Archive Dive- An Old Sketch for an Old Friend

Skitchens has a surprise for you.

Greetings one and all folks! If you celebrate Thanksgiving, I certainly hope you've enjoyed a hearty meal and good times with family and friends. If you don't celebrate the holiday, I hope you're just living life as the lavish rock star you always knew you could be deep down!

I know updates on the blog have been somewhat sparse these last few months (and for that I profusely apologize) but things have been sorta crazy on the personal end with me over these last few months. While a lot of the fervor is seemingly dying down now, I'm going to be honest and say that I've still got a ways to go before I can free up the time necessary for me to be more creatively productive here.

Unfortunately what that means for the time being, is that this post is going to be (yet again) on the brief side of things, but hopefully that will all change in the near future. Believe you me, I want to get back to doing the reviews, the editorials, and the Con-reports, not to mention my radio show BCR.

Far too many projects that have all been woefully neglected for far too long.

In the meantime though (to help tide you all over) not too long ago I was going through some of my old sketches in my near mountainous pile, and I came across this little number. Drawn nearly a full decade ago, I remember when I first drew this piece as if it were yesterday.

The character in the image is not of my own mind, but instead originates from/belongs to my best friend/roommate Matt, and her name is Skitchens. As you can see, she's obviously a cat-girl (try to think of her as being something like an homage to Felicia from Darkstalkers) who actually started out as an exceptionally badass Nekomata class unit from the Disgea franchise, but that's only surface level.

Over time, Skitchens quickly evolved into a far more notably personal character out of Matt's robustly colorful cast. From her hat being a personal reference to a dear relative of his, to her being one of his first attempts at doing digital colors, I knew back when I first drew this that there was a great deal of heart Matt had put into her, and I had to make her embody what she ultimately represented to him.

At her core, there is a child-like purity and innocence to everything Skitchens says and does, an unbridled joy, and genuine emotion that comes from her at every moment. Matt has to told me numerous times he feels that this sort of authenticity with a character is significantly lacking in fiction today (coming off mostly as pandering when it does crop up) so he created Skitchens as not only his answer to that problem, but also as a way to ameliorate the personal dilemma he felt he had in lacking those emotions himself.

Skitchens was in essence created as a means for Matt to try and put forth something positive into the world with fundamentally no strings attached. A gift given, simply for the sake of the happiness that gift can bring, a way of finding a bridge to a complete heart and a fulfilled soul. That's why I drew her getting ready to present a gift, a loving token for none other than the mind that birthed her all those years ago.