[VINCENT] Under The Blankets

Hello all,


I was going to only post a fanart of Craig Thompson's Blankets tonight, but something else came up. Let me tell you about it.


After work, I come home, go up to my loft and sketch a little bit while catching a little bit of the sun before it goes away for the night. My roommates are doing there thing in the living room. Jana's by the window reading when I hear a scream. Apparently, our upstairs neighbor, who has been occasionally letting off the remnants of his cleaning out his window and down and into ours, had decided it wasn't enough to throw dry garbage out the window to the cars, street, plants, and the neighbors below, but why not also throw WATER down there, too. I tolerated it before thinking it would pass, but tonight something broke and I walked upstairs and gave him a few words. No, nothing happened. Just told him there were more civilized ways of getting rid of his garbage like, for instance, a garbage CAN.


Needless to say, the incident left me just wanting to crawl under the blankets and sleep it off. And, as I am wont to do, I took to Facebook and expressed my frustration a little bit. To the rescue comes Evan Bryce Cranston, a fellow artist and November Fifth baby (remember remember), with some kind words and a bit of encouragement to get a little something, anything done tonight before I went to sleep. So I took that challenge and did this:

Allen got your tongue?

It was a quick little thing that immediately took my mind off the dumbass upstairs and made me focus. Thanks again to Evan for the boost and y'all should definitely check out his site and his work. He's great!


Onto the next one!


So, I joined a book club! Specifically a COMIC book club started by good friend Eric Royal and his fiance, Laura Buchan, both of whom have a funny webcomic you should keep a watch on called Consensual Tentacle. The idea with the book club was to motivate us to read more comics in general, but to read some books specifically and one of those books was Craig Thompson's Blankets.


The book itself is Thompson's retelling of a short, but significant time in his young life, that changed his views about people and the world around him forever. It specifically deals with issues of his family and upbringing in a strictly religious community, the trials and tribulations of his first love, and how one relationship affected how he saw everything around him. The writing was superb for a book that is almost stream-of-consciousness in its structure, which is just a byproduct of it being autobiographical. The focus of the book is his blooming relationship with a girl, Raina, from Michigan who he meets at Christian camp. He ends up staying with her family for two weeks and in that time,she gives him a gift of a blanket that she had made herself. That relationship, how it evolves and eventually dies, is the push that he needed to open up his eyes to a lot of realities of life and some of the contradictions in orthodox religions.


There's a lot to absorb in the book and a lot that I, personally, identified with, especially in regards to his disillusionment with The Church and Christianity. But, that's a debate for another time. Part of the book club is the possibility of doing fanart for the book that we are reading so several people brought their own for the first meeting and we all shared. It was a great time and I'm hoping to do it again for our next book which will be....


..... right after this break. :)

Above is my fanart for the book. There are many scenes in the book of them together in bed wrapped up in the blankets, blissfully ignorant of the world outside her bedroom door.


Hope you like it and, if you haven't read the book yet, do yourself a favor and go get it.