This weekend I finished up work on a piece I'd been wanting to do for a long time, an image from Persona 5 of Ann Takamaki hugging the cat character, Morgana.
In the game, Morgana the cat has a crush on Ann and it's pretty adorable, so I wanted to make an image of Ann giving Morgana a giant hug.
I'll be posting the full process video of this artwork soon through Patreon - be sure to join up if you're interested in seeing my process. My process is quite different from most artists.
I really like the Persona series overall, and I think the reason why I like it so much is it poses questions and situations that are interesting to artists. The game also took a lot of the most boring parts of video games, such as recap/experience gain screens and game menus, and made them interesting and artistic. I wrote more about how Persona 5 discusses art specifically in this article.
What I am reading/watching/playing right now:
I finished reading "A Separate Reality" by Carlos Castaneda.
This book made for pretty wild nonfiction, it follows Carlos, a sociologist, as he works with Don Juan, a sorcerer (yep), in attempts to learn the ways of sorcery. "Sorcery" in the book isn't exactly what might come immediately to mind - instead, Sorcery is a mode of perceiving the world more accurately. Sounds boring until the more mysterious parts of the book come to life - peyote-fueled encounters with spirit guardians, indifferent 'allies' who appear throughout the desert, and shapeshifter/spacetime bender sorcerers all make appearances in this, okay, nonfiction book.
A Separate Reality reads like a mix of The Book of Five Rings meets Ways of Seeing - where the sorcerer/mystic's main power involves 'Seeing' or a mode of perception that is more attuned to reality than reality itself.
I'd say as far as psychedelic drug related books go it is about 1000x better than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
This paragraph stood out to me as far as the central key to the entire book:
There is another moment where Don Juan's set of understandings around perception are better broken down:
What I ultimately learned from this book I cannot exactly say - the book itself seems to know that it is a big, lengthy failure to describe a phenomenon that cannot be described by words.