LookingLand

snowy windy day ~ beautiful indeed! and the perfect sort of day for hunkering down at the desk to get some work done. but i wanted to check in with my lovely lj peeps since you may not hear from me again until the new year and i wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas and all of that peace and love business before i vanish off into my own holiday.

i received a beautiful handmade card from scarlite, which was a great joy! and the gift of books from another wonderful and considerate lj friend (you know who you are!). thank you both for being such great friends out in the big bad world ~ you are some of the best parts of the beauty in it.

i am almost finished with my annual sappy Christmas story (this one's pretty amusing, though written rather "lite" for what it ought to have been. nevertheless, it's good grist for a future edit and completely worth it just for the scene in which the goat eats the head off the papier-mâché Jesus from the manger. who says Christmas "romances" have to be all lovey dovey anyway? i'll be wrapping this one up tomorrow in time for the due date (this was for a challenge at work).

also, i'm trying to play a little catch-up with Reconstruction because i have been naughty and not working on it lately. the time away was good though, and even though the work that will carry into the new year is still going to reflect some older choices, i'm looking forward to when the changes arrive and it starts moving along quicker.

finally, i've done a lot of work on the paper dolls that i started last week and they are coming along fairly well. i should have scanned something to share, but i want to have something more substantial finished before i put them here. if i get anything done by tomorrow i will try to come back and post.

if not, once again, happy holidays all! enjoy this season!

: D

Yesterday, I received my issue of Paper Doll Studio in the mail (how geeky is this: I belong to the OPDAG: the Original Paper Doll Artists Guild ~ impressive, no?). Anyway, I was all prepared to be put off by the issue knowing it would be including my Edwin Booth doll. I know I tend to prepare for the worst while secretly hoping for the best, I guess, for all the good it does me. But in this case I was delighted (really, what other word is there?) to see my artwork given some prominence at the front of the issue (page 4 no less!) underneath paper doll artist giant Brenda Sneathon Mattox. And the art doesn't actually suck too much. I mean, I look at it and think: wow ~ I did a not-too-shabby job on some of the details there!

Okay, it's a small thing, but it amuses me greatly and I had a fabulously fun time painting it and submitting it and not feeling like the weight of the universe was crushing around my shoulders just to throw it out there. Clearly I need more of that in my life.

:D

Anyway, I'm looking forward to painting something for the Spring issue as well. I certainly have plenty of time to get it done, whereas this one was such a last-minute struggle! If nothing else, it's nice for the exposure.

from LookingLand.com

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the temperatures soared, but a wee bit of rain cooled things off again. lovely weather just now.

today, this is my favorite book ever:


i picked it up at half price books. yes, it's a children's book for ages 9-12. yes, it was written by the robert kennedy. yes it's less than fifty pages long. but it has wonderful artwork, replete with battle scenes and (oh my gosh!) blood! and it uses the phrase "petty despotisms", which i think all nine year-olds should be well acquainted with, so it's my favorite book ever.

that and Joshua Chamberlain is just the coolest. right after George Washington, of course.

okay, enough of that pitiful fangirl dwibbling. i finally completed Eleison no. 5 today (and without a moment to spare!). the manolo says it is the superfantastic issue and you will all want to read it! official announcement to be posted later today or tomorrow, so stay tuned!

: D

for relaxation, then, last night i went to bed with my light box, a pencil, and some scratch paper so that i could work on dolls. and i did. and they're going to be cool. i am not posting the doll yet because she's just a scribble too at the moment and really not much to look at.

all paper dolls start life as scribbles on scratch paper. and i tend to save the scribbles because they make good templates for others things.

( click if you want to see the scribble with color )

happy sunday all!

this doll took me only a couple of hours start to finish to complete. that's pretty amazing by my standards.

anyway, she needs clothes, obviously. i have some things in mind, but i don't know if i will get to them today. for now, i must take the dog for a walk.

i am having a day of full-on procrastination. clearly i have too much to do.

can you tell?
: D

edit: added a colored version. it came out pretty well for a quick job!

i haven't painted Sid yet, but i couldn't resist throwing this together and giving it a digital tint just for the effect. i'm still working on his leather overcoat and the dog.

i like Sid. i try not to populate my world with too many characters that are just completely off the wall, but Sid was irresistible: affable, easy-going, single-minded, slightly crazy, and just plain fun. he's sensitive enough that you can hurt his feelings with a sharp word, but his short-term memory means he'll forget you insulted him before the day's out. unfortunately it also means he might not remember who you are when you serve him breakfast the next morning.

everywhere Sid goes, cities burn down and maybe he sees angels sometimes. he has been a child arsonist, a soldier (u.s. army sergeant), an oddjobsman, and a sheriff, but his principal adult occupation is a fireman and watchdog against the asian sex slave trade in san francisco. he marries late in life, to a notorious retired japanese vigilante woman with no tongue named Barabas (really, i'm not kidding).

perhaps my favorite thing about Sid is that he is mercifully free of his own past. no horror he has ever suffered (and he has suffered many) can ever touch him.

( to see details of the clothes sans coloring, click here )

p.s. Sid lives in frisco for most of his adult life, but the design of his uniform is taken from a new york style i found in this excellent resource.

i dinna quite finish James today. i still might, but i wanted to post what i had so far. i love the riding outfit. it's so snotty. and i love cadmium red (it's such a joy to paint with). i will finish this for sure during the week ~ after i finish drawing the other couple of outfits i wanted to. i also sketched an Emmaline, but have yet to commit her to real paper at this point. we'll see about that.


otherwise i have struggled some today. finished a draft of one of the stories i have been working on, but it feels weak. it's missing something (coherence? cohesion? co-something?). i feel like i really had a strong sense of what i was writing when i started it, but it's muddly now that it's semi-finished (at an alarming 5,700 words). it feels suddenly oddly pointless as a story and i'm not quite sure how to fix that.

Stars in Their Courses

synopsis: James ropes Lewis into trying to have a heart-to-heart with a woman who has been recently raped. Anyone who knows Lewis well enough ought to know this is destined for disaster.

a wee darling: He had left Camp Faiger in heavy buckskin trousers, a worn cotton blouse, a brown worsted coat on the verge of needing patches, and boots so bent and scuffed they appeared to have fought the late war all on their own.

mean things: Interestingly, this one of those rare instances where James isn't actually trying to be a jerk but comes off like one anyway. The meanest behavior actually comes from the woman, who jumps to unfortunate conclusions about everyone else's intentions.

nice things: i absolutely adore how Emmaline defends Lewis (i adore Emmaline, period). i think this moment and the final scene in which James gives Lewis an astrology lesson (metaphorically speaking - which is where the title comes from) are what inspired me to write the story.

random fact: i confess to perpetrating appalling things against the woman character in this story because, frankly, i don't like her. it seems strange not to like a character i created it, i guess, but sometimes characters are just that unpleasant.

I'm going to give the story a once more over and then maybe send it to a few peeps of distinction to get some needed perspective on it. then i can start doing illustrations for it. eeeeek!

: D

oddly quiet day yesterday ~ and i didn't get much done.

~ * ~

reading: charles johnson's Middle Passage ~ and not enjoying it very much. the story is interesting but the first-person narrative from the ex-bondsman on the lam for debts and semi-shanghaied into a slaver ship in 1830 is beyond credulity. johnson handles language beautifully, but i just don't buy it coming out of this character's mouth ~ no matter how well-educated he allegedly is (all that learning he did between farming and starving) ~ he starts spouting theories by german philosphers and my eyes just glaze over. some of it seems merely anachronistic and a lot of it is just pretentious. a whole section relaying the experience of a frighten cabin boy's witness to a creature in the hull is so littered with allusions that not only do we know that the boy didn't relate the story that way, but we wonder where the narrator character gets off putting such spin on the scene because it's clearly just for our benefit.

it's going to be work to finish this one, but i'm going to try to get through it. i've got about 130 pages to go, so hopefully i can wrap it up in a few days and get on to something else.

~ * ~

with the name poll nearly breaking even, i've decided the safest thing to do is spell the name "Mish" to avoid any possible confusion. thank you to everyone who responded!

and last night i also realized that i've let someone's negativity stop me from making paper dolls. how sad is that? who knew i was such a fragile flower ~ (pardon me while i roll my eyes at my own stupidity).



other than watching Desk Set later this evening, i have the whole day to do something ~ anything. sorta like yesterday except maybe i will take advantage of it.

so i'm off to write. or make paper dolls.

either way, i'm not going to let the voices in my head bother me.

: D

digital art depresses me. it's official.

i gotta find some way to resolve this whole love-hate thing.

digital is clean, it's fun, it's quick. it's easy, and you can undo to your heart's content (or do 500 variations and more!).

but it's still digital.

you can't hold it in your hand, can't pile it in a box, can't see all the loving kindness and care that went into fashioning each piece.

that makes me bonkers. especially when it comes to paper dolls (which are, after all, supposed to be made of paper).

my brothers and i grew up with more paper and pencils than plastic in our childhood. sure, we had all the Star Wars toys (especially by the time the third movie came out), but our imaginations were prone to other things. we were especially fixated with warrior skeletons (a la Jason and the Argonauts) and also talking animals who wore clothes (this from a children's book of stories of mine in which an animal orchestra gives a concert).

well back in them thar old days, they didn't make these kinds of toys and furries weren't exactly "in", so we improvised: we made them out of paper.

we built elaborate sets containing hundreds of pieces. warrior skeletons fought medieval knights and we drew castle walls and halls on paper taped end-to-end as battlegrounds. of the animals, my brother's set had the most bizarre mix ~ i don't remember it precisely, but the daughter was a cat and the son was a goat and the goat boy wore little knee pant-suits (like angus young). he must have had twenty knee pant-suits in all different colors. and then of course, later, when Star Wars first came out we drew a hundred stormtoopers and sand people and they fought on long sheets of paper taped end-to-end drawn to look like desert canyons.

alas, since these were playthings, they were handled roughly, fell into pieces, and eventually got thrown out. for all the hundreds of characters we made, it's really unfortunate that not a single one survived.

as an interesting side note, despite my love for paper dolls, i've always disliked dolls (like Barbies and whatnot). i never owned any dolls as a child (well none that didn't get trashed, burned, and wrecked in vicious ways ~ but let's not talk about my "issues"). likewise, for all my love of paper dolls and all their clothes, i personally don't like dressing and take a very einsteinian approach to clothing: everything matches and it all looks the same. just thought i would share.

well, thirty years later, i still make paper dolls, but i don't have the sort of longevity with doll projects that i used to. i don't like the style or i don't like the pose or i just don't like the doll and i never seem to finish any of them. take Razi-el that i posted this morning. i'll never finish him because i drew him on a piece of scratch paper so that i could scan him in and having done that and colored him, i'll just toss him in the pile will all the other doodles i've made recently. i didn't build him out of something to last, so he's easy to abandon.

this is a terrible habit. in the last year alone i've made and abandoned dozens of dolls whose only crime was that i didn't like what they were made out of.

okay, this entry just makes me sad.

i'm going to go make art or something.

: D

it's snowing in the most lovely way imaginable right now.

: D

~ * ~

so i wake up this morning, having slept a little better than usual as of late, and emerge to this newly whitened world and a sky all soft with crystals and after a brisk trot around the block with the dogs, come to my desk to find the carnage of last night's deranged assault on the paper dolls of the world.

now, i'm pretty bad about leaving my desk "as is" when i'm in the middle of projects, but this is pretty messy even for me.



at any rate, i'm going to finish tackling this one and see if i can't come up with something i will be satisfied with. the odds are totally against me (this is now about the fiftieth variation), but it keeps me otherwise out of trouble.

~ * ~

i keep meaning to take pictures of the snow, but always forget my camera when i go out. i'm not too bright that way, am i?

~ * ~

and finally, in a bit of randomness, here is a really really really cool sculpture i came across this morning by daniel chester french called Benediction. if i had a favorite sculptor, i think french would be my man (in spite of that whole lincoln thing). my favorite piece of his is his Death and the Sculptor which you can see at that link (it's the first image).