the deep moans round with many voices

Drawing fake mosaics with markers on paper is very time-consuming but also weirdly fun. Dot dot dot dot dot! :-D

(Also, protractors, rulers, and conveniently sized dessert plates are very useful.)

When I was a kid, I was fairly good (for a kid) at a number of things: music, sports, art, math, writing, etc. But there are only so many hours in the day, and some activities are always going to strike any given person as more interesting and desirable than others. As I got older, I focused mostly on writing and music. Those were not necessarily the things I was best at -- if you look at my art and my stories from when I was ten or eleven, I am pretty sure the art was better. (My early writing was dire. Trust me on this.) But because I put work into them, I got better. And I did not get better at, say, sports and art.

I still draw like a twelve-year-old, in other words... though admittedly, a twelve-year-old who took a figure drawing course in high school, for what little good that did me.

Which is by way of leading up to: My NBB art is now up. I drew two pictures for pamymex3girl's story, A Tale of Two Sisters. They are done in pencil and colored pencil and then scanned into my computer via a photo editing program, because have I mentioned that I am not an artist? And therefore do have have art or art editing programs? (That is not a thing that ever stopped being true.)

You can also see them on deviantART: Into the Dark Woods and Susan and Lucy.

The reason the sisters have no faces in the first picture is a stylistic thing I fell into doing when I had to write and draw a comic book in 8th grade English, because I cannot draw faces in profile to save my life. I like the coloring job there, though, and the picture went pretty quickly -- I did most of the background directly in colored pencil without a regular pencil outline. Pine trees are dead easy to sketch.

The picture of Lucy brushing Susan's hair was extremely annoying to draw. Hands, how do they work? Also noses. And lips. Argh. (You will notice I completely finked out on any attempt at ears.) I spent a lot of time in front of a mirror using myself as a model, so if the fabric and fingers bear any relation to reality, that's why. The hair is pretty obviously stylized, though. And the frame with the leaf design is there because... well, the frame is both meant to be a mirror and also a device so I didn't have to worry about the background of the room they're in. And then I made a leaf design because I like geometric patterns. I may not be good at most aspects of art, but I can draw some pretty nifty geometric patterns.

Okay, that is the last time I sign up to do art for anything. Period. I can write under ridiculous time pressure. I can edit under ridiculous time pressure. But I am NOT a fast artist, and also? I do not have art programs on my computer, which means I just spent a couple hours fighting to A) scan things with reasonable visual fidelity, B) crop and tweak them in a photo editing program, which is what my scanner automatically dumps them into (it came with the computer, okay?), and C) go back and redo the line art and coloring manually and then repeat steps A and B until I got a usable result.

ARGH.

(I am also not a very good artist, but that's an entirely separate issue. And on that note, I preemptively apologize to my writer. I did the best I could, and while the results are not great, I think they are at least passable. :-/ If the NBB runs again next year, I hope you get a better artist!)

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I sent in my NBB fic last night (thank you for the beta, metonomia!) which means tomorrow I can get to work on my two remaining prompt!fics... after which it will be time to dive straight into my remix.

...

I think I should go to bed. I write a lot faster when I get enough sleep.

Today is my friend Susan's birthday. Yay!

I didn't get her a present this year because I had a different thought, and then I realized it might be presumptuous so I waited until today to run it by her, on the understanding that if she didn't like the idea, I would just buy her a Barnes & Noble gift certificate. But she liked the idea, so...

I commissioned her to make artwork. :-D

See, Susan is a freelance artist/illustrator, but she doesn't have a lot of steady work (and has not been successful finding a new part-time job since she moved back to NJ), so I asked her to make a pastel or watercolor picture of a Finger Lakes waterfall or stream (preferably Cascadilla Creek) in the spring, summer, or fall, for which I will pay her. This gives her both money and something to do, and gets me a pretty picture to hang on my wall. Everyone wins!

And that reminds me that I am now a year and a half overdue on Cat's story, so I ought to quit faffing around on the internet and get back to writing something this evening.

My dad called me at 8:30 this morning. After I'd turned off my alarm clock and woken enough to realize it was the phone making noise, I was greeted like so:

"Oh, hi Liz, we were just talking with Vicky and she reminded us of the souvenir aspect."

And I was standing there still half-asleep thinking, 'What the hell? Are you going on a sudden, unplanned trip to the Grand Canyon or something, and wondering if I want a t-shirt?'

Then he continued, "Do you carry the Washington Post?"

Light dawned! The inauguration! Right! Yes! But... "No, we don't carry it," I told him. Which, incidentally, I have told him before. Several times.

I probably sounded groggy enough that he realized he was calling me before I'm usually up, and said, "Oh, did I wake you on your day off?"

"No, it's a work day," I said, and very politely didn't add, 'which makes it much worse because I have to get up for real at 10 o'clock and now I have effectively lost a good forty-five minutes of the sleep I would have gotten between now and then because you have woken me up too thoroughly.'

"Well, have a good day," he said, and hung up.

*headdesk*

I love my family, but some days, I swear to god, I wonder about their sanity. (Also, hello, my sister lives in D.C.; why was he not asking her in the first place??? Argh!)

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On a completely different topic, look, new default icon! It's a computer-drawn version of a pen-and-ink doodle I used to draw all the time in notebooks when I was supposed to be paying attention to lectures. It began its life as the logo of an imaginary vanity press business I invented for a high school history project, but became something of a signature for a while, as well as the basis for several related doodles. I still tend to draw it (or other mini-sketches in a similar style) beside my signature on cards, as part of a cunning plan to disguise my lack of any appropriate and/or interesting words. :-)