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Got to get some new art supplies yesterday and played around with them today–six new kinds of pen nibs! Very fun to try the different things that they all do best…some work well for fine lines, some are nice and flexible so you get lots of line variety and stuff. Here’s a little bit of playing around from today…
You can tell I’ve been thinking a lot about my story Owen’s Uncles–that’s poor little Owen and a rather extra-ugly version of his uncle Mortemius (and a bird, for some reason)…I’ve been working on Owen’s Uncles a lot the last few days and it’s almost done. Now I’m getting excited to do some illustrations for it; I started researching for those today…collected some neat reference pictures of clothing from the 1890s-1920s. Fun!
Can’t wait to start the drawings, especially with my new pen stuff…If I manage to resist spending too much time with new Christmas stuff (Buffy comics, yay! New Philip Pullman book, more yay!!) I should have some more sketches to post in the next few days ^.^
Warning: what follows is totally dull unless you’re inordinately interested in the seamy underbelly of librarianship. One thing I’ve been wanting to do since starting library school is get a chance to explore some of the seemingly-infinite number of library blogs out there. While researching for schoolwork I kept getting the feeling that there was this whole host of librarians out there blogging away–like, every other livejournal and blogspot profile I read seems to be a librarian’s–but I didn’t have time to follow all the links I was seeing. So now that I’ve had time, I can only say My God. There are a LOT of them. And apparently it has lots of neat little tempests-in-teapots, too! (Or tempests in pee-pots, in the immortal words of my mum…I considered that as a name for my blog, actually…) Neat! I love a good Internet drama.
So, one interesting (read: obnoxious) phenomenon that I keep seeing a lot about is the Annoyed Librarian. She’s fairly grating, which I guess is kind of her deal…Like, a whole blog dedicated to trolling librarians! Uh, cool…?
But I have to admit that this article on her attempt at joining in with the spirit of the Ubiquitous Librarian is actually pretty funny…. (Of course, a post or two later she’s talking about how lame library school is in general, and distance education in particular; so thank goodness she gets right back to being annoying, just to reassure me that I’m not starting to agree with her or anything!)
Yay! I’m such a procrastinator, I just have to congratulate myself on doing what I planned on doing today. I did some sketching from the Muybridge book, worked on a scene for the animation I keep talking about doing, and wrote several pages of Owen’s Uncles (poor Owen is no better off, though–if anything, he’s in more of a jam now).
Doing the sketches from the Muybridge book was really interesting… It’s so nice to have some reference for drawing people again, since it’s been months since my last life drawing class. But, man, it is just amazing what a difference there is between drawing people from photos and drawing from life. It takes a major brain adjustment (for me, anyway)–for one thing, it seemed to be a lot harder to keep proportions right. I think because looking at a photo you really have to force your eye to take in the whole thing, not just focus on one bit at a time, whereas when you’re drawing from life you *have* to look at the whole body as well as all the separate bits, just to make sense of all the information…if that makes sense. Anyway, it takes some effort to adapt to it. But it felt SO nice to get some practice again!
The other thing I was thinking about today was the story writing…I’m getting to the climax now, like I said, Owen’s in real trouble, and what I’m finding is that I have to really push myself to make bad things happen, heh :-) It’s fun to get to the parts where the bad guys start really getting down to business, but at the same time it’s tough– I kind of just want everyone to be happy and nice! But I know I don’t want to make the mistakes of a certain writer I could name…let’s just call her, I dunno, Mephenie Steyer…where you can never bring yourself to have ANYTHING bad happen to ANYONE. Blah! So, anyway, that’s what I was doing today :) Can’t wait to get back to it tomorrow!
The semester IS OVER. LIFE BEGINS ANEW!!! –sorry, but this is an occasion that simply demands abuse of the capslock key and excessive punctuation.
I am so relieved!! I finished my last final a couple of hours ago, and it. Feels. Delightful. I can’t even tell you. Tomorrow I’m going to write (work on Owen’s Uncles–poor Owen’s been in a tight spot for ages now, I really need to get him outta there), watch a DVD (Star Wars? The Office? Who knows! anything’s possible, man!), drink coffee (yes, I do that everyday, but tomorrow it will just taste better), do Christmas cards…Oh, and I’ve got a really cool new book, “The Human Figure in Motion,” that I can’t wait to do some sketches from…
fig. 1. Cool new book, yay.
Eee! I can’t wait. I have school stuff I have to do over the break, but I absolutely *refuse* to think about it until Monday at the earliest. Nyaaah.
I still have a couple of pesky essays I’m working on for the final in my info retrieval class so haven’t gotten to do much of anything fun today, artwork-wise, but I did mess around with a dorky little Christmas kitty pic that I’m using for a new avatar. It’s pretty silly since it was made in like ten minutes in MS Paint, which is not exactly the tool of champions, heh… But, since that’s all I have to show for my day that’s creative, and since it shows off/makes fun of my precious wittle puddytat, I shall post it :)
There, now isn’t that just the most precious thing EVER??
What? what’s that you say?
why, yes, yes I am a crazy cat lady, why do you ask?
Yay, I survived! I am so looking forward to getting to do some creative stuff over the break, to make up for having to read, write, and think about management for the past four months. *shiver* I need a scary font for the word “management,” seriously. That was not a happy place for me, that’s all I can say…
Anyway, the second the semester started easing up in the last week, I got back to writing and drawing, at least a tiny bit. I’ve done a bit of sketching and little writing just about every day — better than nothing, right? It makes me feel like I’m not *totally* euthanizing the creative part of my brain, anyway, which is, unfortunately, how library school makes me feel sometimes.
So here’s a scan of a (very) quick sketch I did yesterday. It goes with a story that’s been at the back of my mind for a few months now which I hope to work on over the break — although, I gotta admit that as soon as I had a little time to really think about this so-called story idea, I realized that I basically have no idea what it’s about, what happens, who’s in it– you know, a few picky little details like that. It pretty much amounts to a bunch of random images in my head that lead nowhere. It’s like it…dissolves when I look closely at it… I really don’t know that it’s going to get any further than those pictures in my head, but here’s the sketch, anyway. :)
This is the cutest thing…I am undoubtedly totally late to the party here, it’s prolly really old, but I hadn’t seen it before. Check it out: Austenbook
I love this one: “Kitty Bennet became a fan of Officers” — hee! But now I need to re-read Pride and Prejudice… Oh, and after I tracked the links back to see who made Austenbook, I found out that she’s in library school too! A fellow library nerd, that so figures… :-P I’ll edit and add a link to her livejournal later, when I track it down again. ETA: Here’s her livejournal, edeainfj, and I see that Austenbook actually isn’t old, she just did it. Cool! I’m not behind the times on an internet thing, for once.
There’s also Meyerbook; I haven’t checked that one out yet, but I imagine it will be funny… Sparkly vampires… *giggle*
Anyway, back to working on my Information Retrieval assignment now, *le sigh* It’s my last assignment of the semester though, thank dog… then just studying for finals and then done!! can’t wait–I’ll be updating way more often over the break–got big plans for art/wrtiting projects, yay :-)
Just stumbled on two interesting blogs that i wanted to post links to so I remember to follow them… I was reading Cleolinda when I should be doing schoolwork (putting off the 20-page paper I need to finish up), and followed a link to this blog entry about what-not-to-do as an aspiring writer–pretty funny story! This is Diana Fox’s live journal; she’s a literary agent and I think her blog would be interesting to follow.
Then from the comments on that entry, I found Jennifer Brozek’s live journal; she’s a freelance writer who’s just getting to the point of being able to support herself entirely on her writing, so that’s very inspiring! Plus she has kittehs ^_^
