Small children with cancer

Toy Parade

Karmen, Emily and I are hosting a tea party on the 29th of December! If you have time, do come by -- we have food, games, and PRIZES.

Natural kei

These pictures were made on request from a friend who wanted to see how I work natural-kei into my semi-normal outfits.


blouse: random Korean brand
overdress: Hyphen World Gallery
underskirt: Victorian Maiden


neck-kerchief: Earth Music Ecology
hat: Hyphen World Gallery


blouse: Hyphen World Gallery


blouse: Hyphen World Gallery
head-dress: Surface Spell
skirt: a local shop that closed long, long ago



It's been raining a lot lately and the sky was really dark when I took these photographs, which is why they all look so dingy (despite my best efforts at shooping them up).

Also, here are some desserts from my mad social schedule this December.



Less eating, more art! I must!!

Sparkles WELKOMES you.

I moved back home two days ago and the house is still in a mess, albeit a sane mess mostly caused by not knowing where to put all my beautiful new books.

Unfortunately, my tablet does not seem to be working this weekend. I'll need to take time tomorrow to find out why. So here is more old art: in this case, something I made for the FAQ page for a lolita comic website I used to draw. I had done the original sketch on the first stage of a flight to Hanoi to take my mind off how much I hated flights. A telephone got in because the flight attendants kept reminding all of us to switch off our mobile devices.


I really enjoy this style of Sweet lolita, it's just that I can't wear it. My body shape was never really suited for Sweet-style cuts to begin with -- but I can live out my fantasies via Photoshop.

I'm beginning to develop twitches if I'm kept away from books for too long. Now that there are no more classes I'll be back to my reading average of one per day! JOY!!

Link to original page: http://url.thecomicseries.com/faq/

Edit, 27 Jan 2013: I have just found out that this is technically a re-post. Urgh. I'll try not to do it again.

Lace!

Another busy week! Bless me but that three assignments were due on Friday; I'm glad I got through it without actually losing much sleep, because I'm awesome like that. But today I went out for tea with S. (who, incidentally, looks like a Taiwanese model and wears Classic lolita so well I could weep) and then we went shopping afterwards. I have been neglecting my drawing duties.



So here I present the little thing I was doing before my graphics card crashed last month: a header for a Facebook page that didn't work out. Tuesday is a public holiday so I'll probably try to do a bit of painting. Let's see how that works out.

(sometimes I wonder what kind of mastery I could have achieved if I had made this into a living when I was younger and let myself spend all day practicing. But that's a very big 'what if' and those can be dangerous. Never mind.)

The lace brushes are courtesy of Courthouse on Deviantart, a la http://courthouse.deviantart.com/art/Lace-Brush-Set-139455191.

The original ribbon-and-saucer photograph was made by Em.

OMG apocalypse!

The graphics card on my computer died three weeks ago.

I sent it to the shop. They said, 'wait one week'.

Two weeks ago, I fell ill. :/ And slept for days and days.

Last week the shop finally told me what was wrong and gave me my options.

This week I took it home. *_*

So that's why I haven't been posting.

Here's an old picture.



More next week if I live through the three-assignment bloc next Friday!

Character sketches

I had some time off between classes this week so I managed to do some sketching for the first time in a while!



This first sketch is a freestyle marker doodle. The top-hatted idiot is Fred from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens -- he laughs so much that I've always imagined him as some kind of icky fop. But his mother Fan is a dear, and I wish I hadn't run out of space with her dress.

What's below is more like a physique + costume sketch. I went a bit overboard with the first character's outfit so I made the second one really basic. I was more concerned with finding out this second character's physique anyway -- she spends most of her time in armour so I'd never figured out exactly what her proportions were. But I figured that it couldn't do any harm to make her... hot.



Colour study:




More logo work to be done, this time for something else ugh!! I always had problems keeping resolutions.

What I had to do all of last month

Being the only person in my service learning project group who was any good with Photoshop, I volunteered to do the logo for us. Because the group name was DreaMakers, they felt that having something based on the DreamWorks logo was a good idea. And they wanted something to do with pedagogy as well, because we were working with small children, so



At that point they decided that it was TOO similar to the DreamWorks logo, so I was asked to make it a little more different and a little more pedagogical. These two were the results.


Variant 1: rejected for looking pedogogial. Does anything involving a little girl and a remotely male-looking thing have to be sexual? Has our culture fallen so far?


Variant 2: rejected because some people felt that the boy was flinging the kid off the moon. Holy cow. OK, I agree that this needed more dynamism and more dynamism would have made it less ambiguous, but even now I can't see how a guy can toss a kid at that angle with a straight arm.

(One day I will invent a dwarf tossing logo and it will be a governing meme on the internet for two weeks)

After which I went grrrah and did some more.


Variant 3: so I thought, hey, if I turned the man into a woman, we'd skirt most of the pedo issues quite easily. Because pedo lesbianism is just sick, right?? It can't ever happen, right?? Because men are just crazy sex-crazed creatures who have no other reason to pay attention to a little girl, right??!


Variant 4: just to make it clear that this game only involves catching, not throwing.


Variant 5: and then I thought -- hey, I could actually bring the book back in, and it would be relevant.

And the logo they chose in the end was [none of the above]. I won't put it up here until the project's completed, maybe next year.

And this is why I didn't post anything over the past four weeks, which are even now staring at me accusingly from the sidebar.

Not volunteering for anything like this EVER again.

Mega post

It's occured to me that I haven't posted for over a month now and I am seriously contrite. I leave my tablet at home to stop it from distracting me in my hostel room when I'm supposed to be doing work but it doesn't seem to be working out for me on the art side. And now that all my classes are done tutorial-style I can't get away with drawing in class any more...

So here's an extra-long post. First, starring some lolita coordinates.

Outfit 1. worn to singing practice at R.'s house

Dress: Alice and the Pirates St. Mephisto's Cathedrale JSK (sorry for wrinkliness! I'd just washed it and I hadn't ironed it yet.


Outfit 2: worn to Orchard Road, at which I promptly splurged on bags (sigh)

Skirt: Juliette et Justine l'amour d'amants skirt


Outfit 3: worn to a Victoria and Albert Museum special exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore (300-year-old wedding dresses!! We honour them with our dressups), featuring one of the aforementioned bags.

Dress: Mary Magdalene Perfume Bottle JSK in cocoa
Parasol: Victorian Maiden Fairy Frill Parasol in fern
Bolero: Innocent World Millefeuille Tulle Lace Bolero in brown
Bag: Lapalette Buckingham Guard Bag (medium) in green x brown
lots of Chocomint and Surfacespell hair clips
el cheapo H&M pouch for putting extra stuff in

Shoes in all three pictures from Clarks, which sometimes has my shoe size.


I've been dressing up rather a lot partly to (over)compensate for not being able to go to the Juliette et Justine tea party held in London two weeks ago, which was awesome by all accounts. But I did send proxies in the form of headdresses. And here they are being worn at the tea party itself!!





My friend is soooo pretty. But her identity needs to be kept a mystery for reasons of privacy, so don't look at her face!


...And lastly, the results of eating a radioactive dragonfruit. I swear this is what I look like right now.

It was tasty. But it IS magenta.

More next time!

Rose garland finished!

Two weeks' catch-up

Headdress progress:


(yes, my handwriting is small. And yes, the flowers are huuuge.)



Also, something I doodled on the opposite side of a printed sheet during a very sad lecture, which is far better than paying attention. The class ended before I could draw feet for the lady at the back. Two more characters -- the lady in front is someone you might remember from January, the one in charge of training from Hell. She's kind of small.


By next week I should have finished both headdresses, so that's when the final photos should be up. Hurr for full-time job, which bestows me with largesse to live on, but which taketh away quality time with my tablet.

One reason why I've not been uploading, either, was because I'd spent my weekends scouring for materials with which to make a friend two headpieces for Juliette et Justine's September tea party, one of which will be epic.

Headdress I:




Headdress II:



Guess which of them the epic one is!

More pictures when they're done and ready to be shipped.

My femmy, clean-shaven boys

I finally got a little time off tonight. Felt like doing something relaxing, so I did some colour sketches for a bunch of male characters. These are two of the shaved guys; the unshaved guys are in another pile, along with the shaved guys I'm still not that pleased with. Vector is the most developed of the designs -- you saw that rather sad early example in that late January post. 





I'm not that used to drawing men yet, sigh. Silver-hair below is meant to be femmy-looking, but he came out looking like a rabbit. He needs to look more dangerous, because he is.






You wouldn't think they were related. The only things that are visibly similar about them is their eye colour and chinline. Gervain's mother came from a rather bleached race.


Hopefully I'll have enough time left over from social duties and work do to more next week, but there's no guarantee now. I'll try my best, at any rate. I'm getting assessed by my bosses in three days, first thing in the morning!! Argh. 

Fruit tree fresh

A few days late this time, but here's a sketch I made recently while waiting for a course to start. The subject matter is the sum of my group's conversation over the few minutes it took to put this on paper.


...and this, boys and girls, is the origin of orange juice.

Be back with more stuff this week.

Dead week

This week:

• first week of my real job
• dinner appointments every other night after work
• food posioning

Hence no art. Sorry. ;__;

Wait for next week.

Classic and wa: progress report II

I haven't made that much progress, and it DOES look ghoulish with the sort-of finished-looking faces amidst the flat colour blocks, but I'm putting it up here for posterity. Works in progress are rarely that pretty.



--I think I'll give the little one pinker cheeks. She looks quite grey against her big sister. And I still haven't thought up names for them yet.

Ignore the chopped-off brown hair -- I'd forgotten that I'd intended it to be Long. I'll just have to remedy that when I get back to it next round. At this rate I'll probably be another month at least with finishing this up -- so much for doing more art in my holidays, sigh. Didn't expect to be doing so much socialising -- or reading. (I'm back to a reasonable average of 1.5 books a day -- a few weeks ago it was 2.5, but then I realised that I had other stuff to do.)

If you have any ideas for names, please suggest!

Quina's ROCK SALAD SUNDAE

Here's a little quickie I did two weeks ago for my friend Shorlixa, who entered it for a recipe competition on FFland (Livejournal). It's only turned up today because the competition results were only just announced. And she's won second prize! WOOT!

Who's played Final Fantasy IX before? Remember Quina?


(Recipe by Shorlixa)


Quina like frog. You no like frog?

Quina saw Ben & Jerry's. They got good ingredients. I show you make good food. Best food.

Recipe Name: Rock Salad Sundae 

Ingredients:

Rocky Road (cobbled road good substitute!)
Fish Food (the fishier the better!)
Red Velvet Cake (extra fuzzy!)
Dublin Mudslide
Sundae bowl

Remember, food must have delicious shape. If not sure, you may lick once.
If Dublin too far, try backyard, lots of water can make mudslide too.

Method

Start with sundae bowl, cast Blizzard to get icy bowl.
Layer bottom with Red Velvet.
Scoop out chunks of Rocky Road, I recommend a good drill
Pour on the Mudslide.
Sprinkle on Fish Food.

And finish with frog leg as garnish.

What? You no like frog?

I like frog.

Feast!

IM NOT DED

I know, I haven't posted for three weeks. All kinds of interesting things were happening, of the kind that might have driven a card-carrying founder of the Temperance movement to have an orgy in your wine cellar. If I were living in a universe where mood swings generated anti-entropic energy the heat-death of the universe could have been pushed back a few hundred years... but things are the same as ever, only better, because now they are as they should be.

Now that my personal bubble is firmly back in place, I should be able to make and post something this weekend. This is just a post to say that I'm not dead. No cheerful art this time, however; I'm just too tired.

Speaking of which, something rather interesting is happening in Singapore right now. A twenty-five year old woman has been arrested for vandalism. Not unusual, except that her brand of graffiti is intelligent, ironic and extremely tasteful, and next to everyone is on her side on this one. We Singaporeans have a reputation for being a nasty impatient bunch who get antsy waiting for pedastrian traffic lights to change; the only socially-acceptable way to express this excess energy, the doddery old bat next to you being legally off-limits, is to spam at the traffic light button as if doing so would help the lights turn faster.

So imagine my pleasure when little round stickers started appearing on traffic lights saying stuff like

• Press once can already
• Anyhow press police catch
• Press to time travel

(Picture found on tumblr)

It wouldn't have been so damn funny if the stickers hadn't been classy black affairs tailor-made to fit the useless little arrow signs  above the buttons. Or the hilarious use of colloquial maxims of the kind that our parents universally nagged us with when we were children, at the age where simply pushing a button was magic. I imagine the vast majority of pedastrians by this point were laughing too hard to be pissed at slow traffic lights, giving said button a much-needed respite; verily, Sticker Lady might have saved our Land Transport Authority (LTA) quite a bit of cash on replacing buttons that might have otherwise worn out too fast. More importantly, she was considerate enough to have made her stickers easily removeable, or they would not have disappeared and been replaced with the regularity that I have observed over the past several months. There's also a bit about her stenciling 'MY GRANDFATHER ROAD' on a bunch of streets (if you're not local/ you don't understand what the joke is, just take for granted that it's screamingly funny), which is not so easily removable, but it certainly makes me happier about using the road -- and, ironically, much better-inclined towards the LTA for not having erased it before I got to eyeball a photograph of it on Facebook.

So now that they've caught her, they're giving her an option between a $2000 fine and a three-year jail term, inclusive of prison caning. So much for my good feelings about LTA. So much for street art, humour, and the only kind of culture that Singaporeans can call Singaporean -- the kind that reminds us of the things we grew up with, the recognition that the very things we do that drive us crazy are in some sense part of the national character, and the sense of humour that keeps us sane in the face of steady inflation (God, you could buy a nice house in the US for the amount you're made to spend on a family car here) and the dead, cold, businesslike efficiency by which the streets are kept clean of all creativity. And then Bigwigs make speeches lamenting both our lack of culture AND Singaporean creativity in general. Forget about censorship, just leave us room to have a little fun!

http://www.change.org/petitions/mica-review-sentence-of-skl0-arts-censorship-in-sg

...aaaand that's about the most political any of my posts will get. Singapore is a great place to live, yes; Sticker Lady was technically vandalising public property, yes; it was a clever idea for her to have done it but she shouldn't have because she was tangling with the law, yes; she knew she was tangling with the law and was deliberately provoking it to make a statement, yes. And make a statement she did: the statement was important, and I'm behind her 100%. The stickers weren't doing any harm; you can't compare it to spray paint harassment or chewing gum sabotage on MRT doors (I'm fundamentally conservative; anything which Hurts The Economy or Negatively Affects Human Quality of Life is Wrong). It wouldn't do any harm either for the authorities to be less bloody stiff-necked about this particular business. It certainly hasn't done any harm to us lowly pedestrians except perhaps for our propensity to snort on bubble tea laughing too hard.

Frankly, if our Sticker Lady MUST be punished, let them punish her by commissioning her to make a bunch of awesome, funny and above all LEGAL signs for LTA that everyone can enjoy without worrying about whether the artist would have to pay for it with a pound of flesh. I call that fair. They can call it, oh, 'community service', preferably with a fat paycheck for expenses. I'd sign a petition for that.

Classic and Wa: progress report

I shouldn't have tempted fate by counting my chickens. Life dropped a ton of bricks on me last Thursday. So all I have this week is a shoddy colour rough that I almost don't want to put up -- I was just slapping on the paint without thinking much, and this is the kind of crap I come up with when I don't think much. Perhaps I'll delete this post later.




Should stop using the same kimono stock  and scan some more. But -- I'm lazy!!

Should also think up names and character sheets for the two young maidens here. I'm very fond of them, but I don't seem to be doing them justice.

The finished version should be much nicer. Maybe next month.


Update: I decided to just go right on and do the real thing. Current progress is


(The little blond one looks pretty scary right now. She'll get better, I promise!)


Update 2: And she did.

More to come.

お花見

A long-belated present for my friend, Liling! As an indicator of how tardy I am about such things, I offered to do her something in February. Now it is May. Ahem.



As requested by Liling, the picture is of a flower-viewing party between a couple wearing kimono. The background was done by scanning in some really expensive chiyogami paper. This picture originally began as a colour draft for a papercrafts project (yes, I was planning on cutting out the black stuff using a penknife and everything), and then I got a bit carried away. So instead of getting a honest-to-goodness 3D artwork made of cardstock and chiyogami she got this instead. *_*

I liked the above version, but then I thought I could do more with the colours and textures, so I pulled out a second layer of scrubbed blue and yellow for a richer statement and thinned out the cherry petals near the top.



Liling said she preferred this second version, even though it feels more like winter than spring. :D Perhaps a late afternoon hanami? The poem on the top left is about loneliness and memory, and has very little to do with the picture unless you create a story for the two people in it.

もろともに哀れと思え山桜花より外に知る人もなし

It's one of the Ogura Hundred Poems and the only reason why I know about them at all is because I'm watching Chihayafuru (Arata's Fukui accent is very charming! I'm hooked!!) My calligraphy's pretty awful however.

Next up (if I keep to my schedule) will be drafts of my comic short, unless I get distracted by something else.

Craft store sale!

I went out to shop for materials today! More epic corsages due soon.

Qi-lolita

Qi-lolita: Chinese-inspired lolita clothing. Lolita fashion being primarily defined by its  petticoated skirts, qi-lolita is especially doable because most cheongsam tops have slits up the side to accomodate skirt poof. I'm a follower of lolita fashion right now because I'm young and deviant, but I've made it a point to be collecting qipao all my life. I buy an average of maybe three cheongsam-style pieces every year depending on whether I find one that I like while it's on sale (<-- i.e. broke because of lolita fashion *_*) and I haven't shown signs of stopping yet. When I am older and more monied I will find a tailor and make him produce my awesome qi-loli designs as well as cheongsams for everyday use.

Cheongsam tops are especially useful for work wear because they can be worn with pants. The combination makes me feel elegant and powerful in a ye olde worlde don't-mess-with-da-master way. The dress varieties are wonderful too but I save them for special daytime occasions, since they're all knee-length or slightly below. Black-tie requires ankle-length styles, and I haven't any of that kind yet.

Today someone asked if I could make qi-lolita coordinates, and I took these photographs -- the lighting wasn't so good, but No. 3 shows my rose corsages!


COORDINATE I 
intended for wearing to a cheongsam exhibition (the pink flamingo is called Shrimp.)
cheongsam: Madame Butterfly, silk voile over polyester chiffon
bolero: Innocent World, Millefeuille Tulle Lace
skirt: Alice and the Pirates, Dance of the Black Cats




COORDINATE II
tea party for Chinese New Year last year (sans a buttload of pearl accessories! I forgot to include them in the picture!!)
cheongsam: Pine Peninsula (松崎), peony-patterned cotton blend jacquard
bolero: Innocent World, Frigg
skirt: Alice and the Pirates, Hide 'n Seek with Missin' Alice




COORDINATE III
random outfit I thought of today, featuring my awesome rose corsages (I wanna make more!!!)
cheongsam: i-Shanghai, cotton and polyester brocade with pattern of chrysanthenaum, wild rose and sedge
skirt: Baby, the Stars Shine Bright, Alice Cards



I ended up going out today sigh. And reading. I'll draw tomorrow. Procrastinate procrastinate.

(it occurs to me that I should have changed the colours of my signature to tally with the colour themes of each photo, but I'm too lazy to switch it back. Well, next time!)

*__*

Gorgeous Corsages

Do you guys remember my absurd table of roses early this year? This is the result:



Instead of making one huge corsage out of the lot as I'd originally intended, I decided to put them together in smaller groups  for more coordinating possibilities... and so that the corsage wouldn't flop about. I'd have to use a number of pins to distribute the stress over a large corsage anyway, so it didn't make sense not to just split them up.



Oh, and I threw together another corsage yesterday, but it's missing some components and won't be complete until I buy the odds and ends. Here it is anyway.



The dress I'd bought the dandelion flowers for didn't work out after all, which is a pity. BUT after I've finished with this thing it would make the perfect hat pin or OTT hair clip. I even have the perfect hat in my cupboard. When the weather is sunny again I will make coordinates featuring my flower corsages against selections of my wardrobe!

Right now, however, I have to speedread through a bunch of books because they're due tomorrow (eep) but after that I'll be back to drawing. I've been pretty lazy these past two weeks, but I swear I'll have more stuff up this week -- stay tuned.

♥