May Australian Spec Fic Carnival

For your viewing pleasure:

 

Illustration Friday: Garden

A cut paper illustration of shadows to cast upon the wall with the hands. Alternative title: How I Wilfully Make Life Harder for Myself.

I drew a rough pencil sketch on sketchbook paper, then put this on top of the black paper and cut it with a blunt stanley knife on a deteriorating cutting mat, lifting the sketchbook paper at intervals to clean up fiddly bits of black paper under a bad light late at night.

Comments and critique are always welcome, as are suggested mnemonics to encourage me to, oh, use good tools, bright ideas and a decent light all of which I have.

 

Illustration Friday: Leap

This week’s picture was drawn in pen (unipin), scanned and coloured in Photoshop. It is very loosely based on DaVinci’s portrait of a lady with an ermine, and if I’d had the reference around, I might have had fewer problems with the sleeve!

Comments and critique are always welcome.

 

Get back hordes of chaos, or: 5 more things I have not been embarrassed about

1. Wearing my blouse inside out. Worked this out at the bus stop, but I had to wait to get into the city, through two blocks and into MacArthur Central bathrooms before I could fix it. Trying very hard to be cool and deliberate but hampered by not remembering where the tags where and consequently walking with my arms very close to my sides in case they were in the seams. Of course, it turned out to be in the neckline and my hair was down, so that was why I couldn’t find them with my elbows.
2. Trying on wigs. Genevieve even joined in! With a bob I look even more like my mother.
3. Changing into sneakers and socks in the middle of Queen Street Mall. I saw stranger things go by.
4. People watching and asking if they could take photos of me drawing the latin dancers. Well, this sort of thing has rarely embarassed me at the time.
5. Buying the most delightfully awful book I could have cause not to regret buying. I’ve been dithering on this for a few months now and didn’t quite manage not to defend myself, but after telling the cashier it was for “comedic value” I salvaged the situation by asking if he read fantasy and (as he did) inviting him to look at the pictures, and he agreed with me. If you are particularly unfortunate, I may even review it.

It was an artistic Friday evening. After Genevieve and I had our semi-regular melting-moment-and-mocha at a cafe in the Myer Centre, we went to the photo shop so I could show her last weekend’s paintings and print out copies. While we waited, we tried on wigs in the wig shop (I found a nice length of bob for… $400+, so might get a more theatrical, cheaper wig unless I can bring myself to the overwhelming question of whether to cut my hair before the 1920s banquet). Genevieve left to practice her scales in the music shop and I returned to the photo store to discover they had printed 24 copies on gloss instead of matte. While they reprinted them I avoided buying a tripod (most of my photos are self-portrait/reference shots so my gorillapod and a chair will do for now) and resisted art books in QBD. Then I sat on a bench in Queen Street Mall and sketched passersby before buying a canvas board and the above-mentioned terrible book. I then proceeded to Brisbane Square, where I drew people dancing and other people watched and commented and cactusdude took photos over my shoulder which he may put up when he gets back to Sydney (he asked first and gave me his card after).

Then I walked back to Milton and had a bite in what is invariably the dirtiest McDonald’s of my acquaintance and would have finished being artistic then and there except that Sinatra came on the radio and two policemen who were just leaving started singing and whistling to “I did it my way”, so I drew a quick picture of that. Then I walked home and tried to take a picture of a frond of bougainvillea (hah! got it right first time!) which would have made a very pretty border ornament, except it was too dark to pick up anything except a distant pool of streetlight on my phone, and so was home by a little after 11.

In the end, the photo shop gave me both sets of photos (glossy and matte) so there may be some left over and I will probably offer them to the earliest takers before very long.

 

Rodrigo! Rodrigo! Save me!

I make a point of reading everyday, and sometimes on weekends when I don’t want to read a book I associate with bus travel and coffee in McDonalds, I pick up odd volumes at home - Labyrinth manga, histories of King John and bound volumes of Windsor Magazine. As a result of which I am left cold by internal inconsistencies, fascinated and frustrated by introductions to books that keep sinking down in the pile of Books to Read and calling friends and saying “Oh. My. Word!”

Oh. My. Word.
This last is because the story I read this weekend was just the sort of story that Anne Shirley and Katy Carr and The Story Girl and Jo March and their friends-and-relations read and wrote and swooned over and learned through the trials of life not to write anymore. Exactly.

 

Illustration Friday: Soar

A clockwork horse for this week’s Illustration Friday theme. I’d like to take this further, with cogs and wheels that look as if they might actually interact.

And happy new year!

 

Illustration Friday: Excess

This week’s Illustration Friday topic is “excess”. Rapunzel is contemplating donating her hair to Locks of Love.

Thanks to /Karen/, who did, and Aimee, who had it.

Illustration in biro (bic) on the back of a business card.

 

Meep: Good Things

Some exciting events: 

Wacom Cintiq 12WX (I can’t buy this until my Graphire pays for itself)

Previews on youtube for the movie of one of the best books I’ve read this year, Marjane Satrapi’s graphic autobiography Persepolis (they’re in French, but you’ll get the idea):

Finally! The 18th Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy is up (in three parts) at http://troubleinchina.livejournal.com/. I look forward to this carnival - lots of thought provoking discussions. This month is heavier on the gaming side of things, which I am not at all involved in, but I also enjoyed this post on 7 more things heroines can do, because it covers some ground I was exploring in last month’s NaNoWriMo project.

Also, the 5th People of Colour in Science Fiction and Fantasy blog carnival is up at Of Shoes - And Ships - And Sealing Wax, but I only just found out and haven’t read it yet.

 

Superstition

This week’s Illustration Friday theme is “Superstition”, so I began a study for the cover of a hypothetical graphic novel of The Crucible. It started as business card sketches, but this is a study executed in pencil and marker in my Moleskine. I’m not sure the costume is from the right era, but I am fond of the poppet and may make one.

This is a thumbnail image of the projected cover (the reason for the flared skirt). I’d like to try finishing this off, some day, with a woodcut effect and era-appropriate lettering.

 

Blue

Originally uploaded by tanaudel
Biro sketches from Conflux 4 - two from life and two from photos on my phone. These border a page of notes in

my sketchbook.

A wide range of what would otherwise be eccentric behaviour is tolerated and even expected at conventions. Knitting and sketching other attendees is fairly tame.

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