Art Anyway

This weekend, having finished the art card project, I found that I kept thinking about doing art anyway. By midday Saturday, I gave up and decided to work on a new picture. During my multiple art supply runs, I'd come across something called "Aquabord™". It's "Claybord™ textured", and appears to be a piece of the kind of board used to make clipboards (chipboard, maybe?) coated in some kind of clay. ursulav had sung the praises of clayboard before, so I was curious about it. This stuff was supposed to be for watercolors, and one of the things that annoys me the most about watercolors is the way the medium warps the paper. Well, this stuff clearly wasn't going to warp for anything short of being thrown in a pool for a couple of days, so I picked up a package of three 5"x7" boards.

5"x7" is four times the size of the art cards I've been working with. Huge!

I spent an hour or two looking at pictures of otters and references in DragonArt. At one point in DragonArt, J. Peffer illustrates the principal of giving your figures realistic-looking anatomy, but not by directly basing them on real animals. In so doing, she draws this adorable cat-dragon -- kind of a dragon-skin on top of a cat body. It's so cute! I kinda wanted to do that with this figure, but didn't.



The gigantic pale purple tree in the background is the trunk of the World Tree, so many miles away that distortion from the atmosphere turns it hazy and blue, the way distant mountains look on Earth. I tried to make it obvious that's what was going on by having a receding line of mountains in the nearer distance, but I'm not sure it works. I got the idea from an illustration haikujaguar did which had the World Tree trunk in the distance like this, and thought it was so cool I had to try it myself.

I scanned in the early sketches to, so those who like to see the process can ( click here to see them )

KFC: Slowest Fast Food in the Nation

I really like Indian food. Lut doesn't care for it at all. So when I want Indian food, I order takeout, and Lut asks me to pick up something from the KFC on the way.

Which would be fine, except the KFC on the way is incredibly slow. I phone in my order for the Taj Mahal Indian restaurant, and they tell me "it'll be ready in 10-15 minutes". It takes 10-15 minutes to drive there, and I think only once has my order not been ready when I arrived (it took a couple extra minutes that time).

I either walk in to KFC or go through the drive-through to place my order. On average, they also take 10-15 minutes to fill my order from the time I place it.

Which would be fine, if only I could phone in my order to them, too. Y'know, in the age of smartphones and internet ordering, fast food restaurants really aren't as convenient as they used to be.

January resolution update

I completed my first marathon for the year, yay!

I've decided not to do a marathon in February. I want a bit more time to prepare for the World Tree game, and I'm going out of town over President's Day weekend, and I may have a guest next weekend. So not as much time to focus on a project as I had in January, and I don't want to make myself crazy. I do hope to do some creative stuff anyway, but no master plan on that front.

I've been keeping an action log so far, which I'll post for the sake of keeping me honest. Also because I'm less likely to misplace it on LJ.

And that's it for my resolution this year. It is sort of nice to have an easy one this time. n_n Oh, and I exercised 19 times in January (out of a target 21). Which isn't a resolution anymore, but it's nice to know I'm still doing it even when it's optional.

( Action Log behind cut. It's long and boring. )