Too Much Time, part the last

I swore I wasn't going to sleep before I finished this sucker...

And some details!

And because I just realised that I didn't properly get his expression in the details, here.

I've given up on the orange-rimmed irises. It sounded nice and subtle in my head, and that's still probably how they transition to this, but after beating my head against it multiple times, I've resigned myself to the fact that glowing orange just does not go with olive green at all.

Too Much Time, part the sixth

Bit by bit...


The tricksy bits are pretty much done, but I've a wee bit of a headache coming on.

Too Much Time, part the fifth

Freckles on noses and larcenous mages
Berks who hold on to their secrets for ages
Scarves worn by notably geeky tieflings
These are a few of my favourite things

(I'm getting there. Painting was delayed by a random two-manning of Attumen and Bloodlord Mandokir for giggles.)

Too Much Time, part the fourth

The end of last night saw me on my wee rogue, chasing's B's even more wee mage around Falconwing Square in search of eggs--and as he was questing in the area, at one point I hopped after him in bunny form and ripped the throat out of a troublesome Wretched npc, a la Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Prior to that...

Needs work. A lot of it. But the 'underpainting' is nearly done, so I can get on with prettying it up after breakfast, or perhaps ponder what to do for my art trade with Z...

Too Much Time, part the third

I'm a dead woman.

But I suppose I made up for the wings in some small way by using a particularly masculine colour scheme, and putting his favourite colour to use. Not that this is going to save me, but it's the thought that counts, ne?

Too Much Time, part the second

There, the poor bastard is dressed. And hey, a use for the redrawn rapier.

Despite the fact that this is one of three companion pieces I have planned for this, he was predictably stubborn about the clothing. Mikala and Lady Kos will likely give me no grief whatsoever when their respective turns come around (partly because they dress well all the time), but Mebrit's idea of dressing up to the tune of that painting really leaves something to be desired.

(Although, after what Myn mentioned to me about an earlier version of his face looking like a steampunk faery, I'm really tempted to give him a set of wings to match the first painting just to spite him for being so bloody stubborn!)

Too Much Time

Since the muse is gnawing on my ankle...


The rest of it is presently being withheld until such time as I draw it some clothes, and also because it sucks rather a lot at this moment.

On an unrelated note, B got me a WoW timecard. This is at once sweet and generous and rather like giving crack to an addict, but since I'm sketching right now and not spawn-camping Easter eggs, there may be hope for me yet.

(We did spend the morning duelling out on the tundra until we were blue in the face, though. Our findings were that while prot warrior stunlocks hurt, spirit wolves are just plain nasty.)

Socks!

It was originally my intention to take pictures of my latest pile of spoils from Sock Dreams, but RJ-45 decided that the photos would be Much Improved by the addition of her lovely countenance.

The blue striped monstrosities are a pair of N-stripes; by no means are they cold weather socks, and they've an unfortunate tendency to roll down, but cuffing them twice offsets that nicely.

"Unhand me forthwith, human!"

(She has a blog, too, curiously enough.)

Barmy to the Spire!

A few minutes of messing about with greyscale painting on an old sketch:


I have full confidence that Isiel the Fabulous survived her brief misadventure, and that her eternally disgruntled cousin is going to find her nancing around the desert and haul her loony arse back to civilization whether she likes it or not.

Unless the hatracks catch up to her, that is.

Shiny pointies, part the second

...and then Mikala turned up and looked at me as if to ask where *his* was. I don't feel like drawing a spear at the moment, so here's a slightly draconic sidearm. Every mage needs a ritual blade, right?


Which makes me wonder. His skin is too tough to be damaged by casual contact with his own claws, but how the hell can he maintain a fighting grip on a spear when they're so long?

Shiny pointies!

...actually, they're not shiny yet, but they're most assuredly pointy.

Miss Nori's sword hasn't changed, but it did occur to me that I'd never drawn the main gauche. The other one has been tweaked somewhat from its original version, but the gear concept stayed.

CAEK!

I've lost the original source of this recipe; I tripped over a link to it via comments on Ursula Vernon's blog a few months back and have since mutilated it slightly to suit my tastes.

It results in enough cake for one or two persons, depending on how hungry they are and whether or not PMS is involved. It is very dense and eggy in texture, not overly sweet. What I really like, though, is that it can be made in less than ten minutes, cooking included.

4 tablespoons flour
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons cocoa
1 egg
3 tablespoons milk
3 tablespoons oil (though I've also used melted margarine with great success)
A dash of salt (if you so desire)
A wee bit of vanilla

Mix the dry ingredients. Add the egg, milk, oil, and vanilla and mix well. Pour into a lightly oiled mug and microwave for 2.5 to 3 minutes. There, you have cake.

Standard knife blade/toothpick tests for doneness work just fine while you're trying to nail the exact time down. Be aware that the mug will be obscenely hot. This actually makes it doubly useful for those suffering from cramps, as it makes for an excellent warming pad.

If melting a substitute for oil, do it in the mug itself. Just swirl it around the cup to coat it a few times before adding it to the batter, and you've saved yourself the trouble of greasing the mug.

I'm presently out of vanilla. I tried a bit of almond extract in its place, but it wasn't quite my thing. A few dry frozen raspberries mixed in to this evening's batch went well, and a palmful of chocolate chips would surely be a nice variant.

Oh, irony.

I really wonder about people sometimes.

For every frivolous news article I read, there are generally at least one hundred comments that are all variations on one or more of the following:

1. "People need to do something more productive with their time. Why don't you go volunteer at a hospital or something?"

2. "There are bigger problems in the world than this."

3. "Why are people so worked up about something so trivial? Get a life!"

...all the while forgetting that they're sitting there, getting riled up enough to spend the time (that they could be spending helping the downtrodden) to type up these comments and make absolutely certain that the world knows how little they care.

Curious creatures, to be certain.

A Slight Improvement...

Despite my terrible luck with rogues in this game, this round is going very well--more so than any other rogue I've run, so I'm taking a picture for posterity. I'm having a dickens of a time finding the armour I want, but it's kind of moot when you can snuff an arch-lich in two turns by scaring it into turning its back and then peppering it with ordinary throwing knives.

(As an aside, she's the @ in the top left room. That & is an incubus and the ! is a potion of oil. Am v. tempted to pick it up and throw it at him.)

On an unrelated note, the semi-resident sickly cat (who has gone through a dizzying number of names, the most recent being Shnuff) definitely seems better lately... and certainly better now than he was a few months ago, when he just about sprayed blood all over me. A very solidly built fellow who, as I noticed the other day, only seems to be comfortable eating inside when he has a human watching his back. He really does seem to appreciate that I'll fling various other furry bastards out of the kitchen so he can snack in peace.

How apropos!

Okay, setting aside the fact that I just got Mebrit killed in the most appropriate way ever--dying to a monster that imitates interesting objects, while in the middle of solving a giant puzzle--it's the hall of fame ranking directly beneath it that made me blink.


I guess Phin isn't content to just take a wee nip out of people anymore. *snerk*

Steamtouched, part the third

Not much of a change, but there you are...


The reason why there isn't much of a change? NetHack, the bane of my existence since age six*. I'm currently running an elven wizard who polymorphed her kitten into an Elvenking. He still seems to have the brain of a kitten, however; he keeps trying to beat up the minetown guards and then whimpering when they smack him down.

Last run was a wizard whose liberal use of charm spells had a very large group of gooey-eyed monsters following her around with hearts over their heads until a mumak strolled around the corner and stepped on her.

If Tolkien isn't rolling in his grave yet, I'm going to be bitterly disappointed.


*And I mean that in the most affectionate way possible.

Steamtouched, part the second

Just because I can...


I adore octopuses. My favourite animals always seem to be either reptilian (and thus adorable) or exceedingly crafty.

Steamtouched

So very tired. My patience is completely absent this week.

I do kind of want to paint a mechanical octopus in her hand, though.

Dragonbutt, part the second

After some tweaking (thanks Myn!), Mikala's looking more like himself (but still rather un-work-safe). I think I'm closing in on a decent likeness.

Finished up my commission last night as well, in between boggling at the walking faux pas that is Amazon at the moment. Methinks it's time for a wee bit of rest and recuperation...

Dragonbutt

Meh... I'm grumpy. I knew I'd be off to a bad start when I woke up from a dream that left me wanting to beat someone into an utterly unrecognizable state, and my mood hadn't improved much during the day, but I went ahead and tried to draw Mikala anyway. Emphasis on 'tried to'.

As usual, he evaded my best attempts at getting a handle on his likeness. But at least he doffed his clothing first.

I think he's just doing this to spite me for always drawing him in a wretched state. As far as figments of the imagination go, he and I do not get along at all.

Ah, success...

This is one of those I-don't-get-it things.

It was something that was constantly pushed in school, and up until I was about twelve, I bought it. Then I started to become aware of the world at large, and it occurred to me that success and happiness are not the same thing--and moreover, in some cases are mutually exclusive.

Slogging one's way up the salary ladder to buy a bigger house, a newer car, to keep up with and surpass the Joneses, and for what?

To stockpile money so that you can retire and hope that you enjoy life, long after the quickness and brightness of your prime has been beaten out of you by your job? To surround yourself with symbols of your success, only to realise one day that your possessions don't love you? To reach the top and realise that you have nowhere left to go? Or is it to provide for your children, so that they can go through the same empty motions once they've grown?

Even in the arts, I have no particular desire to court traditional success. I don't want to be famous (honestly, even my small following gets to be a bit much sometimes). I do not ever want to paint something and think that I have reached my goal, because the joy is in the development.

I don't see cars when I look at a busy street; I see ants swarming about the hive, busily working to maintain a colony that cares nothing for them. For some, the contribution is its own reward, but I've the uneasy feeling that most of them are just waiting for their gold star.

I can haz Mongols?

The muse is back on his leash, doubly so now that I can paint my current commission instead of sketching it. It's much bigger than I usually work, but simple in terms of actual layers, so that hasn't been problematic.

Curiously enough, I seem to do better if I play before I work, rather than after. This may have something to do with the fact that I take about four or five hours to properly wake up, and my brain is just in better shape to buckle down if it's been permitted to come up to speed gradually.

And by play, I mean roflstomp the Earth with Mongol hordes in Civ. I was once enamoured of the concept of cultural victory, but it's too damned fiddly, and nowhere near as gratifying as watching a few dozen horse archers trample everything in sight.

And just because I can...

The Uncooperative Muse

Totally *not* what I'm supposed to be working on right now, but the muse is being stubborn and I'm way off my game where sketching is concerned, so I had to indulge it a bit. NSFW, as with the earlier versions...


Nevermind drow skin, *his* is already giving me fits under those lighting conditions. I can never quite get the saturation of colour to look right--it still seems too washed out and grey for firelight. Must do a little colour studying.

Not again...

I'm feeling a bit verbose this morning, and a great deal of it has to do with this.

Right, then.

I see what the actual stampmaker is saying, and there is much merit in it. I know exactly what kind of picture they're down on, and I agree that they have no real place in a community dedicated to art. Granted, neither do a lot of the clean photographs and sundry other items, but I'll look past that for now.

What has me sighing heavily are the responses to it. The vast majority of it comes from a rabid pack of prudes, screeching about how much they agree and omg sex is gross, anyone who supports it in art is sick, ban that filth!111one!

It's a little insulting, honestly. For someone whose primary goals as an artist include depicting a very gentle, emotional and understated side of sexuality (which, coincidentally, Vyrl is fantastic at and I want to have her artbabies), being painted with the same brush as someone who takes cheap and boring nude snapshots boggles the mind. Hell, *I* have prudish tendencies, but this is ridiculous.

There's really not much to do but paint more, and hope that perhaps somewhere down the line a mind will open, and an unfamiliar sort of beauty will make sense to someone.

(And in the meanwhile, keep in mind my boyfriend's helpful explanation that they're up in arms about it because they're not getting laid.)

Bring the pain!

Yeah... I caved in and started working again. Fortunately, I had a rather large file of wood paneling that I made back when I painted the centre piece for the Piper/Cindar triptych, and with a bit of reshaping and distortion, it makes a decent start for the floor. I used it here too, but it ended up so dark (so as not to blend into his hair) that I can barely see it. And oy, do I hate how he looks in that painting...

Anyway. NSFW and all that:


I am not looking forward to trying to light drow skin with a fireplace. Those will be bookshelves on the wall. I'm trying to break away from my old method of painting (painting over the sketch meticulously) and get better at making an underpainting beneath the sketch, then paint and blend above it. I already do the latter when I'm working in black and white, and I've tried it in colour... the advantage is that it's much less fussy and time-consuming, uses far fewer layers, and never ends up looking like bits are pasted on. The disadvantage? Less control over colours. I can't just grab the layer that the chair or whatever is on and tweak the colour--I have to do that by hand if I'm past the underpainting stage.

My headset is starting to go. Pity, I really liked this one. The things have incredibly short lifespans around me, though; a combination of absentmindedness and clutter leads to a lot of cord-yanking on my part, so a headset that can last six months around me is positively venerable.

More Literal Knotwork

Yeah, this one isn't work-safe, at all. And in retrospect, it's not safe for the tiefling's dignity, either. I just take much amusement from the thought of him turning the pages with his toes for some reason.

I think I should leave that one for a bit before I do something stupid (like, say, try to paint it). Having spent something around 25 hours dinking with it over the past two days, working up a wicked hand cramp, and just about going barmy to the Spire, I don't want to think about what painting would do to me at this point.

Instead, I shall continue working out the logistics of how to roll around in Robert Brown's voice. Not just because it sometimes bears an eerie similarity to that of one of the berks living in my head, either (though said berk likely would not sing even if I put a gun to his head). I can never bring myself to sing along while listening to Abney Park, as I'd much rather just listen to him.

More Nekkid Drow

I tidied up a bit of the sketch I was working on.

Totally NSFW.

I'm not sure why Faenori ends up stark naked in something like ninety percent of my drawings of her, exactly. Possibly because I love drawing her arms, and once I get to those, she's decided that it's a pikin' shame ta cover up anythin' that looks that good.

One of my molars appears to have imploded, though. I think I have some really old filling back there (which would explain why this doesn't hurt) and some bacteria sappers finally smuggled themselves in past it and planted plastic explosives in strategic locations. Or possibly they dug their way in only to find that the good stuff had already been broken into and stolen, and are just trashing the joint out of spite.

Either way, it's kind of irritating.

I am not pleased.

Yes, I knew that the art theft "policy" at DeviantART was a flat-out lie, and that when I filed a complaint about someone having misappropriated one of my sketches to use in a painting, the odds were very good that their heads would remain in the sand, but there's a bit of a walk between heavy suspicion and actual, disappointing proof. Which, by the way, I waited something like a year for.

This isn't even an issue of tracing--evidently this girl didn't trust her skills enough to even give that a go, which isn't surprising as she would have some difficulty drawing her way out of a paper bag. She just plopped it wholesale into her picture and coloured it--most of the original lines are still intact.

And yet, despite what the policy says, apparently this isn't stealing.

Am I naming names or posting incriminating links? No. I'm disgusted, and there's certainly something to be said for humiliation as a learning tool, but I'm not quite that much of a bitch. I called her out some time ago on the picture itself, and she apparently lacks the stones to say a word about it.

Besides, publicity is publicity, and that's the last thing one should give such an individual.


...on the bright side, though, I just got a present (!!) as I was typing this, and I'm drawing more Ilythiiri bondage, so I guess it all averages out. *snerk*




Her face still could use some work, but it's getting closer.

Literal Knotwork

...and when I say my muse bit me, I mean he nearly took my arm off at the elbow.

This is what you get when a knotwork addict wanders groggily into Winter's blog early in the morning and trips over the pretty Japanese rope bondage pictures. I kind of want to try something similar but far more ornate, but this will do for now; I just didn't want the idea scampering off before I could grab it.

Or in this case, tie it up.

Various kinds of NSFW.

We're being snowed on. Again. It's about half a foot thick on the fence and shows no sign at all of letting up--which, as I mentioned before, would be lovely if not for the whole flood thing.

On the bright side, the muse bit me this morning and there is something I really have to sketch...