The Artistic Brainworm

...is one that absolutely -refuses- to allow you to go to sleep until you've sketched that tantalizingly fascinating pose on the PoseMania site, and done a chibi (super deformed Japanese overly cute style of drawing) caricature of Whisper in the Deep Shadows.

And it's 4am on a workday.

I really, really shouldn't encourage my mind to do that but over the years I've gotten accustomed, to paraphrase part of My Fair Lady.

That being said, since my brain isn't listening to me when I demand that it give me the rest of the two new songs I'm writing --wait, what am I talking about, my brain never listens to me -regardless-. This is going to worry me because June 30th, apparently there's a singer-songwriter recital and I'm going to be one of the singer-songwriters featured - just got asked this morning if I was interested.

So like a total numbskull I said SURE I am! Let me know! 1st of June Choral Festival performance, 11th August Acapella Festival competition, and Jakarta practices not withstanding...

La dee dum dum da. I'm a masochist, I am. I have absolute confirmation of that now.

While I beat my brain into some form of failed submission, here's this (very early) morning's work:


Study for Oracle kneeling, and if she looks like she's floating, she may very well be...


Random Pose of the Day on PoseMania. A lot shorter timewise than the above, which was about 15 minutes (and that's too long.) This was 5 or so, even with pencil outlines. Maybe a little less even!

Hipy Papy Bthudththudh!

...and that's A Very Happy Birthday in Commonspeak for the rest of everyone!

Happy birthday to my brother! He's spunky, talented, a -kick-ass- drummer and audio engineer/producer, good-looking, and one of the people I admire most in the whole wide world.

Have a great day, bro --about time you had something -good- happen to you and I am SO GLAD you got that Tama Masai!

Love,
Sis, with a promise of More Things Later.

The Curse of the Abyssal Heights

How in the world can a choke hold be so difficult to draw?

More specifically, when the person -giving- the choke hold is a few inches shorter than the intended victim - every picture reference I've Googled around for generally has the choke hold giver as -taller- than the poor chap they're trying to suffocate.

Times like this, I'm convinced I really, really don't know how to draw and should go for some classes one day but they'd probably toss me out for knowing -no- theory at all. Thankfully, I did find two photographs to sort of play around poses with, or I'd be sunk.

The subjects of the entire sketching rigmarole are two Abyssal characters for a random Exalted game a friend and I are playing - his is named Whisper of the Deep Shadow, and mine is the Pale Oracle of Dry Bones, known as the Pale Rider to everyone else. Oracle is taller than Shadow, and there was one instance where, on their first meeting, he sneaked up behind her and got her in a choke hold. Accursed height differences!

Anyway --here they are. I'm not proud of how long it took, but in the past I'd never even have been able to pull something like that off with any reasonable amount of success, photo references or not. So that's something I'm very thankful for - artistic improvement!



(Yeah I know. Two posts in one day. Miracle! Well, also, it's a public holiday. That's what I do on public holidays - nothing of consequence AT ALL. RAH!)

Passport Office Serenade

And she emerges from the buried depths of the slough of days and stress. With a mallet of doom. And a shield called 'ALL STRESS MUST DIE!' and a sword named 'GO AWAY IF YOU DON'T NEED IT NOW'...

It -has- been a horribly stressy and busy month, with work taking up the biggest chunk of it, and choir and chamber choir coming in a close second - but those are RELAXING busy chunks of it. Our first chamber choir performance will be end of May now (Constance! I'll give you a date when I remember it!) and then the acapella competition got pushed up to August 11th --and then June is the vocal student recital I'm supposed to take part in, July is -my- co-recital with one of our tenors, and November is Asian Choir Games in Jakarta...

Yeah! Breaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaathe. Zombie shuffle. Breaaaaaaaaaaaaaaathe!

We're in the process of booking flight tickets for the Asian Choir Games, and since booking flight tickets to Jakarta on Air Asia now requires a passport number, I took the day off Monday this week to go perch in Purgatory *cough* --I mean, the wet market *COUGH COUGH* --I MEAN the passport office to get it seen to. There's inevitably a line outside the door even before it opens at 8am, so I was advised to go there early to avoid too long a queue. That would mean waking up at 6-ish, getting out of the house latest by 7am, and voila, things ought to be a little less harried.

So of COURSE, I overslept.

The sight of a woman blurrily looking at her alarm clock, giving a SCREECH to rival all the banshees in every castle in Europe and leaping out of bed like someone poured pink paint on her hair was probably highly amusing for anyone looking in from the outside. I think I got out the door in a record 10 minutes, give or take some for finding my keys and cursing how long it took to get the padlock on the front door open.

The passport office resembled a fishmarket with queues enough to go around the world circumference and still have room to spare. And more people were arriving, and there is only so much space in the world, however big an office is built, to accomodate JUST so many people.

And this was only 8.45am.

It's possible to get one's passport here done in 2 hours after you make payment, so the process is actually very -fast-. It's the -waiting- time and the lining up that takes forever and many braincells dying.

So what do you do when you're stuck in the simmering, muttering, wet-market atmosphere of a million bodies all grousing about wanting to pick up their travel documents fast?

If you're me, you pull out the mp3 player, the choir scores, and treat the people sitting around you to the glorious strains of 'Oklahoma' - specifically the screechy soprano special chorus section at the end. Or the tongue-twistingly fast Mongolian Horses. Or 'Caro Mio Ben' (Ale, that's the name of that Italian song I'm singing now!)...you get the picture.

And after that? In revenge for all the crankiness being sent your way, you blithely pull out a sketch pad and sketch the CRANKIEST section in the waiting room. Ignoring the -glares- sent your way.

Mind you, I was impressed. The officials were so very nice and helpful and cheerful despite the awful crush of people. It's the people they were -serving- that were grumpy and irritable.

Anyway to cut a long story short, 3.45pm I got my passport, hauled my butt home, and went to choir rehearsals till midnight.

But that's another story.

And here are the sketches to prove it (no, they're not great, but I was BORED...)