Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Faith, Hope, Love, and Luck


A late, semi-silly St. Patrick's Day picture, fanart of the Zero Escape trilogy of video games. The three heroes rather embody the three theological virtues.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

What to share when it's all for the future


I've been drawing and painting so very much over the last couple months, but I can't share it here... yet. So here's my palette during one of many sessions of a whole new to me medium I've been doing a lot of: gouache painting. The master to whose skill in this medium I aspire is Toshio Ebine. This is for the colored comic pages of the Bovodar and the Bears graphic novel in the works, written by Jack Mikkelson. It will be an amazing adventure. If you want to know ahead of time how amazing it is, check out the novel.

I've always been a slow drawer, but I recently picked up several new techniques and tricks to increase my speed. Instead of pencil sketching, preliminary inking, erasing, and final inking; I now do: pencil sketching, inking with thicker lines, erasing. Listing out each step of projects and assigning them to a schedule helps too, even if I get behind. I keep a list of projects on my DeviantArt journal to keep track of my progress; I'm reproducing its current state below.

I'm very grateful that the more I draw, the more I want to draw, and it's very helpful to intersperse personal pieces in there. Fanart, religious subjects, and a few new story ideas! So hopefully I'll have more to share until these big projects you can see!

Project List

Clockwork Dancer by Jon Del Arroz
Pages 8 and 9 have been finished, page 10 sketched. I haven't worked on it for a while, because I found it's better to concentrate on one project for a few weeks than try to do a little on all the projects each week. With my new speed techniques, I should be able to finish the remaining pages for issue 1 in a few weeks; I just need to clear a space on the schedule. In the meantime, to know what sort of action you get from comics by Jon Del Arroz, you should check out his superhero saga, Flying Sparks!

Bovodar and the Bears by Jack Mikkelson
This is the project I have been concentrating on since the beginning of February. I've completed 13 color pages to make a preview packet! Keep your eyes out for all kinds of upcoming sneak peeks!

The Vampire's Saint by Corinna Turner
Did some character concepts, but it's been a while since I worked on this. Consideration for the schedule!

Paper Doll Veronika
Prepared some sets for the next chapters, written more script, and I'm working on materials for the Paper Doll Club that will be available once the webcomic gets up and running--it'll be all sorts of extras for members, including, of course, paper dolls.

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Refuting a rumor about St. Bede's

My former pastor, Father Vaughn Treco, was removed from his position, his priestly faculties suspended, and is under threat of excommunication by Bishop Steven Lopes of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, for a homily which may be found here.

The letter from Bishop Lopes which announced the removal stated that Fr. Treco "denied Church teaching." There is no denial of any defined Catholic doctrine in that homily. The pending excommunication is on the charge of schism -- the refusal to submit to papal authority. There is criticism of certain papal actions, but no refusal to submit to papal authority in that homily. This punishment is unjust.

You may read more about this incident here and here. In the wake of this, there has been a rumor circulating in other Ordinariate parishes, that St. Bede's had approximately 40 Ordinariate-member families before Fr. Treco came, and his preaching drove all of them away but one, and that one remaining family, fed up with his "embittered trad" attitude, reported the homily in question to Bishop Lopes.

This is the most pernicious kind of falsehood, falsehood with a tiny bit of half-truth mixed in. My family is an Ordinariate-member family who attended St. Bede's before Fr. Treco's installation. There were approximately six other households who attended regularly, not 40. I do not know how many of them, if any, were officially members of the Ordinariate.

The tiny half-truth is that shortly after Fr. Treco's installation, most of them ceased attending, all but my family and one other family. So there were two families remaining, not one. I do not know why most of them stopped attending, but one gentleman moved out of the country and one did attend once much later and stated that it was too far for him to drive from his residence.

My family, Ordinariate members since shortly after the Ordinariate's formation in 2012, and members of a Pastoral Provision parish since 2003, did not have a problem with Fr. Treco's preaching. We found it orthodox and edifying. The other Ordinariate family from before Fr. Treco's installation still attends St. Bede's. I have no knowledge if they had a problem with Fr. Treco's homilies; they never indicated as such to me. There are also other Ordinariate-member families who were added to the parish since Fr. Treco's installation, through entrance into full communion with the Catholic Church and through baptism. Along with non-Ordinariate Catholics who attended regularly, there were approximately 12 families in regular attendance at the time of Fr. Treco's removal. So you see, this rumor is false.

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Pied Piper

How enchanting is the piper's music? To some it is hypnotic. To others, it is merely an excuse.


When presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested that women who arrange for the murder of their unborn children should suffer legal consequences, he was attacked not only by pro-abortion organizations, but by so-called pro-life ones as well. All the mothers are blameless victims, they claimed. There was even one former abortion professional turned pro-life speaker, who argued that Trump's statement was unacceptable because it would mean punishment for her. That was when I lost faith in the pro-life movement.

I still support crisis pregnancy centers and a group that defends the unborn in court, but awareness and lobbying organizations, no more. I may be wrong, I hope I'm wrong, but it appears that they don't actually want it outlawed, because then they would have no reason to continue receiving money.