Old Instagram posts

Between 2019 and 2020, I tried to exercise my social media muscle by posting to Instagram all the progress I’d been making on Yearling’s Bobtail during that time. It wore me out, so then I stopped.

With the coming of AI, or artificial intelligence, I’ve read that artists will soon be expected to “show their work,” so to speak. Since those old Instagram posts were meant to do just that, I decided to compile them all into a single post here on Substack.

Each image gallery constitutes a single Instagram post, and below each one are my original comments, with some minor editing. I also switched out some images in a few galleries, while adding a few more.

I’m going to start posting images from my upcoming webcomic. Still figuring out the best way to show a rendered SVG, or scalable vector graphic. 🙂

Looks like Instagram won’t let you go past a certain aspect ratio.

Rendering images as SVGs is… pretty time-consuming, ha. I’m doing so for three main reasons:

1. SVGs tend to be minimal in file size but are infinitely scalable, which is good for a webcomic.

2. SVGs can be styled in CSS, or cascading style sheets, so I can keep tweaking the colors indefinitely. Which is good, since color theory is my biggest weakness, ha.

3. Because SVGs are just code, they’re considered part of the frontend toolkit, so I might as well choose the approach that also makes me a better developer.

In the scenes that take place in my childhood bedroom, I thought it’d be fun to have posters on the wall showing the comics that inspired me as a kid.

These were some of the first sketches that I rendered into SVGs. I initially found it daunting to work with vector files in Illustrator, as my only previous experience was with raster files in Photoshop. So I decided I’d simply convert all the scanned images from raster to vector using Illustrator’s Live Trace function. But this turns out to add unnecessary paths and anchor points, leading to oversized files. I can probably get each of these down to 10kB. Since this is a webcomic served to a browser, I have to watch those kilobytes!

These posters show the progression of my musical tastes from childhood into my college years.

The one of Michael Jackson was meant to be the first of this bunch. I’d originally planned to have it up for the scenes that take place during my middle school years. But after the recent documentary, I thought better of it. The Bloom County poster ended up replacing it.

These thought bubbles are from the scene in which I decide to spend the next five years recording an epic album by myself, all to impress my friend Mara whom I secretly had a crush on.

At some point, the effort needed to render the sketches into SVGs using Live Trace proved to be prohibitive. I’d drawn all my sketches on graph paper using light-colored pencils, which Live Trace struggled to make sense of. This meant I first had to “ink” the scanned images in Photoshop, by tracing over them in clear black lines. But even after going through this hassle, there were still too many stray paths to clean up, too many extra anchor points to delete. There was no way around it: I’d need to learn how to manually use the Pen tool in Illustrator. So these thought bubbles were my first attempt to do so, since their cartoonish style allowed for a wider margin of error.

This isn’t an original Instagram post; I just thought it’d help to show what I meant about minimizing the file sizes of those earlier poster figures.

These paintings were added as an afterthought, after I decided there wasn’t enough going on in the background for the scenes that take place at my grandmother’s house. As such, the figures were rendered long after I’d learned how to use the Pen tool, and thus are far more efficient in their use of paths and anchor points. You can see they contain a similar level of detail to those earlier posters, yet each is only around 10kB.

More thought bubbles. After our disastrous first few dates, my ex and I didn’t speak for months. But one day she reached out again, and we gradually became friends. Still, part of me always wanted more, so I’d sneak in ways to show off my various talents. By the end of the year, she started to like me back. When I asked her about it after we were finally together, she confessed that the banjo might’ve been the tipping point.

Since every project is an opportunity to build up new talents, I decided this would be the one where I finally get good at drawing realistic figures. So the characters, which make up most of the illustrations, are more lifelike. Meanwhile, these occasional thought bubbles are drawn in my older cartoonish style. Had it been the other way around, this project would’ve been finished a year ago, ha.

Since I was learning to draw figures as I went, I decided to do them in an assembly line. This way, I could focus on one thing at a time, and the earlier figures wouldn’t look so much worse than the later ones as I got better. I think the order was: rough skeletons, skin outlines, feet, hands, props, lower clothing, upper clothing. I freely erased as I went and wasn’t thinking to leave a record, but I did take an occasional photo along the way, which gives an idea of my workflow.

I didn’t take many photos of the rough sketches in their early stages, so these are the last that I’ll be posting. Incidentally, I’m not too proud of my figure drawings. They’re a bit static and lifeless. But it was the best I could do, given that I’d decided for this project not to take art classes, and to just read books and watch tutorials instead. As a bootcamp graduate, I was still learning to code even after I got hired at Zillow, and this was the learning I needed to prioritize if I wanted to keep my job. (Don’t tell my managers, ha.)

Playing in a band was weird. Women would flirt with me after shows, and people would know me at parties, but I wouldn’t know them. It all kind of went to my head. Here, my ex’s friend tells her he’d see me check out other women, which did happen. She responds by telling him I’d hold her close whenever anyone got too flirty, which also happened. But my selfishness always won out, and at some point I’d insist on breaking up to see other women. Then I’d come crawling back months later, and she’d take me in. This happened three or four times, until the one time she finally refused. (Spoiler alert, I guess.)

When I began rendering hands, I’d paste each one onto this artboard, hoping that a few might get reused. In Illustrator, it’s easier to copy and paste paths, then move the anchor points around, than it is to create new ones from scratch. And it worked well enough for shoes. Unfortunately, each hand is too different from the next in angle and pose, so it turned out not to be worth it. Still, I liked seeing all these hands pile up, and I kept adding them. There are 300 figures, and I think I rendered 500 hands total.

My Zillow teammate Matt modeled for the head. They don’t really look like him, since I’m not too good at capturing likenesses. Anyway, that wasn’t my priority, ha.

This is actually a composite character based on Christina, my first girlfriend, and Catherine, a Catholic woman I dated in college. Both were well-read and whip-smart, back when I was very much neither. They probably dated me out of pity more than anything else, ha. Still, they cast a long shadow over my life, since the core motive behind everything I ever do now⁠— when I really, really think about it⁠— is to impress the next Christina or Catherine.

My Zillow coworker James kindly modeled for the head.

In Illustrator, each colored shape is given a unique position in the stacking order. I told a friend that it’s like cutting out pieces of colored paper, then layering them one atop another. But when two shapes share a complex border, like the hair and the face, it’s not always clear which one should go first. Plus, there’s the additional constraint of keeping the byte size to a minimum. It makes each figure a fun puzzle to solve, ha.

I couldn’t picture anyone else modeling Ana’s face, but I also wasn’t about to fly to the Bay Area for some headshots, ha. In the end, I just looked at their Facebook photos, and did my best to interpolate the more offbeat expressions.

My Zillow coworker Ashley kindly posed for the head.

I’d asked Carissa and my ex out at the same time, thinking that one would quickly fall through. When neither one did, I chose my ex. But this doomed our relationship, since any time things went sour, I’d wonder what could’ve been with Carissa. For her part, I’m sure Carissa was relieved to dodge that bullet, ha.

Whole-bodied figures are starting to roll in! Here’s a minor character inspired by two local scenesters from back in the day, Jason and Shayne.

This is a composite character based on Kevin, Ana’s boyfriend from back when we first met, and Tristan, a hotheaded kid who, late into any party, was guaranteed to black out and start picking fights. I thought my Zillow coworker Graham had a passing resemblance to both, so I asked him to pose for the head. Though, when I asked him to make like he was about to punch out the window of a Volkswagen, he seemed unsure. I don’t think Graham has once made a violent face in his life. I ended up just kind of imagining it, ha.

This is Ana’s friend Tomer, with whom we downed Robitussin one night and explored the steam tunnels of UCLA. I couldn’t picture anyone at Zillow as him, so I asked to draw his likeness based on Facebook photos.

More whole figures are coming in! On the Ash Wednesday after Catherine broke up with me, I got the idea to smear a cross on my forehead with a cigarette butt. I was hoping that when I ran into her, she’d ask me where I’d attended Mass, ha.

Those were the days, ha.

In these scenes, I ditch Carissa after realizing it can’t possibly end well⁠— but then I can’t stop thinking about her afterward. Which is also how it happened in real life, more or less, ha.

I had a huge crush on Mara, but she ended up dating my drummer Joi. Here they’re meeting for the first time after a show, which distracts me from making a sale, ha. Meanwhile, Ana is putting away their bass.

Miriam is a composite character based on the three or four women whom I left my ex for at various times, during the years when the Yearlings were a fixture in our little Bay Area scene. Ironically, the one actually named Miriam was the least like this character.

Whenever a woman showed interest based on little more than seeing me sing and play several instruments onstage, it’d feed my resentment of having had to work so hard, and wait so long, to win over my ex. Which then made me feel all the more justified in leaving her for them. Not proud of any of this; that’s just how it happened. I made Miriam and Tristan siblings to fit the narrative.

This is my favorite scene by far: Sasha, my childhood crush, defending me against Andrew and Brad, two boys who bullied me in middle school. Fun fact, Andrew once put me in a chokehold until I passed out. When I came to, my jaw would pop out whenever I opened it too wide, which hurt like crazy. So I learned to clench my teeth while talking, making people assume ever since that I’m Canadian. But I guess I got my revenge by, um, drawing him badly, ha.

Sasha and I actually ended up dating later on. She’s the one who brought me to New York and put me on the conversion path. It didn’t last; I really wanted to mend my old ways, but my behavior lagged behind my intentions. I guess I just needed to see us holding hands one last time, for closure. Of course, getting closure was pretty much my entire reason for working on this project, ha.

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