Work continues to have slow periods. I therefore continue to play with crayons. :)

The colors on these two scans are more accurate than on the previous set of coloring pages, because I found my laptop's photo-editing program and made them more vibrant and less blue.





[link to original post, for when Tumblr inevitably breaks the embedded images]

I finished off my stained glass coloring book listening to three podcasts of varying length, and have started in on my weird geometric pattern paper coloring book. That one is vicious and evil on my wrist, because the shapes are so small and fiddly and colored pencils have much smaller tips than big Crayola markers so they fill space at a much slower rate. I think I may toss that book out after I finish the one pattern I started and print out some mandalas or something instead.

But anyway, pictures!

( cut for images )

The first pattern has no particular significance, but the second and third are, respectively, the associated color sets for Nesta of the Waves and the Serpent: two of the Estarian Trinity from my Firsthome stories. (The Star is not represented because his/its colors are white, black, and occasionally gray, which struck me as defeating the basic purpose of stained glass.) Nesta gets blue-purple-gray because she's a sea/water goddess, and red because her other main symbolic association is blood. The Serpent gets green-brown for the earth, and yellow-orange for fire. (Dreams and lies do not have colors and are therefore not represented.)

The fourth pattern is a weird color scheme that I am somewhat ambivalent about, but hey, if experiments all worked out flawlessly they wouldn't be experiments. And the last one is just a classic four-color combo that I knew was going to be excellent, because I wanted to finish this series on a high note. :D

(You can find the previous seven stained glass coloring pages in this post with five patterns and this post with two patterns, or you can look at all fourteen pages at once here on imgur.)

I ran out of sewing projects (or more accurately, I ran out of patience for sewing projects), so I have started using coloring books as the focus aid that lets me actually listen to podcasts instead of losing concentration about two minutes in.

I'm currently working through a set of geometric stained glass patterns, from a book by an A. G. Smith. I've finished seven and have seven still to go, which is at least three hours of listening time. Then I have a proper paper coloring book -- also geometric patterns -- which I think will be a colored pencil task rather than a marker task.

Anyway, I am going to share the colored pictures with the internet so I don't feel quite so much like I've been wasting my time with them. *wry*


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As you can see, I got a little better about even color application over time. (Also, I uploaded these to imgur rather than to tumblr, which means that the links should remain stable instead of breaking the next time tumblr staff decide to 'upgrade' their site.)

Over on Tumblr, somebody suggested that for April Fools, fan writers should make art and fan artist should write stories -- a sort of conceptual bodyswap. I thought this sounded fun, and dug out my art supply box. At first I couldn't think of any fanart that I both wanted to draw and thought I had any chance in hell of pulling off, so I drew a random freehand mandala instead:



This is the kind of thing I used to doodle all over notebooks during lectures, only usually in a single color of ballpoint pen rather than multicolored Crayola markers.

Then I had the notion of making another mandala, only out of various Homestuck symbols. But before I started on that, I wanted to do something with the little strip of paper I tore off a printer sheet to make a square for my first mandala. So I folded it into quarters and drew four scribbled pictures of a tree over the course of an imaginary year. (I dislike waste. *shrug*)



After that, I got started on the Homestuck mandala. I'm using Beta kid god tier symbols only, because A) I didn't feel like trying to draw Hope or Rage, and B) more than four symbols in a single work starts to get conceptually overcrowded.



I'm still working out how to add Breath to this WIP, since it's not circular like Space, Time, and Light. Possibly four smaller diagonal versions in the corners of the page?

If anyone has suggestions, I am all ears! (And I'm setting this aside for the night, so you have time to make suggestions, should you wish. *grin*)

December 19: mapping worlds and fandoms, cont'd (for joyeuce01) [Tumblr crosspost]

I talked about mapping fandoms (or, more accurately, NOT mapping them) yesterday. Today I am going to talk about mapping original secondary worlds.

The short answer is, I do this a lot. Not always! I have written stories which, as with my fanfiction, have only verbal geographies. I have a bunch of projects I started to map but never got further than a preliminary sketch. And I have a bunch of maps that don't have proper stories attached to them. (Yet, anyway.) But I love maps, so I am going to show you every map I currently have at hand, and explain them at such length you will probably give up and click away from this post in despair before I am halfway through.

*ominous smile*

Let's start with Kerr!

( cut for images and length )

(I think I am just going to continue this topic for any day I don't have an assigned topic. Like I said, I have a lot of maps and a lot of words to say about them!)

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December Talking Meme: All Days

back to part 42

At long last, I have defeated the evil illustrations! I mean, they're pretty cruddy illustrations, but we all knew they were going to be cruddy, so what the heck. I would like to get this episode wrapped up by the end of October, after which I will throw the floor open to suggestions for the next episode.

(Yes, I know I said this section was going to be Aradia's POV. I lied. *angelic smile*)

( Trollstuck: Make Her Pay, part 43 )

continue to part 44

*dusts hands, puts away art supplies*

It is time once again for me to inflict a random picture I drew in RE upon the internet!

Today’s lesson wasn’t a lesson. Instead, after the chalice lighting and opening ritual (and a couple songs from the RE musician, who was with our class this week), the kids got half an hour for snacks and free play. In practice, this meant four seven-year-old boys who all wanted to make paper airplanes and fly them around the room. Managing that does not take one’s full attention, so my co-teacher and I did some arts & crafts of our own while keeping things to a dull roar.

I started by making a paper cutout snowflake, but I left that at the smoke shop for Melodrama (one of my coworkers) to add to our winter window displays. This was my second art attempt: a crayon picture of a sunset over open water. Because why not. *grin*

(The scanning process altered the colors a bit — the picture is more orange and less red in real life — but the non-altered scan is incredibly washed out, so eh, whatever.)

[link to original post, for when Tumblr inevitably breaks the embedded image]

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After church, I ate lunch at Hal's Deli (fish sandwich, mmmm), dropped by the smoke shop for fifteen minutes until the library opened, and then lounged in a library armchair and finished reading American Canopy, because it was overdue by about a week and I wanted to finish it before turning it in. Then I went to the second of my five Finger Lakes Chamber Ensemble concerts.

This one was the first of a two-concert series presenting all of Beethoven's piano-and-cello works, which in practical terms means five sonatas and three sets of variations. This concert was three sonatas and one variation set, which means the March 16th concert will be two sonatas and two variation sets. The pieces come from all periods of Beethoven's career, and the cellist (Stefan Reuss) talked a little bit about each piece before he and the pianist (Michael Salmirs) played them, which I thought was very nice and also educational.

The church was only about half-full, as compared to the January chamber concert -- this is a more specialized area of interest, I assume, not to mention it was a frigid day and the roads got pretty icy overnight as Saturday's giant slush puddles froze -- but the music was lovely and dramatic (well, Beethoven, what else were you expecting?) and I enjoyed it very much.

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Now I am drinking cheap Merlot and preparing to post the entirety of "An Ounce of Prevention" to AO3. I did all the formatting last night, so all that's left is the summary, the tags, and twenty-four chapters worth of copypasting. Bleh. (I don't usually like to import from ff.net, because stripping crap out of the files would be just as much tedious work, and in this case I also wanted to correct one honorific usage while I had the chance.)

Okay, I will go get started on that.

back to part 36

Guess what? It's time for more bad illustrations! And as a special bonus, you also get more bad jokes!! YAY!!! :-D

( Trollstuck, part 37 )

continue to part 38

That is probably all the art for this chapter. There is, I admit, one more upcoming scene that I would like to draw, but alas, I am pretty sure my skills are not sufficient to the cause. I may give it a stab just for kicks, but no promises.

Thursday evening we had champagne cocktails for happy hour, along with some smoked salmon and brie proved by Aunt Cara. We also took the opportunity to make Dad open his birthday cards and presents while both Aunt Cara and I were still here, rather than wait until his actual birthday (next Wednesday) when he and Mom will be alone on the island. Then I read a bit more of Wolf Hall before going to bed.

( Here are photos of the card I drew. )

The outside is a terrible rendition of Star Island. North is up; the red star marks our cabin… well, approximately, anyway. Alas, nothing is reliably to scale. (Drawn in sharpie markers on printer paper, with minor use of MS Paint to change my signature. *grin*)

After dinner, Dad called us all down to the dock so we could watch thunderstorms miles away in the southern and eastern distance, rolling over Leech Lake. They were too far off to hear any thunder, but we could see lightning strobe and flash all up and down the massive thunderheads. It was a spectacular show, all the more fascinating since Cass Lake was at that point experiencing dead calm; the water was nearly glassy smooth, which does not happen very often on a three-mile-wide expanse of open water.

You don't get that sort of show in Ithaca. The Finger Lakes may be scenic, but the thing about living down in a lake valley is you don't have a horizon; you just have hills. Ah well, so it goes.

After standing in the dark for several minutes, I was able to see the Milky Way overhead. Dad and I found the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and Cassiopeia (which is no great feat), followed by the Summer Triangle; this year we actually managed to identify which star was which, since Dad knew which was Vega and we managed to pick out Cygnus (which identifies Deneb), so the remaining one was Altair in Aquila. We have often failed that step in prior years.

I'd like to get out of the dock another night with a tiny flashlight and a star map for reference and see if I can spot some Zodiac constellations, just for fun. :-)

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Today Mom took Aunt Cara over to the mainland at about 7:30am, after which she drove to Bemidji to do some grocery shopping plus return something at Target. Around 2pm, all three of us took Dottie out for a walk, down through the swampy area around the southeast edge of Lake Windigo where there was some nasty deadfall blocking the path. We got the worst of it cleared away, but Dad and I want to return with a saw to get the rest of it; we would also like to clear another ominous-looking fallen tree near the east portage.

( Here are some pictures of the swamp and the deadfall. )

And here is a picture of Lake Windigo itself, looking northwest over the water from a bit south of the east portage:



Lake Windigo is the lake at the center of Star Island, which makes it a lake within a lake -- not something you run across every day! It’s very shallow, maybe twenty feet deep at the most and five feet deep or less over the majority of its area, but you can drag boats over the north and east portages (the south portage is only a portage if you feel particularly masochistic, just FYI) and troll around fishing so long as you create no wake. There are certainly fish available to be caught. :-)

When we returned from our walk, Dad and I did some work to adjust the shore station (and judiciously saw the top of a dock post) so the wheel doesn't knock into the dock when the station is raised. This involved taking the boat out of the shore station, shoveling sand away to make trenches on the sides of the base we wished to move, then moving the boat back into the station and raising it in the hope that its weight combined with the undermined foundations would shift the contraption a few inches. It seems to have worked a little.

I am now 62% of the way through Wolf Hall, which I know because Mom's Kindle keeps count and informs me at the base of the screen. This is helpful, since there is no way to physically look at how many pages one has read versus how many pages are left and make an estimate of one's own. I find the Kindle convenient enough to carry around, and suspect it becomes more convenient the larger the book one is reading, but I confess it loses something in the ability to suddenly flip back half a chapter to check if a phrase is echoing a previous one. There is really nothing to compare to the convenience of letting pages slide through one's fingers. (On the other hand, you can't accidentally break the Kindle's spine, nor will your bookmark fall out and get lost, because the bookmark is entirely electronic. So you win some, you lose some.)

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On a completely non-vacation-related topic, I would like to take a moment to point out that the 2013 Narnia Fic Exchange stories are now going up over at narniaexchange, one per day; this year snacky is posting them in random order rather than the order she received them, for added anonymity. All the stories so far have been excellent -- if you have any interest in Narnia fanfiction, I recommend you go read them and leave reviews for the writers!

More art projects from RE this past year. This one was for a lesson about families and the different forms they can take. So I drew my own nuclear family — said nuclear family is still my parents and my sister, since I am not and never will be married, though I do hope to have nieces and/or nephews to spoil someday. *thinks positive thoughts in Vicky’s direction*

This picture was drawn in craypas on paper, then photographed (it was too big for my scanner), then touched up slightly in MS Paint — most obviously to change my legal first name to the name I use on the internet. Glasses are not shown because I can’t draw them. Eye colors, hair colors, and relative heights are accurate within the limit of my artistic skills. Which is to say, kinda-sorta, but really not to scale. *wry*

[link to original post, for when Tumblr inevitably breaks the embedded image]