blog posts don't write themselves. dammit.

When I (re)started (again) this blog, I promised myself that I would not allow it to turn into a blog about how I suck at maintaining a blog. In order to achieve this goal, I decided to strictly forbid any comments regarding the quantity or quality (or, you know, complete and utter lack) of my blog entries.  And I have been very good at sticking to this -- in all of 2016, there is not one single comment about the upkeep of my blog. I would pat myself on the back except a) I'm nattering on about it now, and b) ha ha, there are no comments of any kind in 2016 because I haven't even looked at my blog in over a year.
Oh well. I'm posting now. And what a deep, inspiring, eloquent post it is. Do I get a cookie?

when I'm painting with watercolors, I'm unable to fathom why anyone would want to use any other medium

Of course, I feel the same way when I'm using colored pencils, or pencil or pen and ink, or pastels. Or - well, anyway.  Today I'm painting with watercolors.  I don't know why I ever waste my time with anything else.

Drawing a giraffe

Been meaning to learn how to draw a giraffe for a couple of months, so yesterday I decided to try drawing one for Miss Buggle's snack bag. I expect I'll run into some issues when I try drawing an entire giraffe instead of just the head and neck, but I was happily surprised at how easy it was to draw a simple semi-realistic giraffe -- almost as easy as a dog, and a little easier than a mouse or rat.

 

pigma micron pens, prismacolors

I wanted especially to make a note of this drawing because it's really the first time I've had a piece speak to me with total clarity...I've had a few pieces that seemed to be trying to tell me something, or hinting at something, but this one came right out and instructed me, in a tone that brooked no argument, to put away my brown and yellow shades and use blue and purple instead.  I didn't expect my drawings to have a mind of their own, or to speak to me as clearly as my fictional characters have; I thought that was just a writing thing.  But this giraffe (and the one I did in watercolor) wanted to be blue and purple, and I think if I hadn't had the right colors with me, I'd've had to go find them.

I think I expected it to be more on the level of a horse (one of the few things I've had to table in my quest to learn how to draw All The Things...I have managed to sketch out a couple of passable unicorns, but horses - especially realistic horses - are still out of reach) ...but it's actually much, much easier.  Now I just have to practice drawing different giraffes, so I don't slip into drawing the same one over and over.  Yesterday I drew three - Miss Buggle was so taken with her snack bag, she asked me to draw another one for her to color in, and then I drew one for myself on one of my vintage book pages, because I wanted to use my watercolor pencils on it.

October went by much too quickly. I am going to file an official complaint. Or maybe just whine a little.

  Comikaze was a bust this year, and we haven't yet figured out why.  A little background: I've been an exhibitor at Comikaze since it began; it was my first convention as Foxwise, so even though we didn't do all that well last year (I think we sort of broke even; at any rate, we didn't make much more than the booth cost, but we did cover it and I was able to fling a few bucks at my poor underpaid assistants) and this year we're doing things like printing receipt pages on old notebook paper and conducting a long-running experiment to determine the smallest possible amount of burnishing liquid you can add to a gallon of water and still get metal (mostly) polished in the tumbler, I scrounged up the money for a corner booth, reasoning that we didn't do as well last year because we were crowded into a regular booth and people couldn't fully appreciate the awesomeness and variety of our wares.  Our booth setup was really quite good this year, I thought (no credit to me; I wasn't even there for load-in); certainly better than last year's, which was pretty disastrous and made worse by the fact that too many of us were there.  I suspect more than a few of last year's attendees saw our booth and believed we had gotten lost on our way to the flea market.  (Not theRose Bowl flea market-- more like the Pacoima flea market).
  Anyway, our booth looked good, our wares were, all modesty aside, kick-ass as well as varied and well-priced, the booth was manned by my three best and most experienced minions...and we made less than half the cost of the booth.  Gross.
  The powers that be had decided it'd be a swell idea to have all the exhibitors stuffed into a separate room away from all the celebrities and events, and to be fair, at first this seemed like a fairly swell-ish idea to me also -- no more crowds of autograph hounds charging past our both and distracting would-be customers, no more groups of people clustered right in front of our booth arguing over where to go next...just lots of people strolling up and down the aisles looking for things to buy.  Except apparently, people decided to be thrifty this year by staying away from the booths, and you can't entice someone away from their budget when you're not even in the same hall.
  I filled out a post-convention survey the Comikaze folks sent out, and asked them to please reconsider the 'separate the exhibitors from the rest of the convention' idea next year.  And also to get rid of Fridays, which as far as I've been able to determine are never profitable for ANY of the exhibitors.

hello, world! ok bye

It seems to me that when someone starts a brand new blog (or hauls out, dusts off, and re-starts an old one), she ought to have a spectacular, brilliant, hilarious, moving, deep - or at the least, very very witty - post to kick things off. And if I had a post like that tucked up my sleeve (or better yet, written out on my computer), I'd sure use it as the very first super-special inaugural post of my brand new (ish) blog. Since I don't, and since it's become increasingly apparent that it isn't going to write itself, I hereby present to the world at large the very first post of my scintillating, riveting, insightful and spellbinding blog.

And now, because I'm a vendor at Comikaze this coming weekend and would be hard-pressed to think of how I could be LESS prepared, I am going to get back to work.

Also, here is a drawing, in honor of Inktober. I was excited about taking part in Inktober and planned to do a new pen and ink drawing every day of the month. Shockingly, that did not happen. But I did do a few.

Zentangle® Feather - Pigma Micron pens, Spectrum Noir alcohol markers