The Silver Eye

Ok I wrote a lot, but first of all, thank you so so much to the readers who participated in the “Official Support Laura Project” You guys are the best and you made me tear up. I am so blessed to have the community that has grown around The Silver Eye!

In this page we see the king and queen of Amethyst. They are the parents of princess Nia Nyx (and technically she is in this page as well). They’re the figures seen traveling in Page 1. They have been long-time friends of Joshua and Isis and are Apen’s godparents.

If you are someone who found the comic while it was on break, welcome! Feel free to say hey in the comments! That being said, I would really appreciate it if the comment section could remain calm and relaxed, meaning please try not to let excitement for the comic being back turn into an impromptu comment party.

2020 seems to be treating me about as well as it’s treating society at large.

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At the end of an exhausting Thursday I sketched this page, telling myself that I would get up at the crack of nothing in the morning and finish it. Then around midnight we got news that my Aunt Mary had passed away and I spent most of the night holding my mom.

Aunt Mary was hit by a drunk driver decades ago. It destroyed her left leg and hip and the accident left her bedridden nearly my whole life. She fought through endless surgeries and had complications from autoimmune diseases. Her body just couldn’t fight any more. Our family expected her passing for a long long time, but that hasn’t made it easier. My mom spoke to her on the phone three times the day that she died, and it sounded like one of her better days. We hope her passing was peaceful. She lived in CA, a few hours from where I’ve just moved. My mom was going to see her when she on our trip out here. I can’t help but think about how, if the timing had been a little different, mom could have been visiting her sister one last time, instead of helping to pack up her things and retrieving her ashes from the funeral home. 🙁

Aunt Mary was always enthusiastic about whatever projects me or my siblings were working on. She would flip through whatever sketchbook I brought and rave about the most simple sketches. She would devour everything that my sister Alyssa wrote. One of my memories of her was when The Silver Eye was a baby comic, only about a chapter long. We were at Mary’s house and she went through it reading the dialog out loud. The inflection of every sentence was off and didn’t match what was being said in the least. It was admittedly hard to listen to, but me and Alyssa smiled and nodded along, appreciating her sheer passion.

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I’m 95% done with my big commission load, the remaining work is mostly revisions, but I should be finished shortly. Rest is so close, I can almost touch it.

I owe my life to a phone app called Productivity Challenge Timer. It’s just about the only thing that helped me make it through these last few months commission-wise. It is also how I know the project I’ve been working on has taken approximately 400 hours. If you’re looking to be more productive or keep track of how much time you’re spending on projects (VERY useful for calculating how much to charge for commissions because you’ll see how much time an artwork takes to complete) then I highly recommend it!

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Gwladys has been the best part of my life right now. She is my constant. After a few weeks of being here she is settling in and has become a very happy doggo. She’s either been indoors or in a fenced yard her entire life but now she has been super good about wandering freely outdoors while staying near the house (Melly, on the other hand, would be long gone by now). My desk looks out a window and it feels like I have a dog aquarium where I can just watch Gwladys swim by throughout the day as she explores.

I haven’t properly processed or grieved leaving my house in VA that I dearly loved. However I do feel like I’m in the right place for me at this part of my life. I had so many options of where to move next and I believe I made the right choice.

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This is something I forgot to mention, but while driving out to the VA mountain cabin, we were going through rolling green hills that looked so much like Somerset in the UK. I thought “Now if only there were a cathedral in these hills, then it would be perfect.” And you know what I saw off the side of the highway? What seemed to be a metal frame of an elevator shaft being constructed. Then my hope increased because as we got closer and closer, because it resembled a tower more and more. I looked it up and sure enough it is a proper Gothic chapel being built by Christendom College! https://chapel.christendom.edu/ I will have to visit it once it’s complete. I’ve never seen new Gothic architecture being built before and I am thrilled!

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I’m going to find someone else to manage my social media accounts for a bit. Stepping away from it has revealed what I’ve long felt, that it’s not a healthy use of time for me. I don’t want to fall back into the habit of scrolling through feeds for hours upon hours every day. I miss my friends and mutuals so I think I’ll try to make more effort to keep up with people on a one-to-one basis.

I had been leaning towards going on a multi-month hiatus to redraw more of the early pages (namely Chapter 1) but after this I just want to continue onto Chapter 20. All I want right now is for things return to normal and for the current storyline move forward. So there is some good news for you.

(The rest of the Alvarados’ congregation, including the other people being baptized, ought to have been pictured on the shore, but I just couldn’t draw them, I am too tired)