Art 45

It's 1:35AM, the temperature* is 30° Celsius, and I'm listening to Michael Hurley. And wearing sunglasses. No. Given how long writing these usually takes me, I thought I'd put the time right at the start. The conjunction of that particular time with that particular temperature is a little startling.
*according to the little computer gadget thingy.

2012! A New Year. Hooray! A bit late for a solar celebration, I know, but the lunar new year was only a couple days ago at least. So now it's the year of the dragon. I like chinese dragons, much friendlier than their european contemporaries. The past few years the Australian Post Office have been releasing stamps to celebrate the lunar new year. I have some for the year of the rat and the year of the rabbit, and now this year's issue.

Taken from the Australia Post website.

I didn't get a chance to make an xmas post - ran out of broadband credit. Woe, woe. This... blogging application, or whatever it's termed, doesn't work very well over a dial-up connection. I should probably investigate the capabilities of my fancy new smart* phone. Meh.
*S-M-R-T! I mean S-M-A-R-T!

Xmas went well. New years' celebrations went well. I stayed home, which I like doing. I tried to get roaringly drunk, something unusual for me, but it didn't work, because a) I didn't drink enough, and b) I drank sensibly, with water between each drink, and plenty of food. Bonus - no hangover.

Well then, on to important stuff! At the moment I'm working on the cryptomnesia piece - I have nearly nearly neeeeearly finished sorting all the snippets according to colour, and will soon have to come up with some sort of picture to arrange them into. What represents cryptomnesia? Here is a dictionary definition, from the Merriam-Webster site:

cryp·tom·ne·sia

  noun \ˌkrip-ˌtäm-ˈnē-zhə\

Definition of CRYPTOMNESIA

: the appearance in consciousness of memory images which are not recognized as such but which appear as original creations

—cryp·tom·ne·sic  adjective

Something involving thought-bubbles seems appropriate. However, I've decided to go all artsy and whatnot with it, and put together a sort of mélange of things I've come into contact with lately. So far that means references to Twin Peaks, and mirrors (from rereading Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett).

Yes, Twin Peaks... I've been really getting into it lately. Up to episode 14. I already know whodunnit (thanks to various family members), but it hasn't at all detracted from my enjoyment of - and horror at - the show. There's this sense of menace underlying even the most ordinary events within it. Now, is this because I basically know what happened, or is it something about the production itself?

Who killed her?
Pic taken from here.

In other news, I recently made a sketch of my latest role-play character.

For the Mutants and Masterminds table-top rpg. She's known as Ion, and she's a super intelligent cloud of invisible gas. This is her costume. I used a diving suit as a starting point for this. Now I'm tidying it up on the computer - fixing the left foot, for eg. Like all the work I do on the computer, it may well take some time...

That is all for now. I'll try to post something relatively soon about the intriguing stuff I've seen online lately. Which reminds me, I really ought to check my deviantart page... So many online things to do, and I just wanna read webcomics.

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.