Sing a song of sixpence
Pocket of hashish
Four-and-twenty mole rats
Baked in a quiche…
My contributor’s copy of Expose 3 arrived in the mail yesterday! As with any anthology, there’s the good, the bad, the ones that could maybe do something with their hair, although since I know way less about 3-D, I’m not really equipped to judge quality on a chunk of it. But Sir Bunny and the Bad Egg hold up pretty well in their surroundings, and it warms my twitchy little heart.
Unfortunately, the really good art is…god, it’s almost too awful to say aloud…inspiring.
I have exactly one week left to prep for this convention. Getting “B” done was a major coup, and I have almost given up on more for the art show, but I have Diggers to do and prints to organize and errands to run and mats to have cut. I haven’t even started running off print sets, and since I suspect the Elemice will do well, and have hopes for the ABCs–and haven’t even scanned the new art for the show, let alone run prints–I have a very busy week ahead.
I cannot afford to be inspired right now. Fifty weeks of the year, the Muse can scream in my ear, and I’ll drop everything and sprint to Painter, but these two weeks, she’s out of luck. Must not be inspired! Must not go “ooooh…that’s a cool leaf technique…I wonder if you could do that with a pale green base and pulling the dark round camelhair up…NO! Must fight! Insidious! CURSE YOU, MUSE!
Ahem. I’m fine. It’s all good. Any noises you hear from the studio are totally routine and no reason at all to call the authorities. It’s aaaaaallll good.
I generally pay lip service to the notion of keeping kids off drugs. I say lip service, because I did a lot of drugs, and seem to have lived through the experience, so I am unable to shake my nagging feelings of personal hypocrisy on this one, nor do I particularly regret any of my drug experiences (although the one time I got falling down drunk was indeed regrettable) but I do genuinely believe that most people are not smart enoug/mature enough/responsible enough to do the right drugs the right way–and teenagers hooked on crack or dying of alcohol poisoning is a tragedy that should be averted at all costs, god knows, etc ad infinitum.
However, today I have an even better reason.
Kids should stay off drugs ‘cos it’s the only bloody time in your life you’ll get the option, and you should take advantage of it. Time was, I could throw clothes in a suitcase, pack a toothbrush and go off on a trip for weeks or months. Nuh-uh. Not any more. I’ve gotten OLD. And now I’m a friggin’ medicine chest with feet.
For a three day trip to Anthrocon, I am already doing the checklist. I need Advil if my arms start to hurt and Aciphase so my stomach acids doesn’t runneth over and Tums in case it does and fish oil and B vitamin for my cholesterol and birth control because…um…and Allegra in case of allergies and I’m wondering if I should do the Echinacea and Vitamin C cocktail starting a few days in advance to try and bolster my innards against Con Crud. I have a shopping list of pharmaceuticals required to keep my failing flesh in prime tip top shape–and I’m freakin’ twenty-eight!
And god! Now I have an opinion on the price of drugs–I could have gotten an entire 200-hit SHEET of white blotter acid that would make God give you a brain massage and paisley flamingos boogie down on your cerebral cortex for what a month of Aciphase costs. Fortunately, I have insurance, but seeing three digits on the little sheet of paper before I get down to my not-unreasonable co-pay gave me a nasty shock. And if I didn’t have insurance, it just wouldn’t happen–let my esophagus resemble swiss cheese if it must, you can’t get blood from a turnip.
So. Stay off drugs, kids. You’ll be on ’em soon enough.
B is for…barely retaining sanity…
http://www.deviantart.com/view/19977844/
Print sets available! I did A, B, and C! Yes, they’ll be at Anthrocon!
Any day where you’re looking up lactating male fruit bats before breakfast can’t help but be a good day.
I am trying like hell to put off painting–I am not so much poised on the delicate, ashen edge of burnout, watching the cinders of motivation float by, as plummetting screaming into the dying flamesof the abyss at this point.
So I’m going to talk about something else. Like the Freemasons.
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The Further Adventures of Twitchy
Today was our second session of our amnesiac D&D campaign. Still bereft of their memories, armed with a few fragments of knowledge and the sorts of weaponry one picks up around an abandoned farmhouse, clad only in their undies and two sets of womens clothing*, we woke from hideous, personally tailored nightmares (our GM is workin’ overtime) and spent today on the vital tasks of digging up cursed objects, finding a town, lying our asses off, and getting clothes. And hurting ourselves. No combat, so naturally my neurotic probably-a-rogue elf “Twitchy” rolls four natural 20s, entirely on things that don’t matter at all, like smiling at the bartender and hiding from a cow.
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You know, after years of doin’ art, you’d think I’d have learned how I work best by now. You’d think I’d have learned not to second-guess myself. You’d think that I’d have the slimmest shred of faith in my own ability to pull stuff off, and not fret that I am somehow Doing It Wrong.
Nah. I have to get all anal and plan too far ahead, just in case, as if there was some chance that I would just kinda forget to color half the painting. I have to anally wash an underpainting into an area, because god forbid I strike out without a blueprint. I might forget! I might somehow lose my mind and think it should be chartreuse instead of Paynes gray!
I…might have to spend an hour and a trip to the harware store to get 400 grit sandpaper to fix my attempt at over planning.
That’ll teach me.
However, on the bright side, clayboard is insanely forgiving if you have sandpaper.
Go, Gimpy!
Gimpy the squirrel, in addition to being fat and sleek, has evidentally gotten some use of the leg back. He’ll never be able to put weight on it–the foot’s stuck with the sole up, so he’d be walking on the top of his foot–but he can scratch with it quite effectively, and is sitting on the railing making little squirrely grimaces of delight while scratching his ear vigorously.
I suspect that his ankle was broken in the initial assault, and has fused into a non-functional joint, hence the stiff foot position. His hip, which looked dislocated for a long time, seems to function surprisingly well now–I know dogs can form a false joint if they have an untreated dislocated hip, and I wonder if Gimpy’s done that, since he’s getting a good, vigorous range of motion with the leg now, and I can’t imagine it would just pop back in months after the injury–it was obviously dangling for quite a long time after the swelling went down.
Speculation aside, Gimpy’s lookin’ good.
Finished the 8 x 10 of the donkey and goldfish. That makes three paintings done yesterday. Not bad. I work well under conditions of extreme terror.
Unfortunately for my productivity–but fortunately for the rest of me!–my natural ebullience re-exerted itself, and I am at least reasonably mellow again. I cannot afford to slack off, as I still need at least three or four more paintings for Anthrocon, and however many for Trinoc, but I’m Zen. In the squishy nuclear reactor of my brain, there are frequent meltdown warnings, the klaxons go off, red lights flash through the corridors, but the problem always corrects itself within a few hours and everything slides back to green. I suspect the brain cells don’t even bother to file out in orderly lines any more. The warning goes off, they get out coffee and put their axons up on the desk.
The Anxiety Creature, bereft of the rest of the chorus, is sulking under my sternum. However, it, too, is fairly mellow. It knows that sooner or later, another pile of paperwork will drop, or I’ll sell a painting that was gonna fill out my space, or I’ll discover I can’t get a mat cut in time, and its hour will come ’round at last, a cute beast slouching towards the zyphoid process to be born.
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