Color October

An October coloring page - a cute pair of kids trick-or-treating. Feel free to print out for your kids to color, but you may not alter, redistribute, or profit from this image in any way. This image is for coloring purposes only.

Hand Drawn Cards

The other night I decided to draw and color some cards. I don't break out the colored pencils all that often because I prefer the look of the computer generated stuff, but of course if I want a card for a friend or family member this is how it goes because it takes waaaay too long to color it on the computer, get it formatted and get it printed. Mostly it's the printing that takes forever. 

The first card was drawn while I was watching "Glee" the other night. So it is BASED on Rachel, but the colors are entirely different. Lighter hair and eyes, totally different colored clothes. Just because I like to put my own twist on things. Also, because I wanted to sell this card and I didn't want be making a "Rachel from Glee" card. I just liked her sweater.

 

The next card is based on nothing but my love of etsy. If you look around you'll find similar items all over the place. Those hair pins you know you've seen a hundred times, but the earrings and necklace are fairly ubiquitous as well. The top and the skirt are just cute. To be honest. If you browse my favorites on etsy you'll notice that I have a lot of items that show up on my girls.

Acceptable Addictions

"They're going to hate us, in the beginning, but we'll get 'em in the end. And do you know why?

Because we'll sell them cheap books and legal, addictive stimulants."

 - Tom Hanks as Joe Fox, You've Got Mail   

I have an addiction to reading and coffee. I'll take them individually, but nothing beats the two together. My former roommate and I have a near weekly tradition of going to Barne's & Noble, ordering our favorite drink and reading for as long as our schedules will let us. Or until the shop closes. 

I can also be found most Sundays nursing a double vanilla chai with ghirardelli chocolate and a favorite novel at a local coffee house.

Which is probably why so many of my doodles involve girls sipping mugs of coffee while they enjoy a book.

Lydea

I have an obsession with the work of Patricia McKillip. I was first introduced to her books by a former roommate who encouraged me to read In the Forest of Serre, when I'd run out of Robin McKinley books to devour. I read it in a couple days and was hooked. McKillip has a talent for creating original folk lore, fairy tales that have no roots in our earth's history. It's all vividly detailed, moving, and unexpected.
And there's SO much of it. Twenty-seven novels from 1973 - 2008 and I'm delighted to have only scratched the surface of that collection.

I'm currently almost done with The Shadow of Ombria and as captivated as I am, I had to take time out to draw Lydea, with the late prince's rings tied up in her fiery hair.

In Progress - 2

So I saved the previous version of this as a jpg to post online and then I went back and saw that I hadn't saved the photoshop file, just the flattened file. Which would normally mean that I would have to start all over, but I thought I'd experament a little with this one and see what I could do.

It's not too bad, although it did require messing  around with the blending modes more than usual and if I continue to work on it this way I'll have to be much more careful about coloring inside the lines. The way I usually layer means that each part of the drawing has opaque bottom layer that keeps the objects below it from showing through, but since I'm coloring over the line art instead of underneath, that's not possible.

Blog Feature!

The nice folks over at the senioritis blog ran
a feature on me today, check it out!

This design is off the student handbook I designed for a local school last year.

Sub-Sublime

I'm deathly afraid of skin cancer, so tanning beds are not my thing. On the other hand, neither is snow-white skin - especially when it's just my legs. Normally this doesn't matter because I wear pants year round (hence the whiteness), but on the rare occasion that I don a skirt - particularly a short one...well.

So I bought some bronzer, hoping to make my legs glow a bit less. It was "instant", but not. So it wasn't until the next morning, the day of my close friend's wedding rehearsal that my legs matched the rest of me. Except of course the bits where I had somehow gotten dabs of bronzer on my already tan arms.

I spent half the day at the office panicking and looking up how to take bronzer off skin. Scrubbing, of course, I had tried. Nothing happened.

So after work I bought lemon juice and used cotton balls to scrub it onto my skin. It worked a bit, but finally I resorted to what some people on the internet had said would "take the bronzer right off" and others had warned would have a bad reaction with skin - hydrogen peroxide. Well I know it irritates your skin and shouldn't be used in cuts because it can hinder healing, but on the other hand my mom used to use it on us all the time so how bad could it be?

Yeah, I know, you're thinking I got a rash or took off the top layer of my skin or something, but really it went pretty well. It didn't take the bronzer "right off" but it did fade it alot, except for a couple tiny splotches which refuse to fade. It was at least enough to keep anyone from commenting on it.

No, Seriously

This happened. Aside from the pink hair.

I mean, two or three years ago, so it's not as if I still cringe at the idea of taking my car in anywhere to get a tire patched.

And I'm not the confrontational type, so I certainly didn't tell the owner of the shop that I would never come back for any reason at all and would pay to have my car towed to the next town before doing business with them again.

Nor did I announce such a resolve to my entire office this week when I asked where I could go to get a patch on my tire.

Fortunately my coworkers did know of another place and they were dandy. Didn't do it for free like my old tire place, but then again my old tire place didn't tell me my tires were worn out when I asked them about it.
Which is why they're the old place.

No bitterness though.



Disclaimer: the name of the offending tire place is not "Miller Tire", my ire stops just short of running down the company on the web. If you live near a "Miller Tire" I'm sure they're dandy.

Twitter

I've got twitter now if anyone's interested in following. I should probably do some kind of give-away to force people to follow me ;)