When did this blog become a webcomic?

Like, yesterday I guess.

This always happens when I need to wake up early the next day.

Comic: Old West

A comic. Because I went to see Rango and Skye's been playing Red Dead Redemption over spring break

Spring Break, Day 1

My internet was down for most of today, so I slept and had time to finish up a lot of old drawings I had lying around on my laptop. It was also rainy and quiet, a really nice atmosphere for drawing!!
Note: All of these pictures and more are also posted on my deviantart account

An experimental portrait of Tori Amos, who's beauty I didn't do justice. (I'm sorry your nose looks so danged wonky Tori!!)

This festered unfinished for mooonths. I still consider it a failure, but I figured I might as well clean it up a little and finish it out.... mostly un-salvageable drawing of my WoW character.

Here's a colored pen sketch of Audra that I told her I would do at Naka-kon

This is a picture Skye drew that I colored

I was really pleased with how this picture was going until I got to the hair, then I was exhausted from drawing all that other stuff and didn't know what to do, so I threw some stuff up there and called it a day. I hope to return and make it pretty....

So yeah. I'm tired...
Pen tablets and muddy puppies~

I am no Julia Childs.

After a long week of midterms, I had just about one thing on my mind coming to my parents house to spend the weekend.

THEY HAVE A KITCHEN. I COULD COOK FOOD.

I wanted to make a masterpiece, so everyone could bask in my culinary genius. In addition, I've been doing a project on France in my class about exploring culture with children (sometimes being an education major is pretty cool) SO I was focused on French food.

I figured French chefs made their awesome food with really classy magic. There was no way making those cute little macarons could be THAT hard, right? I was set on the sugary, adorable little Parisian macarons. I see them all the time in banner ads anyway. You know, these things?

Oh wait... I need to double boil, whisk for upwards of ten minutes and meringues took three hours to bake? I can only partially blame a really sucky recipe. It was the first one I found, and it turned out to be really different from all the other recipes I looked at.

EXCUSE ME BUT WTF IS THIS SHIT?!
Oh but the macaron filling was like, glorious.

It tasted like whipped, sugary, forgotten childhood memories. Isweartogod.
So all in all, the macarons were a complete and total fail, but an adventure. So then I made french meringues instead.

And you know what? CLASSY MAGIC. Yes they had to bake for three hours, and yes I didn't have a pastry bag to make them look perfectly even and pretty, but they taste stupendous! I'm bringing them back to school to share with my friends, and actually had a great time making them.

Oh, and this will be my next baking adventure, I think. Cupcakes on a stick. Yeah.  Bakerella is really freaking cool.

Sugary treats and Thunderstorms~

Dream Diary Post

And because why the heck not, here's an older entry from my dream diary that was especially interesting, and that I might someday flesh out into a real story or something...

My bizarre dream starts out like a videogame, the dead have arisen and people are rushing to kill them before too much collateral damage is caused. AK’s and M16’s were common, all my neighbors had them for some reason (even more baffling was that in this dream I had neighbors) There were dead animals too, and one of my particular tasks was separating the dead horses from the living ones.
It was easier to tell that some of them were dead than others. I remember seeing a small paint pony with feathers in its mane and thinking that it was odd, and there was one morgan mare that barely looked dead at all except for her eyes. Then there was someone else helping separate the living and dead horses into two herds. She was a tall, thin redheaded girl who was maybe a little bit older than me. After we got the horses into two separated, she helped me take the living horses back to the coral.
After that was when we found out that the dead had risen for some sort of carnival festival, thing. And we had stopped trying to rekill them entirely. Also, I was apparently a boy, and I asked the red headed girl to be my date to the festival.
I tried to impress her and tease her at the same time “If you’re my date, then be by me, I don’t want you to run off with some dead folks or anything, and I‘ll protect you if they try anything” it sounded like a good line, protective and loyal too. However, her reply caught me off guard, “Oh, no dead people then? You’re in for a bit of a nasty surprise” she had a weird accent, but I couldn’t place it. I was shocked when I realized she was dead, but stayed with her anyway, because I didn’t have anyone else to explore the carnival with. It was one part flea market, one part circus, one part zoo. Most of the dead people seemed kinda like ghosts, only halfway there, and a bit lonesome. Others acted like full out video game zombies, trying to eat people. Luckily most of them were very bad at it, due to advanced stages of decomposition. They tried to crawl at you from the ground, since their legs had rotted away, and you could just kick away a hand or a head and they’d be deterred. A couple of the zombies were fresher and more dangerous, but we avoided them. We were walking through the flea market part of it when I saw a pin that was my name, and a tiny bird skull. I tried to get the dead girl to stop so I could examine it, but she was hesitant. I stopped anyway, and looked. It was a row of diamonds spelling out my name, and when I picked it up there was a bird’s spine to go with the tiny skull, but it was full of needles. The dead girl said she had put that there, and in the logic of my dream, I found out she had committed suicide. Horrified and saddened, I put the pin back, bird skeleton and all and continued walking. 

Artwork credit Diane Walkey

Unfortunately, not enough of my dreams are this interesting... 

Great Day, and Inspiration~

A little update on my life right now:
I recently won an iPod Touch in an art contest with this piece:

The iPod hasn't come in the mail yet (it's being sent from The CPN head in Oklahoma) but I'm excited about the experience of winning and my art being used in a campaign to encourage Native Teens not to commit suicide.... plus I guess winning something like this will look good in my portfolio/resume

Also, my facebook account was disabled for use of an alias, which is totally lame... but I'll either get my account back or get over it.

Now time for some.... INSPIRATION Because that's what I'm in the mood for!

Picture Credit: Max Cabrera

 A list of things that are awesome and inspire me:

♥ The Ocean ♥ Old hats (not old hat as in 'cliché' but actual antique hats) ♥ Old crumbly brick walls with street art ♥ Animal Skeletons ♥ Tutu's ♥ Piano solos ♥ Old books ♥ Cute animals ♥ Horoscopes ♥ Elaborate Eye makeup ♥ Rainy avenues ♥ Illuminated manuscripts ♥ The fact the there is Hello Kitty EVERYTHING ♥ Little cats sitting in giant chairs ♥ Cthulu ♥ Black and white stripes ♥ How "wind blows" and "windows" sound similar ♥Lilac cupcakes ♥ Rainbow hair ♥ Foods involving avocado and fancy cheeses ♥  Hair bows ♥ Broken umbrellas ♥ Greek Mythology ♥ Really kickass lingerie ♥ Big hair and headdresses ♥ Turquoise and pearls ♥ Jungle plants ♥ Mermaids ♥ Lanterns ♥ Light juxtaposed with darkness ♥ Things that aren't usually black painted black ♥ Patterned silk ♥ Roller blades ♥ Intricate braids ♥ Costumes of all kinds ♥ Pink feathers ♥ Monsters ♥ Seamstress materials ♥ Chocolate caramel hazelnut ♥ Long beachy waves ♥ Crystals ♥

For aspiring artists out there, there are a lot of things you can do to increase your personal inspiration too!
Things I do to gather inspiration are:

• Doing a meme, No..... not like pedobear or something, I'm talking about an art meme! They're great for combatting short art blocks too, and can even get you to try something new! Like This or this or this!
• Someone who says absolutely everything way better than I could in this art....guide thingy on the webcomic (that is amazing, by the way)Manly men doing Manly Things's page um...it's awesome. 
• Network with other artists, talk art and critique or discuss each others work. Bonus if you can collaborate or motivate each other.
•  Make small art challenges for yourself to get out of you comfort zone, things like "Sometime this month I'll go out and paint en plein aire" I did mini-challenges like this once as a new year's resolution, and actually kept up with it throughout the whole year.

Spiral Lollipops and curled hair~

Artist Alley!

At Naka-kon this year, I was able to be in the Artist Alley  (Quelle journée!)

I had these really adorable, magnificently printed stickers to sell, along with my cute food bookmarks and some original artwork I had that had been in folders in my room for way too long. I shared a table with two other artists, and Skye was able to contribute to my portfolio as well, with a sexified picture of Cloud that sold for $20!!
Also for the weekend, I got to cosplay Lady Rainicorn from Adventure Time (For about.... 3 hours on Friday night. As soon as the weather gets better it's totally photoshoot tiem)

I did eventually get some spirit gum for the horn too!! I got to go to some of the panels I wanted to, gifted some artwork to Amelie Belcher, who is like, by the way my art hero. Okay guys?! Art. Hero. Oh, and I also pwned and got a lot of cute stuff from the trading session.


Back to having an art table though, it was a really great new experience, and I'm already planning to do it again. Plus I learned a ton about selling artwork and got a lot of great ideas for other cons. I'm already brainstorming!!

One thing that'll be really different about my next table is doing it myself. I really lucked out in having experienced partners, because my friend Fynd already had those awesome stackable metal grid cubes to display artwork on, and had a really good handle on what she was doing and where she wanted things.
To prepare myself for having to do my own display I've been looking at especially awesome Artist Alley displays, like this one:

I adore how eye catching this is and how it matches her merchandise! I guess the downside of something like this is that, while it'd cute display catches potential customers eye, it allows less room for artwork to be displayed, plus it's the random cute terrace that gets their attention, and not your actual artwork...

What I love about this display is how much STUFF there is, it's a great big variety of prints and goodies, and it's also visually appealing. The downside of something like this would be that the string of badges across the top of the table might sort of disconnect you from potential customers and make communicating with them harder. On the other hand, it'd be a good thing if you made more money by commissions, and didn't like people watching you draw...

Which brings me to another thought! It's really important to have a partner, so one person can draw while the other works as a salesperson X3

Displays also change based on what it is you're planning on selling!

I looove this display, I think it would be an ideal to have that much room(that table's sooo big! I'm jelly!) and impact! There's room for communication, a big upstanding display, and a lot of color! I really think a high impact/noticeable table cloth makes more difference than you'd think, a lot of people complimented ours.

All in all, I'm only beginning to brainstorm X3
There's a lot to consider, like what display you want, what you're going to sell, and if Tip jars are tacky or desperate (lol) An artist alley is definitely a worthy experience though!

Teddy bears and mochi~