and bye the way

Since I desperately need to write my NaNoWriMo novel this month, all my drawing (read: procrastinating) skills came back with a vengeance. Le sigh.

NaNoWriMo... again

So there's this thing called Camp NaNoWriMo... which is basically NaNoWriMo, only during April and July.

And of course I'm doing it.

 So far I'm on track! (Sort of? not meeting my personal word goals, but at least not officially behind.)I'm finishing my November novel, which I didn't finish as far as plot goes.

Motivational sketch. Read the "write you fool" part in Gandalf's voice.

Oh, speaking of sketching--I just got my arting abilities back! I can hold a pencil again! Hallelujah.just in time to help me procrastinate.

...don't mind me, I'm giving my fish a new pond. (see side bar, heh.)

Random interesting words:

"waveson" --goods floating on the sea after a shipwreck
"whangam" --an imaginary animal
"woodshedding" --spontaneous barbershop singing

When I figure out how to use these in an actual sentence, I'll let you know. 

still trying to kill my art block

I have now graduated myself to quick scetchy paintshop-painting pieces. Basically: I'm bored so I color sketches super fast and don't really care how it looks.

Most of the time while drawing these (I've got a few more about halfway colored) I just hum Dory's "just keep swimming!" song from Finding Nemo. yep, I've gone pretty wonky.

Also, spell check doesn't believe that "Nemo" is a real word and wants me to change it to "anemone". Random fact.

OH LOOK, I DREW STUFF

My latest attempt at vanquishing my art block (yes, I'm still incapable of drawing. sigh.) has been to spend hours drawing lineart in Paintshop Pro. I'm getting very sick of it, which is the basic idea. I figure once I literally can't stand this anymore, I'll be so relieved to pick up my pencils again it won't matter what I draw. XD

On a (slightly unrelated) note, I've decided to do camp NanoWriMo, which begins in April. Basically, it's NaNoWriMo, only with more flexible word counts. i'm planning to do 25,000 this round.  The above characters are all part of my plot.

Things I Love: the Secret of Kells

Secret of Kells is basically just a movie. Except, of course, it's a completely traditionally-animated movie in which every scene is basically a piece of art that I want to rip off my television screen and plaster on my wall.

Yes, these are all stills from the movie. Not even stills from my favorite scenes or anything. Just random ones I found on Google. I could post the entire movie in pictures here, and it would be breathtakingly gorgeous.

In other words, go watch it. they have it on Netflix.

two extraordinarily random poems here...

13,000 feet above the ground
coasting through the air inside a metal bird
look out the tiny oval window 
down
down
down
down
down
down
at a tiny silver car
like a busy beetle, all alone
and wonder if the people inside have any idea
that they're being spied on

it was mustard yellow
once
but not anymore
now its been charred
yellowgrey
like a sickly grungy green
because thats how it feels
a house is supposed to 
protect shelter
and this house did
once
but not anymore
now its alone
it didn't mean to kill
the people inside
that isnt what homes do
it was a home
once
but not anymore
now its just a house 
because its veins were all wrong
and homes have to keep people safe
and the house tried
and couldnt protect
anymore

HALLELUJAH

Guess what I have?
a.) a therapy llama
b) a large yellow mug with a smiley-faceon it
c) a lifetime supply of spearmint tea
d) every shade of cool grey Prismacolor marker
e) none of the above

The answer is e), sadly enough. But that's actually okay, because I have something else!

What is this mysterious thing, you ask?
A KEYBOARD. YES.

I may have already posted about this on the blog, but I have been using two keyboards lately, one of which was missing half of it's keys, the other one missing the oppisite half of keys.

It was extremely hard to type. In fact, it even got to the point where I would be happily writing something on my iThing when WHAM "where's my other keyboard? i need to hit the letter g!" Causing me to panic for a second before I realize that I don't actually need a second keyboard on my iThing.

And now I can type again.

blocked

I have been unable to draw anything satisfactory for the past few weeks, which I must admit annoys me to no end. I have tried drawing everything to get out of my rut, but I don't like anything.

Well, this 20's Flapper Chinese style dragon turned out okay, but I don't know what I was thinking when I drew her. Honestly.

I have yet to decide a course of action on what to do-- I should probably get started on a large project so I'll feel compelled to finish it. What that large project may be, I have yet to decide.

For now I may just pick up a new hobby. Puzzles are fun. Hm.

Things I Love: Dovecote Crest

Dovecote Crest is a webcomic, and basically it is the most fun webcomic I have ever read.
(Okay, I'll be the first to admit that I don't exactly read a lot of webcomics... but it would definitely take a lot to trump this one.)

Why, you ask? Let me make a list...

1. the art. Obviously, these pictures are all pages from Dovecote Crest.... and you can probably tell at a glance that it evolves a lot over the course of the comic. In honesty, watching the art grow and become beautiful adds so much to reading it. But beyond that, the art is just so charming and enjoyable, right from the start. I hardly even noticed how much it changed.

2. the stories. They're engaging, well-told, and basically awesome. Enough said.

3. the setting. Dovecote Crest is set on a historic site, and the characters are Civil War reenactors. I especially love this, having been brought up hanging around places like Colonial Williamsburg (where there are Revolutionary War reenactments all over the place) and being a tour guide myself. I can especially connect with some of the museum-y tidbits lying around.

4. this is a major one; the characters. Basically I'm in love with all of them. Some characters only get one or two lines throughout the stories, and yet you (or at least me) still feel connected to them. I especially love the characters separate voices and unique speech patterns--Jeremy's is easily the most noticeable, but they all have small patterns that make it easy to tell who's talking, even without the handy speech bubbles.

Also one more thing before I go... I personally love looking at the art of this comic, because it is so beautiful, but its still very accessible. As I'm trying to plunder through art myself, I love being able to look at the art and see something that I could maybe learn to do someday. I love the colors and the way they work, and being able to see how the artist did them. Other comics, which don't use styles I'm familiar with, seem distant to me. A lot of webcomics use art styles that seem so perfect, like some MARVEL god came down from his cloud and handed over perfectly drawn art panels. This art doesn't feel like that. This feels very familiar, and I love it for that.

Also if you aren't convinced by all this that you should look at it, go look at it anyways. And start at the beginning. HERE.

Guard yourselves, my friends...

Who Is Zuri Sophilia?: The spork...clever utensil combination, or downfal...: What is wrong with the world today?  This question has been asked countless times, and the responses which have been given are as varied as...

Happy Valentine's Day!

This year's Valentine's day drawing! It took nearly two days, much longer than the others. On the other hand, I've been in an art block for a while now and this really helped. So yay!

2012's Valentine's Day Picture

Aaand 2011's Valentine's Day Picture

Things I love: Figment Daily Themes

at Figment.com you can sign up to have a writing prompt sent to you every weekday, Monday-Friday. I love these things. I love them very much.

I don't often use them, but whenever I get into a writing rut I can just go through my email history and find something to dig me out. Plus, they're always interesting to read! :D

bored

And this is what I do when I'm bored!

In case you can't tell what that thing up there is, I build house plans. And yes, I am extremely bored.

On the other hand, this thing easily took four hours, because right after finishing it my little sister ran past and unplugged the computer. The computer is so old that when you unplug it, everything crashes. So I lost all of my work. It was highly depressing. I felt like I had to finish it again, so here it is. XD

Which reminds me of something I just read about Sharon Kay Penman's book the Sunne in Splendour. She wrote the first copy of the manuscript, five hundred pages worth of historical fiction, only to have her only copy stolen from her car. She was unable to write for six years after that, after which she rewrote the whole thing. I was almost physically sick when I heard that. Let it be a lesson to us all to back up everything we write a million times.

And since Ms. Penman's book is about King Richard III... here's an article about the recreation of his face! And guess what? He doesn't have a withered arm...

NaNoWriMo

~and other things that are not being finished~
a startling report by Chloe

Well, folks, it seems as though the world is conspiring against my finishing the novel I started back in November.

I apologize, that is a bit of a hasty thing to say. In fact, I'm merely unable to type with ease, thereby hindering my ability to write efficiently. Why, you ask?  Well, because one of my beloved siblings has spilled Doctor Pepper all over the keyboard, and now bits and pieces of it are refusing to work.

I didn't like Doctor Pepper to begin with, but this was the last straw.

On the bright side, now I have a plausible excuse to procrastinate. Wait, is that actually a bright side? I have yet to decide.

This blog post took me a full fifteen minutes to write, which may not seem like a lot of time but trust me, it is. Normally I can write an entire sermon about something in fifteen minutes. Le sigh.

And now, off to find excuses to not draw! I take my bow and exit...

New and improved, slightly less incomplete character list!

And it even has its own page! There shall be much rejoicing. Visit it here: CLICK
Actually, it's mostly for me, though. Haha.

At last count: 290 Characters are on the page.
Not looking forward to counting again. It takes so long, even using the best tech I can find! :P

Resolutions

Started figuring out what I'm doing with my main New Years Resolution (i.e. write and illustrate entire graphic novel/comic thing) and subsequently filled pages of paper with sketches and studies. This is only a tiny portion of the stuff I've drawn. But you know, practice makes perfect! (I hope.)

adventures

I have been continuing to enjoy my new-found love, the sepia brush inking pen, in the rare times when I take a break from my sign-painting duties and NaNoWriMo novel finishing. (FYI, I only made it about halfway through my plot by the time I reached my 50,000 mark: I'd apparently not realized exactly how many words I'd be using for world-building and planned far too much in-between stuff.)

This is Constantine. He's from my novel, which is a massively retold bunch of fairytales melded together and thrown into a world filled with civil strife. He's the beast from Beauty and the Beast. Mostly I just wanted to draw something on my watercolor paper.

Now... I am off to stop procrastinating! I shall finish my novel... if it is the last thing I do. Right after I eat a bowl of ice cream.

I keep forgetting I have a haiku blog, too.

With the dawning of a new year (and, of course, the pressure to announce corresponding resolutions) I was meandering around my email and blogger pages, looking for distractions. Of course, I found one, in the form of my own long-forgotten haiku blog.

 Chloe's 100 Haiku blog

Like the goofball I am, I was going strong with these until about July, when I apparently had my first senior moment (senior as in high school senior) and my entire memory of my project was wiped from my brain.

Ah, well, that's okay. Better late than never, I suppose!