bought:
- Sharpening stone. No honing oil though. Oops.
- More wood to hack up
- A wooden scrapbook-album cover

I was planning on carving something on the scrapbook cover for my scrap-loving grandma. It’s pretty thin but maybe a shallow carving.
aaaand after i actually got home with it i realised it’s like three layers of even thinner wood making up each cover *>< And the grain is going in completely opposite the direction i’d like for carving.

gonna try it anyway, though. maybe it will somehow work.

Related posts:

1. cats and squirrels
2. goal for the rest of winter: POINTY THINGS.
3. Existence

Related posts:

1. shopping
2. goal for the rest of winter: POINTY THINGS.
3. Khokloma Camoflauge

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1. cats and squirrels
2. shopping
3. Existence

I’m starting this up with re-learning how to carve woodblock prints, which i did a bit in high school but haven’t done since. Once i’ve got the hang of basically carving out flat pictures again i’ll get some bigger blocks of wood and better knives and try to figure out real woodcarving.

Nope, no proper classes (unless printmaking six years ago counts as a proper class). As near as i can tell the nearest woodcarving classes are in cities several hours away from me. YAY RIDICULOUSLY DULL SUBURBS. Sigh.

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1. cats and squirrels
2. shopping
3. Khokloma Camoflauge

Click for full-size

Timing out how long it takes me to do a comic so i have some idea of how much i can do. This one’s kind of a crappy script but i wanted to time everything, including the writing.

And, yeah, i should probably do a bunch of scripts and take an average, but i don’t feel like timing out a pile of script-writing :P So just the one, for now, and i’ll re-average after i actually know what i’m doing…

The final comic is going to be on a site layout where i can actually fit the whole thing at full size. And probably just lineart for at least the first few months, as adding even greyscale took up about half the comic-making time. I’ll save greys or colours for when i can actually do lineart in relatively brief time.

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1. The NaNoWriMo Furoshiki
2. Recognising Shoddy Tarot

Been kind of slacking in the art department lately – working on bits and pieces of various stuff has been no problem, but actually finishing anything… yeah. I haven’t done anything traditional in a while, either. Forgot how much i love pen drawings.

So, for the Illustration Friday theme of ‘Renewal’ – a young woman ‘renewing’ herself by breaking the ties which have been holding her to a life she doesn’t like.

I sort-of tried to tie her into the Star card in the tarot, too, but almost everything i did along that line made her look worse instead of better… so i gave up pretty quick. It could still work as a Star card, i guess; the overall theme of freedom, hope, and inspiration is still there.

Semi-random tangent: i have been ridiculously obsessed with tarot art lately. I love seeing all the ways different artists have of interpreting the symbolism of the cards; i actually get really disappointed when i see a deck which has more to do with what the artist felt like doing than what the card normally symbolises. Okay, so tarot started out as, and in some countries still is, primarily just a card game; and while i don’t know the actual game rules i imagine the symbolism is pretty irrelevant – so it’s not like a deck which doesn’t join with the traditional symbolism is automatically useless or pointless.

Still, coming across such a deck while looking at more symbolic decks is like coming across a landscape at a portrait exhibit. There’s all these wonderful ways of depicting people; full bodies and faces and other body parts, active and passive, realistic and impressionistic and fauvist and abstract, and then, bam, there’s a sunset over a valley.

And it could be the most beautiful landscape in the world, there’s still going to be a what-the-hell-is-that-doing-here moment. Does it look like a person if you squint and tip your head sideways? Is it some sort of highbrow non-figurative portrait, where the colours represent the person’s aura and the environment represents eir birthplace and the buildings represent eir accomplishments? Is it just a really long-distance portrait and if you just look closely, you’ll see a tiny figure waving from the horizon?

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The print of ‘Connection’ is now available for sale through Artists for Charity. Yay!

They’ve plenty of other beautiful prints for sale, and all proceeds will go to a selected charity (currently the Autistic Self Advocacy Network), so go look around a bit. Good stuff.

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1. Submitted… now to wait.
2. cats and squirrels

I sent Connection off to Artists for Charity today… still have to wait around a bit and see if it’s accepted, send in the high-res version of the image, etc. But i’ve gone as far as i can on my own until i get contacted back.

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1. ‘Connection’ is Go

It’s been sitting in my ‘drafts’ folder, waiting for me to spontaneously develop awesome query-letter-writing skills. Seems NaNoWriMo does not, in fact, help develop such skills. So i finally screamed ‘don’t let perfect be the enemy of good!’ at my email client, hit ‘send’, and my certainly-not-perfect, probably not even really ‘good’, query letter is on its way.

…i don’t know how optimistic to be over this. Maybe i’ll get a rep on the very first try, woohoo! Or maybe i’ll end up falling into the common new-writer habit of collecting rejection letters. ‘Form rejection, one point! Personal rejection, two points! Not-this-one-but-send-us-your-next-work rejection, five points!’

I’m kind of expecting the latter, but wouldn’t exactly mind the former.

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Oh yeah, random bald vampire chick FTW.

Used the Brushes app on my iPod Touch, as it’s really the only software i have on anything which automatically creates the video as i go along. The alternative is to use screen capture software on my Mac, which a) requires me to always remember to open the second bit of software when sketching and b) has for whatever irritating reason never worked when uploading to YouTube.

Still to do:

• Get back in the habit of updating my regular sketchblog! I still sketch regularly but have been shoddy about getting the sketches onto my computer for uploading. Bah.
• Smooth out the workflow of updating the vlog. Among other things i’m sure there’s a way to auto-post from YouTube to a blog… so i do not have to impatiently wait for the video to process and then post manually every time.

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