Art 38

On Saturday* we went to a local Chinese New Year celebration. It was quite small, just a few stalls with food, lacquerware and pottery, calligraphy. Had a very good atmosphere, though. I wanted to stay a bit longer than we did - there was to be a mahjong demonstration that I wanted to watch. My companions were getting hungry, though, so we left for some Chinese take-out...
*-Saturday the 12th - it's taken me awhile to complete this post!

I really enjoyed looking at the pots on display. There were some beautiful mother-of-pearl inlaid ones, with a dragon on one side and a peacock on the other. There was also a lacquered pot with an eggshell inlay. For some reason that really impressed me, I guess because I'd never heard of (or even considered) the use of broken eggshells in art. Soo I did a little bit of looking around online, and found a nice explanatory article and some beautiful examples of eggshell lacquerware.

Meanwhile, I've added another quadrilateral type-1 koch snowflake to the set I'm working on. It's more inspired by the fractal than an actual example. I'm not entirely sure the design is even fractal in and of itself, but I think it might be.

Also, I made a few sketches a couple weekends ago:

I quite like how this turned out, mostly because it's my first okay inking.
Aside from that, I'm not entirely happy with the hair, or the feet.
She's wearing a faceplate, because she's in spaaaace.

Some alien/robot things. Just playing around.

Also! I've finally started a test piece in the Wings3D program. It's a cat. I'm familiar with cats.

Annd I think that's about it for now. Oh wait! I also have a cunning plan regarding an old shiel pack* and some not-yet-made-handbags. The canvas is all grimy with machine oil and miscellaneous grime at the moment, so the next stage is to cut it in quarters and take it to the laundry.
*-I can't find "shiel pack" anywhere online. It's kind of a large garden waste bag, made of canvas. I think cattle feed might also comes in shiel packs, but I'm not sure. I'm not even sure that's the proper name, but it's what's written on the label.

And and and, as a sort of for-fun side project, I've been drawing on a kitten-decorated bag someone gave me a couple Xmases ago. What am I drawing? Fine attire!

Gentlemen kitties.

Art 8

Something I quite like are table-top role-play games, like Dungeons&Dragons, World of Darkness, etc. At the start of June I picked up a World of Darkness core rule book, and flipping through that afforded me a bit of inspiration, and I came up with a couple sketches. I have dodgy phone camera pictures, but can't upload them at the moment. One sketch contains tentacles, the other contains zombies, or possibly ghouls.



Somewhere along the way I downloaded a program for making 3D shapes. I haven't explored it much yet - finding it a bit intimidating. It was the same with gimp at first - something with a layout that I was entirely unused to. Presumably I'll get the hang of it eventually though... I'm thinking this will probably be most useful for making things for Second Life. Or I could get a 3D printer!



Hm, what else... Still working on various pictures on the computer. The tree one, and the Blue Foundation one, and now another. This will be for a texture I'll import into Second Life, for a kind of grating thing.



Second Life! Have a made an entry yet about that? Second Life is an MMO, sort of. Or possibly a virtual interactive social environment, I dunno. It's a thing where you make an avatar and do stuff. There's a bit of role-playing, but I haven't really explored that side of it - I'm thinking my 'net connection probably isn't steady enough to really handle any combat-based rpg's, which are, frankly, the only kind I'm really interested in. As for what kind of stuff people do do there - it really depends on the person. I have a friend who hosts live DJing events - that seems fairly popular, but my connection isn't always up to it. I have another friend who gives tarot readings, and a couple others who build things. For myself- I guess it's another creative outlet for me. It's fun making different avatars, and building exotic structures and things. There's some really beautiful 3D art on Second Life - forests and castles and mountains and caves and stuff, as well as cities and things. I think I'd appreciate a few more treasure-hunt style things. There's a couple I've done before - kind of passive mazes runs and stuff - but there's potential for a lot more. Maybe there's not enough money in it, I dunno. Yep, there's certainly money on SL - it always reminds me of that song by the Hilltop Hoods - "Come sit with me honey, I got half a mil in Monopoly money". It's fun, anyway.