difference in Jake’s height and level of detail when he grows up. He doesn’t grow very far vertically.

That about wraps things up!

How nice is it that I got to end the year with a nice little Sunday post? What better way to leave a year behind than with a display of youth and age, side by side. I’m sure some of you are using today to try to relax before the new year starts rolling in. I mentioned earlier that time doesn’t take breaks between the seconds. The clock strikes 12:00:00 12:00:01 12:00:02 no need for commas. How appropriate that the year starts on a Twos Day. Even more appropriate that Day 2 of the year 2019 is a Wednesday.

I said time was unrelenting.

Me and my big mouth.

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Thor’s Day. A Little Effort, Please??

by Tables on December 28, 2018 at 4:27 pm

Posted In: Art, Blog, Comics, Throwback Thursday

I didn’t actually prepare anything new for today because I thought it’d be nice to skip out on the last Thursday of the year. In case you have trouble reading the year on my crappy signature down there, this is from 2017. I took an hour or two out of some day to crank these out.

This about sums up my feelings regarding the fine art. Nevermind that these Throwback posts coincide with the Thursdays that I don’t get paid on. A little resentful, sure, and my feelings haven’t actually changed all that much since I drew it, sure, but…

…I’ve got nothing. But I do want to explore this again at a later time though. So there’s that at least!

Edit: For all my efforts, I just realized that I put this Thursday post up on a Friday. So that’s been my week.

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Last Wed Nes of the Year: Best Boy’s Day to Shine

by Tables on December 25, 2018 at 12:22 pm

Posted In: Art, Blog

Happy Holidays, everyone! December has been a real emotional roller coaster but we did it. We’ve made it to Christmas! Oh, what fun! To that end, I’ve decided that since this week’s Wed Nes is literally right there next to Christmas on the calendar, it wouldn’t hurt to post it up a day early.

I present to you, my drawing for Inktober’s Jolt Prompt;