As I was rattling my brain, trying to think of what direction I should take my art in, I asked myself a question: “What is it about the anime you watch that pulls you in?” Once that was in my mind, the answer for all the anime I went out of my way to watch was the artstyle. That’s it. Rarely does story or plot come into the picture. But then my mind went to the key art of a lot of anime series, and I remembered one thing:

I always had background music playing in my head as I looked at something.

Ever since I was a little kid, art and music always had a special relationship with each other that was inseparable. I always had a color that I’d associate with a sound, like I’d associate a C major scale with the color blue, or E minor with red.

So, then I thought, “Why not base your art off of that? It’s the one thing that has been always consistent with you.” I found it. I found the one thing that gels with me. Or rather, it was always with me, and I was too distracted by social media and politics to notice.

I’ve done stuff like this before. “A Night With Kid Nimbus” is the biggest example of this.

I made this while I was listening to various funk, house, R&B, soul, and disco songs. I managed to capture the vibe of those songs very well. I would redraw this, but I felt like it would make the moment I captured years ago irrelevant.

This realization made me draw the picture at the start of this blog post. It was based off of a song by Groove Collective called “In Your Mind,” or rather, a section of a song that reminded me of a beach during a sunset. It was also a very relaxing part of the song, in which the lounging frog represented. Not sure why I chose a frog, but I think it’s because I subconsciously took cues from one of Vaughn Bode’s lizard characters, which makes sense, because Bode was prevalent in the 70s up until his death, and that section from “In Your Mind” sounds like it came from that decade.

So, yeah. I plan on doing more stuff like this. After all, I did say I’d make a return to my 2013 creativity.