Last Post 2006 and Happy New Year!

I did have a post ready. A thought-provoking, wise, canny post even. Then I coughed and promptly pulled a back muscle, which makes sitting up easier than lying down, really painful on standing, and agony getting up after lying down.

Maybe I wasn't meant to make that post eh?

So I'll just leave all of you with this, and my best wishes for a wonderful, blessed 2007 to everyone.



Thanks for reading, for being friends, for everything.

Sketchcrawl Enroute Year's End...

Finally, finally, after fighting with a lot of pride and embarrassment issues, I've gotten off my ample rump and scanned up all the sketches I did from the SketchCrawl on 9th December. Three weeks late! Yes, part of the mitigating circumstances were that the computer was down and the scanner wasn't working with the laptop, but still, I'm late and that merits a big, big apology to those who've posted and did take part (Sandra, Zeke and Hadibi namely!)

So here they are - I'm taking your advice, Marcelo! They're not that good, I admit; I've still got a long way to go. But it's a personal milestone in that a few months ago even, I'd never have been able to even attempt something like it. As puerile as they are...I'm proud of having made the attempt. The complete image is behind the thumbnail; I decided to spare everyone's eyeballs and put them behind a cut to be kind (they're largish images):


A lady with an interesting hairstyle at a caricature booth - it was at the Digi Street Party, I believe, or something so inclined. Cornrows! Haven't seen those in ages!


This little Muslim girl eyed me suspiciously the entire time around I was trying to unobtrusively sketch her. Her mother too, and I only managed her head.


The girl with the striped shirt was getting a temporary tattoo from the lady with the bag. The chap with the cap is from the International Busker's Festival in KL, I forget his name. Oops. But man, his shirt was fascinating!


The fanstastically entertaining New Zealanders, the Motley Two, from where I was sitting, watching the two Canadian performers doing their thing. Check out that SPIKY HAIR. How could I resist that?


A very attentive, fascinated little boy watching in the front row of people.


Carnie the Contortionist. A very BAD profile. Boy can he contort. And his act with the bear traps? Just makes my hair stand on end. It's fantastic, but SCARY! More of him later...


David Ladderman of the Motley Two on his trademark ladder, holding a juggling club. It was bright green. LOVELY colour.



More Ladderman, his partner Mullet Man, and juggling and ladders!


Now these are -post- SketchCrawl, done from videos Sandra shot and photographs, so they don't particularly count, but I still tried to keep to time limits anyways:


These Canadian guys were breathtaking. I kept catching my breath and hoping nothing bad would happen and everyone collapse in a heap...


The Motley Two on unicycle and ladder, juggling between each other.


One from the Sketchie, Carnie! He saw me with my honkin' huge sketchbook (how could anyone miss that) and made a pose. I was red in the face and laughing too much to actually -catch- him in it at the time, but Sandra snapped a photo and -here- is the pose!

We were collectively known as 'The Sketchies' that day, I think. Not that we minded, it just felt odd to be so...notorious? Never been quite so publicly identified as a Sketcher before, at least for myself!

This has been a really mixed-up year, like a cocktail drink - shaken, stirred, occasionally turned upside down and hammered on the counter - but I think that without it I wouldn't have grown, wouldn't have met some of the people I treasure most in my life right now.

Last post of the year tomorrow, and New Year greeting besides! Have a good one, y'all...

Dead Cats and Rubbish

No, that doesn't refer to me actually having personally found any dead cats in my bed, or rubbish pouring down the pipes again (no Marcos! It has not happened thank GOD!) - it just happens to be the only things strong enough that I can smell at the moment when I walked back from lunch today.

Eating gyuniku udon (udon noodles with beef in soup) is really a lot less fun when you can't taste a ruddy thing.

As Erma Bombeck wrote once, 'It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. I've got the flu.' Or something like that, anyway, but yes. I have the flu. No doubt brought on by sleep deprivation from making costumes like mad over the past week or two, and stress from work, but STILL. Christmas with the Flu. And the Christmas play in two days. It should be an institution.

However! I had the perfect remedy for the blues when I got home - Catalina! I've been asked for pictures of her, so as a courtesy to the Kitsune Fox whom I absolutely adore, and my brother, who thought it was really neat, here's the lady herself!


Sleeeeeeeeeeeeeek as a pirate's cutter, oh yeah, ain't she?


Before the Makeover. Those wires don't exist, nope, nope...there is no wire, there is merely the puuuuuuuuuuuter...(ok so that's my room, where I live, so everything has to fit in it. Still!)


And after the Makeover! Does something look rather familiar there...

On another (stranger) note, I think I'm beginning to be known around my area as That Girl Who Draws Everywhere. I mean, I do nowadays, I've got markers and sketchpad with me even if I'm in the bathroom most days. It's brought quite a few stares and some comments, and a lot of opinion. This was brought home to me forcibly when I went to lunch this afternoon at my favourite Japanese restaurant, and the owner-lady said, "You know, the picture you drew for us last year's been up for a while, draw something else and we'll put it up!" Short explanation: this is the same Japanese place which feeds me tons of extra food every time I go, and last year to say thank you, I did a quick kimono girl pencil drawing over lunch, folded a paper crane, and left it with the bill after I paid - after making sure no one could see me leave since I was shy and didn't know if they'd like it.

Apparently? They did! One of the waitresses even asked for a Santa drawing she could colour for her little girl - both requests which I'm going to try my best to get done along with a few other things (and the Christmas play.)

Looking at Marcos' paella must have gotten me in the mood to draw seafood because I managed some of these prawns in the freezer case:



I'm the Girl Wot Draws to all these lovely people. Wow. That's...really something.

She's HERE!

There's a sexy, sleek new permanent resident in my room right now. All in classic black, no less, and sitting coyly on the floor.

I'm in love, oh yes I'm in love.

She's my new computer! And she's absolutely gorgeous, with the most beautiful silver trim, and she runs like a DREAM. All the software installed right. She's got XP Pro. My scanner works. I've got Photoshop again and a 17" monitor (I used to have a 15 year old 15").

I'm so, so happy, I don't even feel tired any more even though I only had 4 hours' sleep.

And because she's my very first new computer since college that I bought all on my own and didn't inherit from previous users, I had to give her a name - and that was easy.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present Catalina de Los Angeles, after El Pacifico's feisty Pirate Girl (the colour scheme on the display unit matches her outfit. I am not kidding. Blue, red, black and some white, very tastefully done.) Because my 'cyberlady' just looks that spunky and sassy, and because she's mine so she has to be.

And now for dinner because I err...kind of forgot to eat after I set her up...

Anyways in the meantime, have a picture from the archives from when I really couldn't draw architecture (and still can't but am trying to practice. That cathedral was good considering I'd never drawn a building before but looking at it now makes me just cringe in agony.

Redefining Gothic In Style

Christmas approaches. Costumes are ambushing by the minute.

So in the spirit of 'let's not get drowned by a few pieces of fabric and thread', I dug something out of the archives that has -something- to do with fashion and design.

Well, and sheer insanity too, but by now everyone reading this ought to know I'm truly loco.



Presenting the New Goth Girl.

Or rather OLD Goth Girl...never mind, I'm not about to argue semantics tonight, not when I'm still trying to remember how to spell my own name. I had to stop and think for a moment.

There's got to be a way of growing old more gracefully than trying to explain, 'It's on the tip of my tongue, what's it called' and realizing you wanted to say 'saliva'. (If only that were my line; it's Bill Condon's, punnish genius that he is.)

Random Thoughts from the Glog Barrel and Draw Something Sweet Challenge

Today my sewing machine worked. And there was much rejoicing.

To know why something as simple as this causes leaping and dancing upon the high hills, you have to understand that nothing about sewing machines comes easily to me. Nothing. I'm a self-taught seamstress, and everything I know about a sewing machine and its innards come from two days of lessons from a dear, dear friend in Florida whom I've lost touch with (drat it, Joy, I miss you, wherever you are). That, and an entire week better left nameless during Easter this year, when I was holed up with the machine infernal (where it jammed, stuck, tangled, broke needles, and otherwise turned my week of costume-sewing into a nightmare which rivals Fuseli in creepy eldritch horror. Or is that Cthulhu?)

So to have it work without a hitch, even sewing a straight seam, gladdens my heart and makes me smile. Especially when I used it to hem my first ever satin fabric. Satin fabric! That slippery evil I've dreaded working with for years! And it's tamed!

Yes, happy-making here, folks.

***

Saturday 9th December was International Sketch Crawl day. In a fit of rash foolhardiness, yours truly took the plunge and went barrelling off into the wilds of Kuala Lumpur city to shoot a drawing. I mean, SKETCH. These sketches, properly harnessed and muzzled, will be put up sometime soon after my scanner comes back, because my digital camera ain't going to take a nice enough picture of them, that's for sure. In the meantime, enjoy this wonderful artist's posts and photos of said event, because man, she ROCKED (and sketches both fast and well, believe me. I was there...uh, if there's photographic evidence ignore! ignore!):

http://sandorasan.blogspot.com/2006/12/sketchcrawl-12.html

***

Some days, being professional, calm, collected and quietly cheerful at work is exhausting, and leads to an abstracted fit of the blues and almost-crying-but-not-quite. I have a legendary bad temper; the effort of smiling politely when I want to brain a nincompoop who's yelling at me over the phone takes a lot out of me and usually leaves me brain-dead.

This would be today in a nutshell.

So, a 45 minute walk home, a looooong phonecall to my mother and an equally long venting rant later, I go for dinner at the mall to try and cheer myself up. Which suffered a rather small setback when I ordered iced tea and got Pepsi instead. I did ask for a change of drink since I can't stand the latter, but I did remember to ask nicely instead of taking someone's head off (it was a temptation but I was just too tired, and I'm sure those poor waitresses were overworked anyways because it was late.)

Some people are of the opinion that iced lemon tea is for drinking. I'm sure somewhere along the line I agreed with that in a nebulous fashion once. This time, I not only didn't drink more than a quarter of it, I left the rest in the glass so I could draw the pretty, pretty light-and-dark contrasts between the ice and the tea. And since it was sweet iced tea, I figured it qualified for the EDM group's 'Draw Something Sweet' challenge, since I...haven't really done any of those in donkey's YEARS. Centuries. Yeah, it's been a while.

Hot fudge brownies are meant for eating too, but I totally ignored it in favour of getting this down. Apologies for the lousy picture, digital cameras at night don't make for the best shots:



Vaguely out of the corner of my eye I noticed one of the waiter/waitresses standing there watching me while I was sketching, but I didn't pay attention, not until I went to pay for my food and my waitress said brightly, "You're an artist? I like watching you sketch!" Turns out she was a graphic artist in college and she loves seeing people draw; when I left she and the girl who got my order wrong waved happily and called, "So nice to meet you!"

It was a sheer waste of a hot fudge brownie, which had turned to lukewarm and amazingly jaw-sticking by the time I got around to it.

But it was worth it all, just to see those two girls smile.

Casino Royale Dreams and Overworked Brains

AFTER CASINO ROYALE
© SYL, 2006

Been a while hasn't it --
since a gun sat in my palm
snug as a Russian nesting doll
giving up secrets, layer by layer:

a gun of spun smoke and stilted words.

I look down the barrel of my days
Beyond the known yonder
Infinity spans its necklace of hours.

I'm fixing my sights
Baby I'm aiming straight -
Shards of me, that secret hollow
tiny splinters of fractured time
and a bullet of echoes backlit
by pieces of unseasoned dreams
cordite traces of a smile
that should have been yours
but faded, like invisible ink
drifting away.

Suckerfish Training School Part-the-Something

I had whelks for lunch today.

Those of you who've read this will know exactly what that means.

Today however, things were just a touch different. Because all the whelks went on strike.

I knew I was in trouble the minute I picked up the first one, and it not only didn't come out of the shell when I slurped on it, it made me drool because it was a bit -too- large to bite on comfortably, -and- required the skills of an elite vacuum cleaner just to keep up with the sucking action.

No wonder babies go to sleep after taking their bottle of milk. Oww. My -lips- are still sore.

By the time the fourth whelk had defeated all attempts to eat it, I was pretty convinced it was One Of Those Days. The discreet slurping sounds that usually accompany this enterprise had sort of long since materialized into a swampish gurgle that often accompanies quicksand victims trying to get out and failing. Either that or a truck stuck in an oozing, squelching shlrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp of mud.

If half the restaurant was looking at me by this time I didn't notice; I was busy looking the other way and studying the wall with great interest. You can perfect the Innocent Animaniacs look doing that, I assure you. It's great practice contriving to make it seem like those ghastly sewer noises are not emanting from your place despite you going through the -motions- of making them, but are really helium balloons under your chair being deflated. Method actors have -nothing- on me at this point, behbe.

This is one time I'm very thankful I'm nowhere near a resident franchise of Sketchclub. The spectacle of a short, wild-eyed woman attempting to contort her mouth into shapes only seahorses, blowfish, guppies and chimpanzees should be allowed to practice would just have been too much to resist for any self-respecting artist.

Oh what the heck who am I fooling. If I'd been looking at ME I'd have grabbed the sketchbook and started plugging away at it.

I had to commemorate the moment, even if I only had 5-10 minutes to do it. Behold the Whelk of Doom:



I managed to get out of there with my self-respect intact. I think. Despite having to resort to stabbing at the whelks with a fork to fish it out, and in the process, cracking the shell accidentally and taking a whole lot of unexpected calcium into my diet. Crunchy calcium, no less.

Man. My mouth will never be the same again.

(Believe me, I'm glad I'm no one famous because THAT line taken out of context would, like the ever famous Lucy, require a great deal of 'splainin' to do.)

Introspection Intraspection

ANY GIVEN SUNDAY
© SYL, 2006

Any given Sunday the garlic stakes twist
Around your heart
Your vampire heart – your life sucked dry
By its feeding.
And dreams, like leeches
Drift through thoughts
White, dead
Bloated hope.

Your cracked voice swells.

There is nothing but a husk of shell
No sound but these withered bones.

Sittin' On the Dock of the Sushi Bar

You know you've been going to a restaurant long enough to be considered 'family' when the waitresses try to steal your sketch book to get a peek inside.

There's a wonderful little Japanese restaurant opposite the hospital where I have lunch once a week. The ambience is wonderful; I did and still do a lot of my sketching there because it always inspires me to do something artistic over lunch. I've been going there for over a year or more now; the staff there know me so well they feed me -extra- food sometimes. Considering their portions are already huge, this often provides me with dinner from the leftovers.

The sushi chefs and the waitresses there have always found it amusing to watch me plug away at the sketch book while waiting for food to be served. But since the sushi chefs are often kind of shy about being sketched, I have to be sneaky about it. The waitresses just find it the biggest joke ever. Today two of them caught me at it, and demanded to see what I was drawing --me being shy, I declined. One of them tried to distract me, and the other tried to steal the sketch pad off my place, and we had a splendid friendly sibling-like scuffle (which bemused a lot of the patrons.)

But I -did- manage to steal a really crooked sketch of the chap preparing a Japanese salad. It was difficult, because every few seconds I had to sort of look somewhere else and pretend I wasn't drawing at all, since he kept turning around. And every time I looked back up someone had moved something on the counter so I couldn't get a good sketch of anything, even the pots! Still...I tried.



On a different note, I'd have to say that even if I'm not famous (except maybe for a phenomenal bad temper), my life is definitely not -dull-. Tonight it rained and I tried to hail a cab to take me around the corner to my apartment, since I didn't want to get thoroughly drenched with water and rival an ark. Normally, the cab fare would run to about 3RM since base fare starts at 2RM. Mr. Taxi Driver Sir wanted to charge me TEN. TEN! For that amount, just to put things in perspective, I could get to the monorail station 15-20 minutes away!

Fortunately it was raining hard enough or else the people at the bus stop nearby would have heard 'Ah moi(standard term for 'girl' here), go there need 10RM ahhh...' and 'WHAT??? DROP DEAD!' *door slam as Ah Moi with umbrella stalks off*.

Not -all- Ah Moi's loaded with umbrellas, bulky bags and who look a little like stout, short barrels melt in the rain. This Ah Moi regularly walks the 45 minutes back home when the bus doesn't come, thank you very much.

I really wasn't very accomodating to that poor man, come to think of it.

Anyway, that being said, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it! Here in my culture we don't, so I don't have any turkey pictures to put up but err....will a sushi chef chopping salad do?

Cthulhu Bell and Other Random Thoughts

...So if 'taco' is 'octopus' in Japanese, does that make Taco Bell Cthulhu's own personal insidious project to lure all into the Great Deep with Nyarlahotep by disguising tentacle mind-altering goodness as the things we know as tacos?

Ahem. This image courtesy of my beloved brother who reminded me of the Japanese meaning when talking about music. All blame solely attached there.

In other news: I have picked out a shiny, new, custom-built computer system and I am happily drooling at the thought of it. Yes, after 8 years or more, I will have a -new- computer that is not a hand-me-down! I might even be able to get a tablet to go with it, like I've wanted for ages and ages...

I've been working on a piece quiet-like for about 2 weeks now, and haven't quite decided what to do with her yet. I was curious to see if I could do shading, because I never felt comfortable with it, so I did an exercise for practice.

And here she is!



Any suggestions most welcome! I want to keep a fairly stark aesthetic with her, and thought of maybe just detail on her face and shadow on the rest of her dress but my ideas are like sieves and many times don't hold water artistically that way.

And now to let Cthulhu devour my brain --err, I mean, work on a piece that's deadlined for next week. I'll post some of those studies later!

Whelks, Slow Food and Time

Whenever I'm stressed, I buy a bowl of whelks to eat with lunch.

I bought some today.

There is a little cafe near the hospital where I work, called the Bawang Merah (Red Onion) which sells the most delicious whelks in curry sauce I've ever tasted. I usually wind up with my mouth on fire after eating them, but it's worth it.

These tiny little shellfish, usually no bigger than half my thumb or a little longer, take some skill to eat because basically we have to suck them out of the shell without the aid of pins or forks - the tines are too big to go through the small hole at the end of the shell anyway. As the process involves generally a minute amount of rather strange sucking noises reminiscent of tentacle monsters sucking out eyeballs, a reasonable amount of tolerance amongst the diners in the cafe is usually a good thing, plus the ability to be thick-skinned and pretend to not notice when a particularly loud slurp brings all eyes in your direction.

Whelks take time to eat. I only order then when I have a long, leisurely full lunch break because they can't be enjoyed in a hurry. Today I was able to do that, and even have enough time to do a five minute sketch with a self-inking Chinese calligraphy brush.

A bowlful of whelks reminds me that there's all the time in the world. That for one hour, life slows down just enough for me to take a breath and enjoy, moment by moment.

I need those reminders more often.

Revenge...of the LAPTOP!

First a disclaimer: the following was entirely Marcos' fault. The image his comment conjured up stayed in my head all afternoon to the point where I doodled around between patients just to see how to lay it all out.

So! Specially for you, Marcos, I present my very first comic page ever - *cue DUN DUN DUN music* The Laptop's Revenge:



Top points to anyone who can name which show and which episode, precisely, the title parodies. Because dude, you're as obscure-geekish as ME and that's SCARY.

Rain Rain Come NOW (But Only When I'm Sleeping)

I love rain, and there seems to be quite a bit of it floating around at this point. I do object to being drenched two days in a row, nevertheless. If it's going to pour, do it when I'm sleeping! That way I can definitely have an excuse to curl up under the blankets and snooze.

The Saga of the Computer continues. I replaced the network card. Computer still refuses to work. So I've started pricing new systems. The scanner refuses to work with the laptop. Yeah, I'm upholding my record for Comic Book Life *coughMarcoscough*

Given everything that's going on right now (including trying to stop reacting to dust in this place) I think I could use a little of my version of this:



Lady Luck of the Origami Fortuneteller. She was one of my first complete pieces about 2 years ago, and she's oil crayons, ink, and half-dry magic markers which I almost threw away but didn't. I discovered that those do -marvellous- things over oil crayons; adds a whole new layer of richness and texture.

Not throwing all my old art supplies -really- comes in handy sometimes!

Movie, Anyone?

All right. I give up. WAY give up.

I come back from vacation. Enough drama, right, you'd think?

Right?

Of -course- not. My desktop network card is fried. I thought it was the modem but by sheer fluke I plugged the modem into my laptop - and it worked FINE. So it looks like the network card.

Not to mention I got soaked getting ONTO the bus yesterday and today when I went to get a wireless USB port as well as a new cable in the hopes that it would fix the problem. As it turns out I didn't need the wireless port and the problem ISN'T the modem, but it'll come in handy anyway since I've been planning on getting one for a while.

*sigh*

Or maybe I just need a new computer altogether since 128 megs of RAM and Win 98SE is kind of obsolete. It's amazing it runs everything it needs to - Photoshop, my music stuff, the lot. But it may be time to start looking at a new machine with at least 1 gig processing speed.

So while I'm still scanning and transferring stuff, have something from the archives:

Rain. Pour. That Stuff.

Text message from my brother, 4am: Our van just burnt up. We lost everything. Please pray.

He's in a band, currently touring. All he could tell me since his phone was running out of battery, was that the van just went up in flames for no reason. There's nothing left of it, more or less. No one knows what happened. Thank GOD no one was hurt, everyone was ok. But they lost all their equipment, including the pride-of-his-heart drumset, all his snares and his cymbals. Which weren't insured. They're spending the night in Memphis right now, heading back to NY tomorrow.

Any good thoughts and prayers, I'd be grateful if you'd send it their way.

I'm just thankful he's alive.

Wonder if anyone wants a furguppy from the archives?

Life, The Soap Opera

The Great Sewage Saga ain't over yet. The plumber came on Saturday and made things -worse-. Now the entire kitchen smells like the inside of a drain. Upstairs neighbours, whose fault this entire mess is, don't want to pay compensation. Our pipes are still leaking every time someone a couple floors up turn on the water. -I- have promised to help housemate take someone apart if things aren't fixed soon because I can't -cook- or heat up stuff without being in a welter of swampland miasma.

Oh, and to add to the Soap Opera theme - I pulled a groin muscle. I've no idea HOW, other than it was too much standing and kneeling to ink yesterday's bulletin board piece, since my table's tiny and wouldn't properly hold an A3 sheet of paper. I can sit on anything with a stable centre of gravity but the minute it wobbles and I have to engage my abdominals to keep balance, OWW. Walking's also not a very fun thing to do, and any heavy lifting's out of the question. I'm hoping it goes away by tomorrow; I'm sure bumping home today on the bus for 2.5 hours didn't help.

And I forgot to bring my camera battery charger back so of course my digicam's dead as a dodo. Bah. I had a sketch on it I wanted to upload!

On the plus side however: I'm home! I'm home for five days! I'm not in a sewage infested apartment any more! (at least for a little while.) The awards ceremony on Sunday went -marvellously- well, and I made my Designing Debut with The Dress. It was a hit! (yeesh, that sounds so...self-aggrandizing. But people did like it a lot and I kept getting asked where I bought it!)

And everyone who sent well-wishes to my housemate's father, I'm delighted to report that he's back from hospital and doing just fine, aside of a slight glitch with accidentally ripping off the scab on his foot. He's convalescing at home and doing very well. Thank you all so much!

So in lieu of what I -wasn't- able to post, I went back into the files looking for history and came up with:



She's from a game I used to play on a while back - Ro'sllendrin en'Vrdhatru. Initially she started out as just someone in my head called Gothic Alice..and then she sort of turned into this.

And Xinh! Xinh'duronh Shaha, originally from a Star Wars universe. The MUSH folded, but I do miss her sometimes.



Newer stuff is gonna have to wait till I get home in a couple days and by then I hope the drama's going to be over.

OH! OH! I went with my mother to see Open Season and it was -cute- as all get out...and there was Marcelo Vignali's name in the credits at the end, which was just great.

*whistles her way through Joshua Kadison's 'Cherry Bowl Drive-In as she sits very carefully to do some work*

Buns Are Nice But Not On My Head

So a couple weeks back my writers' group had a bulletin board that needed decorating, and me, being the masochist that I am, volunteered caricatures of the members to be put up. We decided to do the core team committee first - which didn't sound so bad initially because there are only four of us anyways. One of the girls created a tagline poster that was very 1950s comic-book feel, so I decided to sketch us four goons in as comic-booky type characters too.

The result, after about 45-60 minutes of inking and half an hour more of frantic colouring before group leader came to pick it up, is certainly...interesting.

We have: The Narnia Queen of snow and ice, for Jan who loves chewing on ice cubes. Gambit, for Jon, who loves staves and blades and who wanted to be Wolverine but the artist had a brain fart and did not have the cool ability to draw that character, alas. Cheryl, who just -begs- for a Disney-style look and so got Kim Possible. And me. As Chun Li. Because I hit things and like explosions. And the paper was way too big for my scanner so I had to break the entire sheet of A3 paper up into two scans.





It isn't the BEST something-whatsoever, but I'm happy it's DONE at least. Now to type out the taglines for each character and send it in for someone else to comic-book-script since I don't have time to do it before I leave...

Y'know, I really do like Chun Li, but NOT THOSE STUPID HAIR BUNS!

The Anatomy of Lesser Known Things

I.
The force [F = Ma, or, Force = Mass x acceleration] of taking (a) a plate of food (m) off a high counter will cause gravy to fly with glee in a fan-shaped pattern and splatter your clothes, ergo:



II.
Being blindsided hard (F) by even a slow-closing lift door can cause you to stagger (a) and thus displace your innards and your ribs (m), or so it feels like for about five seconds.

III.
Being cracked in the sternum by the bony elbow of your equally bony, tall counter nurse can feel like a kick from a really skinny mule. Especially after collision with abovementioned lift door.

IV.
I didn't even know you could get a paper cut from new dollar bills.

V.
Light really does reflect on skin.

VI.
Directional spotlights, recessed ones too, really do cast triangular shadows. Even in broad daylight, ergo:



VII.
The day gets a trifle surreal when you're trotting back to your clinic counter bearing leftover pizza from a doctors' meeting. In a brown envelope. (Ok, fine, there weren't any available containers or plastic bags in there. It is still surreal, yes.)

VIII.
I am currently engaged in taking apart a thirty-six dollar skirt and turning it into a layered samurai-style outfit for a national awards ceremony I'm helping with on Sunday. Cloud Strife style overskirt, Issey Miyake style weird folded jacket. I have an ENTIRE wardrobe of suitable stuff for the occasion. Why am I doing this? BECAUSE I'M INSANE. I think. Yeah.

...Ok. So today got just a liiiiiiiiiittle surreal. Mostly. It was probably a bad idea to walk 3 miles home in the muggy heat too.

So much disproving the idea that a certain life could be a movie script. Right?

*looks at above list* I don't think I NEED to answer that question, not after this...

Hit the Road, Jack...No, Wait, That's Water

Hey Marcos? You were not kidding when you mentioned 'all the happenings in my life right now'.

*sigh*

Half an hour up to the -eyeballs- in foul-smelling water left over from the Great Sewage Saga, I've come to the conclusion that I'm Real Life's alternative to John Constantine. The water's not draining out of the kitchen from when housemate hosed it down, and we didn't realize that -under- the stove was a puddle of Stygian horror. We'll have to mop it out again tomorrow after one round today - it'll require two people and neither of us are feeling well tonight after that stench.

Oh, and that means I have to clean the bathroom -again- because we had to clean crap out of the mops. The bathroom cleaning usually leaves me with lower back pains that require me to take muscle relaxants if they're bad enough.

I can't take the muscle relaxants on a week night; I won't wake up the next day.

The only thing -good- out of all this is that next week, I'm going home for five days on break again.

And on -that- note, here's what I -really- feel like doing, from another hissing session sometime ago:



Now if only I could get a BIGGER cast-iron yoyo.

Sunrise, Sunrise

...looks like morning in your eyes
But the clock's held nine-fifteen for hours...

Ahh, Nora Jones. It's been a long, long day interspersed with medical drama of the Not Good Kind. Had to chase my housemate off to a doctor with her father in case he had gangrene after a motorbike ran over his foot some days ago. Am hoping and praying everything's gonna be just fine; situation's complicated enough as is without more fuel chucked onto it.

So, just because we've really needed an angel, this is in honour of that. It's an old piece done as a commission three years ago; the client specified 'black and white and sort of unfinished'. Watercolour, colour pencils, ink and a wee bit of crayons.



Sometimes, strange places have strange angels unawares.

...Man I'm tired. I think I need to go to sleep soon and put the sketching ideas on hold for now.

Blossoms, Homecomings, and Domestic Disasters

Four hours, rest-stop-jammed-up-to-highway, and tons of rain later, I'm finally back in my apartment.

Only to discover that my upstairs neighbours have once again clogged up the water pipes and pounded a broomstick or something down the u-bend - resulting in the ENTIRE lot of sewage, rotting food and foul water coming down onto our kitchen. AGAIN. Yes, this happened last year and I was the only one at home to clean it up. This year it was my housemate's turn.

We'd rather skip that yearly duty and move onto greener pastures, thankyouverymuch.

And since upstairs won't pay for the damage and we're going to have to get a plumber in to fix it and, and, and...

Never mind. I'm throwing someone off the balcony tomorrow and it'll be one of the upstairs neighbours if they don't cough up compensation.

Oh, and someone stole our mop off the balcony as well. A MOP. I've no idea why and I don't think I want to know either but...a MOP.

In other news, as promised, the flowers I drew from dinner the other night. I'm not entirely too pleased with the way the colours came out - I am -so- not good with watercolour - but it's an attempt and I'm glad of that, at least.

The Embroiderer...Err, Artist's Floral

Some years ago when I was still working in a fibre arts store in VA, I came across a book called the Embroiderer's Floral. It was, as the title states, a treasury of floral designs and techniques for embroiderers. Fascinating book; I regret not buying it. Maybe I might be able to pick it up at Kinokuniya some time...

...though that wasn't quite the point of the post but the lead-in for it. At dinner tonight, a beautiful cozy little place called Paprika Cafe, we were served flowers with our food --sweet peas for my father's chocolate cake, and two lovely unknown blossoms for mine. I've been trying to take one artist's advice and sketch/paint every day. Which means I carry my sketchbook just about anywhere I can fit it into my ragged canvas bag, and a couple Sakura Pigma Microns of varying sizes.

So I yanked out the drawing paraphernalia and sketched away all through dinner. The waiter and my parents were highly amused. The colours of the flowers were so lovely I took them back with me so I could attempt (note the operative word) to paint in the drawings.

Haven't got a scanner here, but will post when I get back to my apartment in two days.

In the meantime, have another Beldame and Dominic sketch:



"Nic? Soooooooooo not in Chicago any more."
"I noticed."

It isn't the best sketch, but it's my first time attempting a bloody -building- and since I hate 'em I'm trying to make myself do them.

Ooof. VACATION!

CONCERT DONE! CONCERT DONE!

We played to three shows - 2 full and one almost full - and it went off -so- well. The quartet rocked the house. They did so well, I cried off-stage when we got done. It was one of the best shows we've done I think. People want to hear it in another state! They want the same program! And for the cast party I dressed up as Cloud, complete with blond hair, and it went off well and...

Yeah. It was a good show.

And now I am on vacation after two of the craziest weeks ever since the show ended. Work has been absolutely and totally insane. It's been so stressy everything's been making me cry. But since it's Deepavali and Hari Raya and my boss abruptly took Monday off I get to GO HOME till Wednesday! I haven't been home for 7 months over, and it's just lovely to be back to see my parents and my fish and the guppies and my dog. I plan on having a lovely few days before going back to work, definitely.

Oh, yes, the artistic muse bit my brain the other night when I was doing some work on a character. Captain Jishu Kijahng Thalasa, and her best friend, Quinton Arundell, sitting in the sun being cheeky. It's kind of big an image so it's got to go behind a cut. It wasn't even going to be a proper sketch, and it's still pretty rough so...it's not the best thing ever but I'm happy with it because of the expressions. I never finish anything and this time I did!

So, without further ado: Introducing Jishu and Quin!

Maybe I'll do some more sketching later, but for now this redhead is going to relaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaax.

Public Service Announcement

Dear people:

If you have a problem with me? I'd appreciate you actually coming to y'know, -tell- me about it to my face. Not me finding out in a public setting that, apparently, that I'm bidding fair to be queen of kissing butt.

Yes, I'm probably tired and need a good night's sleep, and I'll probably be just fine tomorrow, and I should probably laugh it off because it's for fun.

Except for the part where it hurts like fucking hell, I'm sure it's all in good fun.

Werewolves and Weird Detectives Come To Town

A werewolf and a detective found my brain, sat down, and wouldn't leave.

It's Dominic 'Nic' O'Reilly and Beldame. Now I've finally set them down on paper, maybe they'll give me a break and let me get some peace. Yeesh. Characters.


"That looks icky."
"Yeah."
"REALLY icky."
"I know."
"I won't touch it if you won't."
"Ok."

If It's Nerves, They Can Go Die Now K Thx Bai

There's an industrial-sized wrecking ball making short work of the inside of my skull at the moment. The nerves of my entire face feel like someone just tweezed them apart bit by bit with an ice-pick, especially around my eyes. When I coughed, whichever -entire- set of receptors that went from the top of my head to the back of my neck promptly went, "BURN BABY BURN". As a result, my cranium feels heavier than a lead cannonball balanced on a toothpick.

I hate having migraines.

...On the other hand, I'm not entirely sure why having a migraine - and the first signs of it some five hours ago - prompted me to walk to the mall, shop for groceries, thumpity-thud back in a taxi caught in the biggest traffic jam I've seen in a while, sweep my room, MOP my room, prepare vegetables, and promptly proceed to spend the next hour and a half cooking dinner.

I just tried to put some wall decorations up. My head is starting to get ornery and give conscription orders.

I think it's time for bed.

OWW. Yes, I should have been in bed five hours ago. It's called Live and Don't Learn.

Owwww. OWW.

Head, Meet Wall Meet Sticky Surface Meet...et. al.

October isn't even here yet and I'm already choking on apprehension.

The quartet premiers my composition for 'A Malaysian Affair', the Young KL Singers' big yearly concert. They have been absolutely wonderful about practicing and trying their best to get it sounding as good as they can for the last three weeks.

That's where the apprehensive sets in.

I feel like I'm letting them down by not being able to give them more help with vocal technique to sing it right because I don't know how to. I feel I've let them down by not writing a -better- song for them to sing, after listening to the rest of the solo acts. It intimidates the -heck- out of me, truth to be told. Listening to what everyone's done and the little voice in my head keeps whispering, 'Yours is so simple it doesn't hold up, it's not complicated or fantastically ear-catching like some of the other pieces by the rest.' Even though it took me months and three rewrites to finally come up with something that worked, that wouldn't totally defeat people with no music training to sing (it was originally for a whole choir, and I didn't want it to be too daunting. It isn't fair, not to people who genuinely have a musical ear but can't read notes, plus there are so many other songs.)

It requires spot-on pitch precision because it's acapella. It has a canon that has every means of going wrong if one of us loses the thread. Much breath control and technique needed to keep it light and lyrical, and it's demanding only because it requires so much -precision-.

The quartet's just been so good trying to put it together at such short notice. And I keep thinking that it's not good enough, that they deserve so much better, that I could have done SO much better with it. I'm supposed to be a classical musician.

My choir mistress gave me such an honour to compose for this event.

And I can't get rid of the nagging little whisper in my mind saying that I've let her down and everyone else.

The Fifth Wind, Pirates and err...Ink! Not Rum!

Those sneaky pie-rats proved to be far too tempting. I -was- going to go to sleep. Really.

The challenge of the blunderbuss was just too, too seductive a siren song.



"It's only a tentacle. You've got a sack of pepper to throw, right?"
"...Well, YES but TENTACLE."
"You have the Fifth Wind. A sturdier blunderbuss was never made."
"Right. Point. Charge?"
"Charge. --CHAAAAAAAAARGE!"


And now I -am- going to bed. Really! Just because I'm looking at barnacle pictures to try and plan Tierre's wedding dress o' barnacles from Davy Jones' Locker...and those gooseneck barnacles are so pretty with their red and mother-of-pearl shells...and they'd be so nice as trim for the hem...

I mean, BED! BED!

Anyone Gotta Can of Germ Begone?

...and I can't even begin to tell you how good it feels to be out of bed and mobile for the first time in two sick-filled, germ-infested days. It's bad when I take a day's leave from work because I'm sick (I'm the only one in the clinic to handle my side of work. Taking leave = baaaaaaaaad). It's -really- bad when I take two days because I can't get out of bed, and that's precisely where I've been.

It still doesn't explain why I've choreographed an entire set of Irish dance steps to the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song, Jack Sparrow's theme, and the theme for the Kraken. Yes, Irish dance steps. Those four years of Irish dance lessons have apparently resurrected themselves with a vengeance and I've no idea why they've chosen to do it with three of the most unlikely songs in the universe. Madness may be an explanation. In fact, I'm quite sure it factors in there somewhere very heavily.

I did, however, manage to find my way to Ikano's Fasta Pasta to catch Az Samad performing in the evening! There also needs to be a law against taxi drivers who don't -tell- you they don't know where a certain place is until -after- you're five minutes into the journey, but that's another story altogether. It was worth it, anyway, for a few hours of great music. Man, I need to get out more, I've really -missed- events and music like this (story of my life, eaten by work and no transport. Bah.) Am really glad my brother poked me into seeing Az, or I really would've been Highly Deprived --my favourite of the sets? The Tupai song! (I didn't MEAN to choreograph a set of Irish dance steps in my head to it but I did. My brain is WEIRD.)

Other than drawing Pirate Girls and being sick, that's...really all that's been goingon except rehearsals for choir and quartet. Yep, Pirate Girls. Tierre and Olna Rosetta have been Committed To Paper. They need fixing, since it's just a mess of blue pencil and wayward lines, but...it's a start.



Now I just need to sketch in the blunderbuss for Olna Rosetta...

Plots, Pirates and Pandenomium, Whee!

I have Pirates of the Caribbean 2 in my head and it won't go away. Mostly it's the soundtrack (which, incidentally, I find -excellently- mixed - there's a depth of sound to it I rarely find on recordings of orchestral music). I'm always a fan of great music, really - I haven't found much to sit up and go OOOH over for a while that ways though, and this soundtrack does just that. It's worth listening to, certainly.

I don't write fanfiction either - not my thing - but I did wind up writing a piece to amuse a friend. It's set in the Pirates universe of course, and if apple branches, crows' nests and taking rum hostage sound like the quirks of a deranged brain, you'd be absolutely right. It's my trademark. I deal in Strange Brains, after all.

That being said and done, I actually have found time to sit down and sketch again, albeit scribbles here and there.

Meet Beldame Constantine Kante, when she's not in the John Constantine universe. She's a private investigator who has a penchant for seeing Strange Things and the Supernatural, and has a partner named Dominic 'Nic' O'Reilly - who just happens to be a werewolf.



I TOLD YOU shooting my partner would make me CRANKY and you WOULDN'T LISTEN WOULD YOU!

Yes, she's generally cranky all the time. And yes, her name IS Beldame - the hag. She, obviously, is not. There's a story behind that, but that's a whole other story in itself. I may ink her tonight; I'm nervy about that because I happen to like the sketch and ruining it -while- inking is not my idea of a good night, no indeed.

Maybe tonight I'll have time to sketch Tierre and Olna Rosetta, the Pirates of the Stealthy Starfish What Roams By Starlight. (There's a story to THAT too.)

And Az! Thanks for stopping by! Definitely going to try to get to one of your shows in August for sure.

Merging Emerging

...Wow. It's been quite a while since I tossed up a post here. I'm not dead, though there are days when 'suspended animation' takes the place of 'life' in general.

To say a lot has been going on since my last post would be equivalent to saying, 'Mount Etna is getting ready to blow in 3 seconds. I haven't packed yet but I -think- I can squeeze a few hundred items into a duffle bag before I have to run.'

The biggest thing thus far, out of the list, is that I've been finishing up a commissioned piece of choral music for the amateur choir I sing with. It wound up being a piece for 4-8 voices, and my choir mistress has, in a demonstration of great faith and staggering optimism, given me the privilege of training the quartet. Our performance (which is an entire evening of original local compositions written specially for us) premiers all pieces in October.

I'm also trying to put together a short, few-week curriculum for teaching a small costuming class as requested by my creatives group director. This is still in progress, and my brain is short-circuiting. Since the main feature of what I'll be teaching them is 'costuming on a budget and creativity', it requires a staggering lot of thought that I'm not sure I'm capable of. Nervous? Hell yes.

On top of that, the job has notched up from 'Nnnngh stress' to 'AAAAAAAAAAAAGH GET ME OUT OF HERE'.

Needless to say, EEEEGAH. Yeah. I'm sort of snowed under.

But! I will be posting a little more regularly now, I hope!

Illustration Friday: Angels and Devils

Finally, Illustration Friday. Don't ask me how many months I've told myself boldly that I will Go Where I Have Never Gone and post something for it. Last count, it was roughly about 6 months ago. Boldly Go apparently means 'Let's promptly scream in panic and not do it' in my melted eggscramble of a brain.

It started off, innocently, as a pencil-and-ink drawing. Somewhere somehow I had the Bright Idea (tm) of adding some pencil shading to it as I'd done in another piece some years ago. The result, after some screaming at the wall in attempts to find out what was missing from it to make it complete, was promptly thrown into a digital ink-and-paint program in desperation and given a hit-and-miss treatment with something called a 'Weather Effect'.

Here lies madness...and maybe the occasional Death of a Dude(tte).



This is the sound of the brain that said I will draw, that worried the Muse, that hissed at the girl, who hid in a funk, who picked up a pencil and went insane from Cthulhu-germs --*ffffffffffffffffttt*.

Sunday Scribblings: My Shoes

I wouldn't recommend that anyone try my shoes. At size 5, sometimes 4.5, they're a bit small for most people to fit into. Mind you, I wouldn't recommend my FEET to anyone either, since they're the ones that's causing the problem with my shoe size. After all they're shaped that way --but they would require an act of God, Nature, and plastic surgery to correct so I'll just leave them out of the equation for now and blame the shoes instead. It's easier in the long run.

My very first pair of 'I-want-those-now!' shoes were a pair of strappy red and white 2" sandals of the sort that would make any sane adult blush in shame to wear. Then again, being about 5 years old sort of colours one's judgement. My mother said Absolutely Not, upon which I persuaded my grandmother to get them for me, and promptly sprained my ankle in them so badly I was laid up in bed for a few days.

We retired the shoes after that. I don't remember much of what else happened, so they probably met a quiet, given-away-to-someone end.

My first pair of 'I-am-grown-up-see-me-strut' shoes were white close-toed high-heels with a basket-weave pattern in a woman's size 3. They were for a wedding - I was to be the bridesmaid for a friend of my family's. They lasted me quite some time and died a natural death after about a year or so of not-so-careful pre-adolescent use. When you're 11, grown-up shoes are one of the yearned-for validations that one's a Grown Up Person. I was a Big Girl Now. I wore them proudly. I strutted. I was a lady, and I felt like a lady in them.

I yearned for high-topped basketball sneakers as a teenager; oh I yearned for them and craved them because I wanted to be a boy. I wore them just like the older teenage boys did - unlaced, arrogantly, and with the certain knowledge that I was Not A Silly Girl, I was a Tomboy. That wasn't quite as good as being a boy, but it came close.

When I went to college, the first thing I did to celebrate my return to the world of Normal Girl was to buy a pair of stiletto-heeled velveteen strap sandals with russet-and-gold flowers. I did this because I fell in love. Naturally it was unrequited. The matter was settled over a long quiet talk after dinner one night, afterwhich I was convinced that the root of most of my social problems in college was my trying too hard to appear tough and manly (it was.) The sandals lasted me through a Diploma in Liberal Arts and all the way into the continuation of my degree overseas. They were promises of good things yet to come.

Nowadays? Finding the right shoes is almost impossible because all that clattering about on rocky terrain and hard tarmac gave me a permanent tendon injury, not to mention walking miles to get anywhere during my university years. Anyone who enthusiastically recommends walking to and fro to work and school generally has never done it through pouring rain, ill-favoured umbrellas, freezing winters and iced-over sidewalks. (They've also probably never clomped to work in a pretty magenta Indian-cotton broomstick skirt and black tank top, and been followed by a policeman in a patrol car who is of the opinion you're a hooker - at 12pm under the blazing heat with a huge rucksack and minimal makeup, at that. But that's a different story.)

So let's talk about ideal shoes for the moment. My dream pair would be comfortable to walk on - soft cushiony impact each step, ooooh what bliss. They'd have good sturdy heels, the elevation of which would give definition to my short legs and elongate my calves to a work of art. They'd be multi-purpose for a variety of occasions - blue jeans and pearls, dinner-and-dance, work, casual wear. Practical and useful and just lovely. They'd allow me to sail across the dance floor like the Latin dancer I've always wanted to be, they'd take my clumsy, stubby feet tripping gracefully down the most mysterious highways and byways in search of adventure. They'd make me look tall and elegant; they'd let me float like a cloud, like an Italian senorita, they'd make my every step fascinating. New York sidewalks. Thailand country roads. Tibetan plateaus. They'd transport me to places beyond Oz - click 3 times, Dorothy, and you're not in Kansas anymore.

These shoes would embody my dreams, my hopes, every yearning step I want to take to a better something, a better somewhere. Maybe over a rainbow, down the next raincloud, tap-dancing on a star, tango-ing on a dewdrop. Standing on tiptoe to kiss my beloved in the middle of a scarlet, cat-fur-soft rose. Take me here, to another tender memory, take me there to my grandmother's bedside before she died, take me forward to my wedding (will there be one?)

For now though - I'll settle for a pair of sturdy, comfortable boots to go tromping through the rain, to keep my feet warm. Splash through a puddle, jump over a stream, hopscotch like a zany little girl again.

When dreams are far away, feet that don't hurt and soothing shoes are one tiny step closer to heaven-in-the-real-world.

Sunday Scribblings: Why I Where I Live

I live where I live now because the foreign company I worked with decided that lying was the better part of valour, and when termination came it was faster than a zap in the eye from a lightning bolt and the smell of burnt arse wasn’t quite so savoury.

All right, perhaps that’s not strictly accurate. But it was the beginning of a two-year chain reaction which eventually dropped me into Southeast Asia.

Dropped me. I should say ‘dropped me back’, really. I was born and raised there for almost twenty years before striking out for foreign shores and spending a decade away. Returning wasn’t a choice – it was a non-negotiable option due to legalities and visa issues. Eventually I found a job, and that job required a move from my hometown to the capital city of Kuala Lumpur.

So here I am.

Funny how ‘home’ is defined as where you’re most comfortable. This small, stuffy room in a low-cost flat I share with a housemate is, and isn’t. It’s where I come back to after work to relax, to guard my privacy from the demands of a tremendously stressful job. It is not where my heart is, much of the time. In my dreams I’m still in a small apartment in Virginia Beach with russet shutters and a window with a broken latch. I climbed in through the holly bushes planted in front of it enough to still feel the rough texture of the sill beneath my fingers, gritty granules of dust sifting up into the air. The carpet still feels stiff where 20 gallons of water poured through the ceiling one cold autumn day and flooded the dining room and half my room. My mind has never quite left; sometimes I think that my soul hasn’t, either.

Here, in my room now, the moon can be a firefly darting outside the window leaving glowstick-trails of light. The concrete block of flats opposite offers only fodder for the imagination –a saxophone in a corner phone booth, an imaginary cityscape of lights with the secret lives of its tenants enacted out in lurid yellow and noir. There is no grass beyond a perfunctory patch down below in some strip of courtyard. Whoever coined the term ‘concrete jungle’ knew the vista from these windows only too well.

Sometimes I’m not sure if I live in an apartment or a pocketful of lost dreams spun from a web of days-now-past. It would help, I suppose, if the kitchen were more functional – I learned to love the therapy of cooking in my decade of prodigal-daughter-wanderings. But the stove occasionally explodes in a fury of gas when it’s switched on, and the water pipes have been fixed three times in the recent year, and nothing can be done about them because they’re old, and apartment management wouldn’t replace the entire building’s plumbing system anyway. So, rather than tempt fate, my housemate and I, we do not cook. Not often, and nothing elaborate – one-pot noodles, something simple. There is no inspiration for cooking creativity in a kitchen both poky and bleak.

Simply put: I live where I live because I have no choice. There are few cheaper places around. Public transportation is an abomination, and I do not have a car. Here, the bus stop is accessible and this is an important point. My housemate and landlady is an old friend; we rub along tolerably well, and we are forgiving of each other's foibles. It is not bad, living here. It is just not what I remember, and memory of places loved can be a tyrannical mistress when I can't take solace in baking because we do not have an oven.

But life happens. There are no easy solutions when city living is so expensive and one is not rich, when one must be close to one’s job. Sometimes, however, being here mines a vein of thoughts to be written, to be drawn. They’re often melancholy in nature, but a time or two, the golden colour-drenched sunset filtering through chinks of wire window mesh has made my heart sing. And when my heart sings, I must write it or lose the song forever.

I’m writing now, just before bed. Just before the stars in memory blot out the cheap surroundings and poverty, just before the boy I love finds me from over the sea.

Just before, where landscapes dream and I’m once more in a small Virginia apartment, dancing like a joyous, red-coated lunatic in the new-falling snow at 3am in the morning.

Innocent Victim Deathness, Oh Yez Oh Yez

I've been trying very hard to do any amount of drawing at all in the past few weeks. Given that I costumed an Easter play, that just didn't happen unless you count the rough sketches I did for design purposes.

This, while not an EDM challenge, was a rather difficult personal one on quite a few levels. Mostly because I don't do 'realistic' sorts of inking very often (even this one was done with a picture reference in front of me) and also because the female was a shot at drawing without a model. That, and it's linework which I haven't done in a while.

Inspiration for it was a discussion with a few friends, and the consensus was that if I were ever a comic book character, I'd turn out to be either a) the woman who cornrows and zigzag braids Destruction of the Endless' hair with shiny, glittery colourful beads or b) the utterly persistent, terrifying, pestilential person who puts John Constantine of Hellblazer fame in a pink My Little Pony trenchcoat --and somehow lives.

Apologies John, it just had to be done.

This is what happens when I'm really sleep deprived.

No No, the Other Reality

I'm almost certain that if there were Celestial Gamblers, they'd be taking bets right now on the length of time before my sanity snaps. *pttt* just like that, like a fresh sugar-snap pea when you break it in half. This is largely due to work, and self-preservation has dictated certain measures to keep this bit of grey matter intact - namely Stressing Out and Hissing the minute I get home.

That being said, it's done nothing for my praiseworthy, if unexecuted, plans to do Illustration Friday either, dammitall. I mean, I -have- half a blue-lined sketch sitting nicely in my journal. It's just not coloured -nor- inked.

It shall be done within the next few days. Oh yes it shall be, lest the brain turn to mush, and mush be de-evolved into sewage.

***

Ahem. Babble, yes.

***

So people have been talking about fantasy self-portraits, said a little bird flitting in on the Wings of EDM Listmail. Not going to do that, sez she, oh no no, I cannot, I cannot, saith the lady who doth protest too much.

So she promptly sat down and spent an hour hissing and in the Spirit of Not Going To Do That, offered up the sacrificial goat below:

DIGITAL FOX



Self-control? What's -that-?

It's called Digital Fox, the story behind that being when I first met my present SO, he used to call me his Digital Vixen Princess (and still does, for the record.)

No it doesn't look like me. The REAL me is nothing like that.

Cue the raspberries, la-di-da-di-da, and the spit valves.

Self-Portrait Challenge and Suchlike Pandemonium

I've been drawing! Really! I've just been too lazy to scan the things and throw them up. Shame on me, I know. So to remedy that I'm throwing everything up, starting with my EDM self-portrait challenge:



I was between cases in the operating theatre today, and figured I'd make use of the time. Not very -well-, it seems, from the way it turned out but at least it was an attempt. I might do another one before the week is out.

And now for something completely different (and unspectacular as it was rather a barren week drawing wise):



and



Yeah, it was a bad drawing week. But maybe it'll get better soon.

Rainy Day Drawing Blues

Maybe this whole community thing really -is- starting to take hold and push the cobwebs out of my brain. After symbolically beginning the artistic year anew by hunting down and purchasing a really nice blank journal, I tossed it into my bag before I went to work and threw in five of my Micron ink pens as well.

The urge to sketch something, anything, is starting to devour my brain. I wound up drawing the chocolate ball I had for lunch, and stood like a nutcase in a light drizzle for about ten minutes sketching out a very pretty plant in front of the hospital. For once I didn't pre-outline with pencil, just dived straight in with the inks. I do that more with the botanical drawings I infrequently do, and it's a good lesson in line, I find.

I came back after dinner, worked like a maniac on colouring the plant, and this is what resulted:



I think I'm going to start having to carry my camera -and- my sketch journal wherever I go. I'm looking at the trees down the side of the road as I walk and seeing beautiful, arched shapes in their twisted trunks and towering boughs. It makes me just itch to materialize them onto paper, watch the curves and angles form one black line at a time.