Presents for Architects

A coworker emailed a blog post to me this week that I'd like to share titled "How to buy a present for an architect."  Despite being in architecture, I've never shared anything about it here on my blog.  That's mostly because I tend to consider myself an artist who happens to be working in architecture.  Being in the business has given me an appreciation for it, but my muse doesn't naturally lean toward buildings, interior design, and landscaping.  It leans towards people, fantasy creatures, and settings of a more wild and fantastical nature.

However, artists and architects are close cousins, and so the stereotypes of all the creative professions tend to resemble each other.  So, for the curious, here is a peak into the stereotypical mind of an architect.

Death the Kid Picture, & Drawing in Anime Style

Okay, first of all, my Nanowrimo efforts seem to have gone down the drain.  The last few days I've had the strong desire to draw, and so I decided I had better take advantage of that.  I'm afraid that if I were to wait until after Nanowrimo, I won't feel like it anymore.

So, I'm back to drawing.  I haven't given up on the story I'm writing, I'm just temporarily shifting around my priorities.

On that note, I finished a picture!  (And I plan on starting another one as soon as I'm done posting this.  I know just what I want to do.)

NaNoWriMo 2011

For those who don't know "NaNoWriMo" is National Novel Writing Month, a yearly challange to writers, professional and amateur alike, to write 50,000 words of a novel within the month of November.  (That works out to roughly a 300 page novel, I believe.)  The official Nanowrimo website is www.nanowrimo.org, where writers can create a profile with a plot synopsis, keep track of each others' word count, and interact on a forum.  This month, I'm participating... sort of.

A Ramble on Drawing

Hey, look, guys!  I actually drew something!

Inspiration Folder

Good grief, it's been almost two months since a blog post!  I just want everyone to know that I do intent to continue my blog, I've just been distracted lately and I've done next to nothing when it comes to anything artistic.

That said, I do have a drawing started.  After that I've got a To Do list of drawings and projects.  It's been so long since I've done any drawings (like a year) that now I'm itching to do a bunch of them.  Pencil drawings and colored pencils are the things I always come back to eventually.  I wander off to foreign lands of painting, sculpting, sewing, and the like, but I always come home again to pencil drawings.

To hold you over until I actually have something to show, I will give you a peek inside my Inspiration Folder.

The Story I'm (Not Quite) Working On

The story I'm not quite working on, also being the story that is not quite working.

I've had the idea for the story hanging around in my head for a while.  I like to let ideas sit and incubate in the back of my mind a good while to make sure I've got the plotline all worked out before I begin writing.  It's getting to be about time for this story to come out of the incubator and hatch, except for one problem.  This story is a twin, and it's dear brother is rather disrespectful and unruly towards it's mother.  In other words, I can't get the darn thing to do what I want it to do.

Free Programs of Creative Awesomeness

Just as the title says, this blog post is more or less a list.  I couldn't think of anything in particular that I really wanted to talk about, so I thought, "Let's talk about everything!"

Okay, so it's not really everything but there's writing, gaming, 3D modeling and music here.  That's kind of like everything, right?  It's all the really important stuff anyway.

How To: Pillowcase

Alrighty, guys!  Someone requested the instructions for the pillowcase I made, so that's what I've got for you this time.

Anime Pillows

What have I been doing this week, you ask?  Making anime pillows.  Duh.  What else would I be doing?  You think I do normal things like watch TV?  Psht!  No!  I come home from work, jump on the sewing machine, and my life is complete!  (Apparently I have no social life.)

Sculpey Necklace

It's that time of the year again!  Summer!  And that means it's Anime Convention Season!  For most costume-wearing convention attendees, (we prefer the term "otaku" which is Japanese for "obsessive nerd")  this means sitting down at sewing machines and whipping up something awesome to wear.

But sometimes, it means busting out the clay.

Update on Life

I want to do a followup on that icky-yucky birth control situation I talked about a while back.

The gist of it is: everything is okay now.  I'm not crying for no good reason anymore.  Life has calmed down again.  Yaaaaaay!

I definitely want to tell everyone "thank you" for all of the comments, suggestions, and sympathy I received during that.  Depression is a lonely lonely place to be, and you have no idea how grateful I was to see people caring enough to listen to my misery and try to help, even if helping was a short reply saying, "I had a friend who had that happen."  Even that much helped.  Thank you.  Seriously.  Thank you.

If you want to hear me ramble about how things turned out, and possibly sound a bit silly, and that sort of thing, feel free to keep reading.

Musicals

Last weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to see a professional performance of the musical Les Miserables.  Boy, was it neat to watch!  And I think one of the best things about it was to get back to work on Monday, tell my coworkers I had seen it, and have two different people instantly say, "'Bring Him Home' is such a good song!"  (I love my coworkers.)  That, and I overheard someone afterward saying "I thought he was going to jump off the bridge rail and just face-plant on the stage, and I was thinking, 'Uh... that's not going to sound like water.'"  Which, if you don't know Les Miserables, won't make any sense, but if you know it, you know what I'm talking about!  I had to try not to laugh, because I wasn't meaning to eavesdrop.

I'm in love with musicals.  Music has such a powerful effect on emotions, and I think the idea of telling a story through music is pure brilliance.  So here, for your enjoyment, are some of my favorite songs from my top three favorite musicals.

Comic Strips

First of all, I want to thank everyone for the responces, encouragement and advice I recieved on my last blog post and on facebook as well.  Being able to share this with others and hearing back from them really helps a lot, and I'm very grateful to everyone.  THANKS, GUYS!  YOU ARE AWESOME!

Secondly... remember that thing I said about how I wasn't going to mention Trigun in my next post (ignoring the Post of Angst I wrote last time)?  Well... I kinda... lied... I had thought that I would spend the week making a necklace for my sister and then blogging about it, but instead I've spent a whole lot of time doing nothing.  But I did mention an Easter comic that I was going to blog about and it... might... maybe... involve... characters from a certain anime, the name of which begins with "Tri" and ends with "gun."

SO ANYWAY, here's a belated Happy Easter to everyone!  Please enjoy my belated, silly, and kinda crappy comic that I made.  (And don't worry, you won't have to know Trigun to appreciate it, although it might be a little helpful to know the guy in the suit is a priest.)

We interrupt this program...

I'll start with an apology.  I had drawn up an Easter comic this weekend and intended to post it as my blog post for the week.  But, unfortunately, you'll have to wait for the funny, because I'm taking a moment to talk about something more serious.
I'll give a second apology.  This post is almost entirely just to get something off my chest.  There's something that I really want to talk to someone about, anyone will do, and so I'm talking here, since there's no one here in person, and since I'm really quite terrible at talking about emotional things in person anyway.
My third apology is that I'm going to ramble quite a while until I finally reach present day in my narrative, so hang in there.  If you're impatient, then I'll skip to today: I cried this evening for no good reason and I'm very very upset about that.  Okay, now I'm going to go back and explain everything.

Tailoring, Part Two

I want to start off by saying that I am wearing my Milly Coat even as I type this.

Trying my Hand at Tailoring.

Note:  This blog post is about something I'm CURRENTLY working on, but it takes me a while to get to the point.  Just keep reading.  You'll get there eventually.

I sewed my first item of clothing when I was about eight years old, if I remember right.  It was a pair of shorts made from purple flowered material, and my mother wouldn't let me wear them out of the house.  (I don't blame her, although back then, I thought they were AWESOME!)

My mother did a lot of sewing when I was very young, and would make matching Easter dresses for my sister and I every year until we were old enough that we thought that was kinda uncool. As such, I learned a lot about sewing when I was little.  In fact, I even remember doing those little lacing cards where you thread the yarn through the holes to outline a cartoon character, and I was always annoyed that the string wasn't long enough to do a back-stitch.

Project Completed: Vash the Plushy

I'd like to introduce you to someone.

Now, this blog is called Adventures in Creativity, not Adventures in Anime, so I’ll forgo explaining his character and his show.  I’ll just let that introduction suffice.*

*Vash is the hero and a good guy, but also an outlaw, so he's a little hesitant sometimes to throw around his name.

Who I really wanted you to meet, though, is this guy.

I finished him up just a couple days after my last blog post, but I was slow to post him on here because I’ve been really busy... busy being lazy I mean.  So, what I’d like to talk about is how he was made, and tips I’ve learned in plushy-making, so that other’s can take a stab at it if they like.

The Huggable World of Plushies

"This is Scrump.  I made her.  But her head is too big, so I pretended a bug laid eggs in her ear."
~Lilo, Lilo & Stitch

I remember the day I discovered the craft of plushie making.  I was poking around corners of www.deviantart.com that I had yet to explore and stumbled upon it.  Making your own doll was a completely new concept to me.  The idea of making a doll for a child was within my realm of reasoning, although it conjured images of Raggedy Ann dolls and things with button eyes that came just a little too close to resembling something you cast voodoo spells on.  And it seemed a bit silly to go through so much trouble when you could go to a store and by a doll that wasn’t creepy.  But here were people (lots and lots of people) who could stitch together completely adorable little dolls of just about any fictional character they wanted.  They weren’t creating Raggedy Ann for the sake of giving a toy to a little kid, they were creating cute, huggable versions of their favorite characters for the sake of owning cute huggable versions of their favorite characters.

A lightbulb came on.  I could hug anyone I wanted!  All I had to do was figure out how to make them!

It was as though I had seen the light.  Someday, I would hug the crap out of one of my favorite characters while squeeling like a little girl.  It was my destiny!

Villains a la Carte

“Up to no good, I love plottin',
'Cause I'm so good when I'm rotten.
No more Mr. Nice Guy, wait and see.

I'll become that nasty, naughty, very spiteful,
Wicked, wayward, way delightful,
Bad guy I was born to be.

Lying, loathsame, never tender,
Indiscreet repeat offender.
No more Mr. Nice Guy, that's not me.”

~Rothbart

The Swan Princess

Let's talk about bad guys.

I have written and completed four novel length stories. I use the word completed a bit loosely, but, hey, it counts as far as I'm concerned. Lately, I've been working out a new story idea in my head, and I feel really good about it. This one's going to get written and finished, too! I can feel it! But there are aspects of it that are tripping me up, and one of them is, well, the bad guy. See, I have no idea why, but from one story to the next, I can have a well-rounded bad guy that I love to write about and then have a villain who's absolutely flat. You know, the kind of bad guy that you could replace with a cardboard cutout labeled “Evil” and none of the other characters would notice anything was amiss. I really don't understand it. This new villain of mine is trying really hard to fall into the "Flat" category, even though I keep telling him not to. It's gotten me thinking lately about just what it is that makes a good bad guy. There's got to be some kind of formula out there. If I could just figure out what it is, I could use it to help out Mr. New Villain.

Well, after much thought, observation, and study, I have come up with the following.

Sarah's Recipe for Villains a la Carte

(Produces 1 serving of Main Antagonist. Results may vary.)