March 1 2026

Hello and welcome to Spring! I don’t care if it’s planning to go back to winter in a week, for a few beautiful days we’re getting a taste of warmth and light again and I’m loving it.

February was all about two art projects. Sewing myself a new shirt, which was pretty simple but took way longer than expected because I messed up with binding off the arm holes and used the wrong color thread for all my top stitching and had to redo a huge chunk of the project by hand; and drawing robots, which is still a work in progress but I’m making good time on it.

Here’s the shirt in question. Really simple stuff. But it feels nice on my skin and it layers great with a lot of my button ups and a lot of my pants and it fits like a dream.

I really love the double darts coming out of the arm hole. They feel cheeky.

Then there’s sketchbook time! A few fashion sketches to start,

Then it’s all robots and mechs. Last month I was trying to figure out how to draw these mechanical shapes at all. This month I’m figuring out how to pose them. Mostly by taking a nice human pose reference, sketching that out, and then drawing a robot over top it in a different color.

Once I had that technique looking good it was time to push the anatomy a bit, play with designs that were less strictly human.

Here I’m starting with a human pose and then redrawing it with some increasingly inhuman proportions, until I have a design and pose worth redrawing large scale.

Honestly I think that last sketch had a better flow to it than the actual large scale drawing, but it is what it is. And what it is is a robot that I can be proud of.

All of that’s leading up to this missile explosion combat illustration,

which I honestly have pretty mixed feelings about but It’s coming along well enough and I’ve learned a ton in the process. If this is the last big robot I draw then at least I get to go out with a bang.

I expect to have a lot less time for doodling going forward. I’m getting out of training and into the actual work of my new job starting tomorrow. I’m just hoping I’ll have some energy left in the evenings for picking away at these projects.

Take care of each other, fuck ice, and I’ll see you again next month.