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.