A little night music

I've been thinking that I might have the skills to finally colour these sketches -- I must have done them four years ago, because I distinctly remember them being doodled on my Political Science notes. I'll try that out perhaps a little bit later.


Intended colour scheme: red, black, parchment colours, gold.


Intended colour scheme: blue, fawn, silver, foliage green with yellow notes

Note: just discovered that I in my former wisdom had actually DATED the sketches. They were from November 2009! Time flies!!

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!