thagandizzle

...But a sexy Edwardian! The sharpest-eyed and keenest of memory among you might recognize her face--I drew her on my sexy Victorians/Edwardians page when I did the 100 Heads Challenge. I love her. I don't know who she is or where she was from, but I have a pretty damn hard history crush on her. Her beautiful face! Her impeccable riding clothes! THAT POSE!!! *swoon*

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As always, print available via DeviantArt

I had never thought that pastel pencil would take over my love of traditional graphite pencils, but here we are!

I didn't end up getting either of the job offers and J is suspicious that something might be going on with one of my references. I don't know who, though... Everyone I list is someone that I know, like, and trust and who offered to be used AS a reference. I never left a job having been decided as un-rehireable by HR... Not gonna lie, the thought had absolutely crossed my mind, but I can't imagine that it's the case. But, like, one of the jobs was part time in a pizza place call center. I am ABSOLUTELY qualified, the interview went great, and I was genuinely enthusiastic about a--let's be honest--less-than ideal position. My availability seemed basically in line with what they needed. Maybe I wanted more hours than they could reasonably offer? I don't know... It all seems weird. I'm sure we're both overthinking it.

The other job I knew I'd lost after I told who I found out later was the CEO that my experience at Amazon had been weird and then, right after I learned the interviewer I'd met with was the CEO, learned he had been in upper level leadership at Amazon before moving on to making his own company. So, you know, oops! Amazon was SUPER weird, though, and I'm not gonna lie about it. Either way, I've got the temp position lined up so I'm not completely freaking out anymore. But it still seems really weird to both of us that I had all these interviews that all seemed to go really well and didn't get any actual job offers over the last seven months. To be fair, I definitely was interviewing for slightly more involved work than I had done in the past, but fuck, man... I got a fucking promotion during interviews when I was interviewing for Goodwill. I don't know... Again, I'm sure J and I are both overthinking it because that's a thing we do, but it's still pretty weird.

I went out on Monday and got signed up again with the temp agency that I worked with before my last full-time job. They're super nice and did their best to get me decent placements, so here's hoping that something comes of it. I'm running to the end of my unemployment and have hit a lot of dead ends. Also, I want money. And to not be in my apartment. So, if temping is going to save me from having to fall back on traditional retail, then temping is what I shall do. The other problem I'm running into is that a lot of places have outsourced their offices to places outside of Seattle and since I bus, it's just not reasonable for me to take a position in Kent or Everett.

If I do have to start looking at traditional retail, though, then that's just how it'll be. I don't know if my back can take it, but I really do want to find SOMETHING at this point. Fingers crossed I'll find something that I actually want/like!

I did paint a Rowlet, though! I like him, but not as much as I liked my Magikarp painting. I think I just really loved the bright colors of Magikarp and I do wish I'd decided on a slightly more dynamic pose for Rowlet. I just wanted him to be a happy orb boy, so I went with my gut. I also wish I had better instincts for cuteness. I think if I'd made him a little wider and squashier, maybe moved his feet apart more, he'd be a lot cuter. I just tend toward elongating things!

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Print available via Deviantart

I don't know, guys... When I was thumbnailing Sylveon I snuck a quick little thumbnail of a sort of cheesecakey/pinupy sort of lady in a bikini top and some denim shorts. So, since I completely failed at going to bed last night, I decided to spend some time sketching her out.

I guess I'm into pink right now? Which isn't a usual thing for me. Drawing sexy-adjacent ladies is also not a usual thing for me. Am I going through another weird experimental phase again? I mean... I'll take it, if I am! In any case, I wanted her to be pink, so she's pink. And then I grabbed a few shades of purple and then some palm trees spontaneously erupted and there she was! Not mad at it, though. I do wish I'd worked harder to differentiate the sun and to burnish the color in the sky, but w/e! I worked without a reference and got the base sketch down at, like, five in the morning and did the shading/coloring after I slept for a few hours.

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Print available via Deviantart

Today was J's birthday! Aaaaaaaaaand she's sick! Woo! She's got some kind of gastrointestinal nonsense going on, so she's been out of work for much of the week and we didn't really do much in the way of birthday stuff today since she isn't really up to going out or eating cake.

I stayed up until nearly 5 in the morning finishing the art I did for her! I thought doing a sort of seedy underground Pokemon battle would be really funny. I've been cataloging her favorite Pokemon for quite a while now, so I was able to get some heavy hitters in this painting. I tried to get as many Pokemon in as I could that we find particularly ridiculous, but I wanted to make sure that Hawlucha was definitely winning the match because it's a luchador hawk and that's hilarious

I also got her a copy of Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse which we are about to watch now. I feel a little bad-ish? because I definitely got it for both of us since it's the best movie ever made.

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Print available (with J's permission!) via Deviantart

I've been on a huge kick recently for The Killers. They dropped their first album, "Hot Fuss" when I was in high school and I've been a ride or die fan ever since. I don't know why, exactly, other than I just like the sounds they make. Most of my other favorite bands are closely tied to specific times in my life or bring up a really particular emotional connection. The Killers just make music that I really really like. I like literally every single song I've ever heard them sing which I can't actually say for most of the bands that I consider my favorites.

So, I drew Brandon Flowers who is the lead singer. I found a recording of their Lollapalooza in Brazil concert performance which was almost exactly an hour and half long and that's how long it took me to draw this. I could have fiddled with it some more, but, like, it's Brandon Flowers fanart and I wasn't about to spend three hours of life whittling away at getting his stubble exactly right, you know?

Anyway, I love him. Click to enlarge!


Print available via Deviantart

And yet, here we are, lol!

When I finished my metallic deer piece, I thought: What if I used the metallic paint as the background and did black over it? So, I had in my head a piece of paper covered in super pale gold with this beautiful dark-haired life goddess or something just sort of swanning across the page. What came out was... Not that!

Preliminary tests showed that these metallic watercolors are not suited to being sketched upon--especially if you need to erase as you go. I thought about heavily using references for the face so I would feel less need to erase, but then I couldn't find references that really worked and I ended up Googling pictures of Priyanka Chopra and got SUPER distracted because of her extremely pretty face. So, I pulled back and decided to just go for broke and draw a damn lady. So I did. I did the lineart and colored the hair.

But then I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. So I used some scrap watercolor paper and drew some really sketchy little thumbnails of the figure to do some little samples of how I actually wanted to paint it. And I pretty much immediately reached for copper. I just REALLY like copper! I love the richness of it and my favorite "Pimp My Ride" episode involved painting a car the color of a new penny and it transformed my life, y'all. So I wanted her to copper. So then, like, did I want the whole painting to be one shade of copper? Did I want the background to be lighter? The figure to be lighter? How involved did I want to shade it? I still went in with only about 40% of a plan once I finally starting setting paint to paper.

I did a sort of wet-on-wet blotchy background in copper and two shades of gold and then I painted the figure in just copper. I did basically my usual shading because that is what I'm comfortable with and this painting had gotten so completely out of my control that I felt the need to put my foot down about SOMETHING. Then I redid all of the black lineart because she was going to be super linearty, damnit, and that's how she was going to be! so I'm not sure if I'm 100% on board with the shading AND the lineart, but I'm 90% on board with it, so I'll count that as a win.

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Print available via Deviantart

I got a set of Ohuhu markers off of Amazon about a month ago. I've used them to add accents to watercolors, but coloring with markers isn't really something I ever did much, so I'm still not 100% comfortable with using them.

So, in the spirit of drawing the tree earlier today, I decided to do an illustration (which is a type of art I don't usually do!) in marker with flowers (gnk!!) and a paisley background (GRNNNK!) with white gel pen--another tool I've used to add occasional highlights in watercolors, but not for anything else.

And I'm not mad at it! I like how the marker coloring went, overall. I thought I'd ruined it completely about 500 different times, but I just colored over it with my base color until I blended everything pretty much to oblivion. I did a very basic gradient from a darker green to a lighter green on the background. Then, because I love punishing myself, I did a gel pen paisley. I have never done a paisley before. I am not good at, like, patterns and things. But, again, not mad at it! It's bright and colorful and looks pretty good! Since the self-flagellation wasn't complete, I also did flowers. I'm a little mad at the flowers? I don't know. They're ok. I didn't really want to be very detailed with them--I wanted to keep a pretty flat-colored illustrative quality to them to contrast with the comparatively more elaborate shading of her face. I don't know if it worked? Whatever. I did flowers and I only, like, 15% hate them so I'm counting it as a win.

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Print available via Deviantart

I took a couple of much-needed days off before tackling these guys. These are friends who volunteered their faces after I had already gotten 10 volunteers for the actual challenge. One of them is a repeat because he's just so pleased to have someone drawing his portrait, apparently!

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I'm not sure what I want to tackle next. I want to design a "Get Munny, Get Paid" Moogle shirt for my wife, but after that, I'm not sure. Probably nothing involving human faces for a while, though, lol!

This was... Tough. I wanted to do people who are/were cool but who weren't primarily famous for being beautiful. So no one who got their start as actors or models or anything particularly glamorous. Even though there are some deeply cool people who got their start that way.

So then, I did my overthinking thing for, like, three days because what am I defining as "cool"? Is someone worth drawing if they seem to have done some pretty awesome stuff in their life/career which I know of, but don't really care about personally? Is someone cool if they've made art that has had an impact on me, despite how shitty they might be as a person? Is someone cool if they are in the echelon of culturally agreed-upon cool people even if I barely know anything about them?

So, I figured I would pick people who had some kind of positive impact on me and/or my interests. Maybe they just brought me a huge amount of joy or introduced me to things I never would have originally been interested in. Maybe they were hugely influential in my obsessions/interests. Either way, they would be on the list.

But then, the overthinking came in again. Should I include Jean M. Auel, whose Earth's Children series gave me the obsession with Neanderthals I have today, even though I find those books DEEPLY embarrassing now that I'm no longer 12? Should I include Guillermo DelToro who has a vast body of work of which I only REALLY care about Pacific Rim, but I care about Pacific Rim A Whole Lot? Do I include people like Leonardo da Vinci who I loved so much that I legitimately cried reading his biography because he died at the end even though he was alive 450 years ago and could not, therefore, have been photographed? Do I include musicians?

So, I cobbled together an extremely not comprehensive list of ten cool people who did not start as actors. Who they are and why I chose them are below.

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The McElroy brothers: Hosts of the comedy podcast "My Brother, My Brother, And Me" and, like, 9000 other podcasts/YouTube series. They are hilarious and made me like podcasts which I didn't think anything on earth was ever going to do. Griffin McElroy loves the video game Stardew Valley which makes him a-ok in my book.
Julia Child: I used to watch her Cooking With Julia and Jacques show she did with Jacques Pepin in the 90's. She was a FASCINATING lady and, even though I'm not actually all that into French cooking, I am easily drawn in by her passion for it.
Fred Rogers: Mr. Rogers is perfect.
Emmy Cho: Host of the YouTube channel emmymadeinjapan, Emmy is just a beautiful ray of soft spring light in the morass that is YouTube. I love how kind she is and it's nice to see someone who is just joyful and enthusiastic and excited to try new things! I have made Poppin Cookin sets because of her.
John Mulaney: What's to say that everyone doesn't already know? He's one of the most hilarious people on earth without ever punching down. He's a wonderful antithesis to "edgy" comedy.
Laura Ingalls Wilder: Author of the "Little House" book series which I still love today. I used to idolize her when I was a kid. I don't really have heroes or lionize people anymore, but back then, she was The One. I had to eventually realize that she was not, actually, a perfect person. She had some pretty ugly racism in her books, some really gross opinions about white expansion into the American West, and was super opposed to the New Deal. But those books... God... It is not possible to ever overstate how much those books changed my life and molded lifelong interests.
Carl Sagan: I just love the way he approached science education. He, like Julia Child, just LOVED what he did and he was able to draw others in and make them love it just as much. I love how staunch he was about his own atheism and how beautifully he was able to articulate his passion for his chosen field of study.
Terry Pratchett: I came to Pterry later than most--I was fully an adult before I ever read a single Discworld novel and, man... It was like being hit with a freight train. I still can't think about the fact he's gone. It's basically instant tears.

Tomorrow is day 10! The last official day of the challenge and I'll be trying to do some original characters. I am terrified!

OH MY GOD THIS WAS SO STRESSFUL!!!!

One of my friends very sweetly asked if I would draw him, so I figured (LIKE A DUMBASS) why not make a day for it? Get ten volunteers among my actual, human, friends to be drawn. And I got, like, thirteen volunteers. So I drew the first 10. Now, something that I told myself at the start of this challenge is that I would do my best, obviously, but if the end result doesn't look exactly like the source image, it's ok!

But these are my real human friends whom I love so I HAD to get it right. Like, I haven't been taking artistic license willy-nilly this whole time, but if someone's eye ends up at a weird angle or something, I have felt pretty comfortable making small changes to the face to make it work, you know? But not this time! Because I wanted to totally accurately recreate their pictures and, man... I ended up with some major hand cramping by the end!

Most of them (notably middle right) chose which photo they wanted recreated. For some of them, I just chose the one I the cutest. Two of my friends (top left) are engaged and both wanted to be drawn, so I picked one of the many adorable photos of them that they've taken together. I also tried really hard to make them all basically the same size, so I am not as crazy about the overall layout.

BUT WHATEVER. IT'S DONE. Click to enlarge!



EDIT: Better scan!