Project Wrap-ups and Naka-kon

Okay, let me start by getting this picture out of the way.

Here's Vash with his gang of Pokemon.  That makes all four of the main characters, and this little series is complete!  Yay!

I've also finished my stun gun.  Remember how I was putting paper mache on the whole thing?  It took longer than I thought it would, because when I put the paper mache on, I had to leave some parts of it dry, so it could sit on that part while the rest was drying, so I had to break it up into parts and do a part a day.  (And also because I procrastinated some.  But you didn't hear me say that.  Sh!)

When I hit crunch time, though, I couldn't afford to do it in parts, and ended up with wet areas all over the place.  I got a little creative trying to figure out how to let it dry.

Then I painted it, which went much faster than I expected (and waaaay faster than painting styrofoam goes), and so, finally, I had this.

Which is pretty much how it looked before, just with a different surface texture.  I took it to Naka-kon this weekend and I'm very pleased to announce that this is the first con which I didn't have to do any repair work afterward.  It got a little bumped and scraped, but nothing is loose and no paint came off.  Woohoo!


Naka-kon was a lot of fun.  (Of course!)  I think I had fallen into a rut before hand, in which nothing existed in the universe except for my job and the internet.  It was nice to have a reminder that there's a whole world out there with fun stuff to do and awesome people, and that those things make me happier than the internet does.

I won't post pictures on here, since they're already on facebook, but I will share one since I likely won't post it anywhere else.  I met one of Trigun's villains, Legato, and he suggested we take a picture of me shooting him.  Except I tried to kind of scowl at him and just ended up laughing.

(This guy was one of the highlights of the con for me.  Not only was I really excited to see someone cosplay Legato, but he was a super nice guy.  He caught sight of me the day before and told me he would be Legato on the next day, so "you should come find me and shoot me."  I told him his costume was fantastic and he said, "Thanks!  It makes me feel pretty.  I think it's the hair.")

Okay, that's everything!  Peace out!

Wood Puzzles, Pokemon, and Paper Mache

When I first started those Trigun + Pokemon pictures, I originally meant to do the main quartet, plus the main bad guys and perhaps a few secondary characters.  But I knew my attention span wouldn't hold out that long, so I cut it down the to four heroes.  Good call, because I have one left that I've started the sketch for and I'm itching to do other things!  So much so that I've been slipping in other small projects.

Project One:  Last weekend, I revamped a wood puzzle.  A friend gave it to me, and for some reason, I looked at it and said, "I want to paint it."

 

I painted the pieces black with acrylic paint, and then drew on the pieces with a silver sharpie.  I've been playing Zelda: Twilight Princess, and got the idea for the color scheme from the Twilight Realm, which features dark colors with light highlights.  The text is the Hylian alphabet used in that game.  It actually correlates with the English alphabet, and the blocks have real words on them, although I chose random, Zelda-related words like, "Link," "Hyrule," "Hero," etc.

Project Two:  If you could call it a project.  There's a drawing challenge floating around tumblr in which the participants go to a website that generates a random pokemon.  They then redraw that pokemon three times, redesigning it three ways.  It's for general drawing practice and for exercising your imagination.  I spent an evening doing some sketches.

Look at this derpy guy!  I tried to make him look a little cooler.

Keldeo's a little cutie.  Here's "Slightly More Realistic Keldeo," "Epic Stallion Keldeo," and "Baby Keldeo."

Project Three:  Naka-kon is coming up and I need to get cracking on my stun gun.  Today I started paper mache-ing it.  My paper mache paste kinda weirds me out.  It's made from flour and water, which the internet assures me is a totally common paper mache recipe.  But it has the look and feel of thick pancake batter, and I can't shake the feeling that I'm smearing pancake batter all over my gun.  I feel like a mad scientist creating an experiment in which a styrofoam gun, breakfast food and newspaper combine together into one monstrous abomination of nature.  Science has gone too far!

Here's a picture, by the way.

Tomorrow, I'll smear pancake batter on the other half.  Later in the week, or next weekend, I'll add a second layer.  The internet says to use about four layers, but I think that's for a hollow paper mache project that needs to be really sturdy?  I'm just going to go with two.  I think that'll do me, since I'm doing it to hide tape and to give a better surface to paint on, and I don't need it to be all that sturdy on it's own.

That's all for now!  Peace out!

Stuff that looks suspiciously like stuff you've seen before...

Second picture of a Trigunner with their pokemon.

(I accidentally made Meryl's hair a touch too long and it blurs together with her eyes.  Oh noes!)
Meryl has water and ice types.  At first I was afraid that Krabby would be this awkward red blob in the middle of the picture, but I'm actually really glad he's there, along with other areas of red and yellow, to give some warm spots to the picture.  These are kind of giving me a lesson in color choices, I think.  I liked Milly's a little better, with the pink, yellow, and brown pallet, and seeing this one is kind of making me worried for the next one, since it's going to have a heck of a lot of black in it.  (Vash's picture is last and it's all red and yellow.  It's either going to look good, or it's going to look like the page is on fire.)

Anyway, not much else to say, I guess.  This was done exactly like the last one, with inked lines and colored pencils.

In other news, remember my cosplay prop?  My stun gun?

You know, that thing that I bring up because I have to repair it over and over again?  Well, I think I went to a whole ONE convention without it, and I decided I wanted it back.  But I had deemed it too unstable and unrepairable, so I was mulling over my options and decided we can rebuild it!  We have the technology!  It's going to take drastic measures, though.  The plan is to duct tape the ever living daylights out of the weak joints, and then paper mache over the whole thing, not just to cover the tape, but to give me a more reliable surface to paint on.  (The paint is constantly chipping off the styrofoam.)  Yesterday I did the duct taping, but I might add more for good measure.

So, yeah, that's it from me.  Peace out, guys!

Cross Stitching

I've been cross stitching for the past week or so.  Unfortunately, I'm only about a quarter of the way done with it, and I'm restless.  I knew it would be time consuming, but I underestimated just how time consuming it would be.  Or perhaps I overestimated my attention span.  I plan on keeping what I have in case I decide to come back to it later, but for now, I think I'm going to set it aside.

Here's the story, though.

I never would have considered cross stitching, since, to me anyway, it holds the stereotype of being an activity that is only done my one of two types of people: old ladies, and Victorian ladies.  Since I am neither, it wasn't an option.

But one day I stumbled on a little crafting niche of cross stitching geeky stuff, like these:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22085563@N06/

http://miloceane.deviantart.com/art/Cross-stitch-Yellow-s-Pikachu-275035689

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stopsign/3282603064/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/krupptastic/3487964783/in/set-72157614432044697/

I thought, "Hey!  That's cool!  Maybe if I'm cross stitching something that I really like, it could be fun."  I decided to give it a try.  After much pondering, I decided to cross stitch the four elemental symbols from the series "Avatar: The Last Airbender."  This was good because a) I'm in love with that show, and b) I wasn't sure how much I'd enjoy cross stitching, so I could start with just one symbol, and if I liked it, I could do the rest.

I started with the air symbol.  I've a fondness for air out of the elements of the show, because air benders are pacifists and avoid direct conflict, and that's me in a nutshell.

Since airbenders wear orange, I grabbed orange thread for a background (and that left blue reserved for water, if I got that far).  The thread changes colors down it's length from orange to yellow and back, so I thought that would look cool.  For the symbol and a border, I grabbed a very dark brown, rather than black.  I don't like using straight black much in art.  I feel like true black is somehow sort of lifeless.  I'll frequently mix it with brown or dark blue to make it either a "warm" black or a "cool" black, and that feels more comfortable in an image to me.

Anywho, I had to make my own pattern, which was a bit of a task, and involved graph paper and drawing, erasing, and redrawing little X's over and over again until I was satisfied.

This is how far I got in a week.  It's about a quarter of the background, and you can see where I intend to put in the spirals when the background is complete.

(This is about three inches across, or about thirty stitches.)

I've learned a lot from this past week.  I learned about cross stitch fabrics, and how to secure the end of your thread without trying a knot.  I learned different ways of making your own cross stitch pattern, and that cross stitch thread comes in more colors than Skittles.  And I learned that cross stitching isn't really my thing, and that's okay.

I consider myself always in a bit of flux.  I'm always learning new things about myself, and about what I like and what I don't like, and how I feel about different things.  I tend to roam from one type of art or craft to another, and sometimes I think it would be better if I just picked one thing and stuck to it.  But then I would stop learning about myself.

Here's to hoping that someday I will actually finish this.

Peace out, guys!

Javert - Finished

Finished!

Okay, so technically, I promised a hat, but I'm kinda ready to move on to other things.  Honestly, he'll probably go hat-less until they release the next Les Miserables movie trailer, and then I'll get all worked up and excited about the movie again and decide make his hat.

The only difference between the finished product and the last time you saw him is that trim and buttons have been added to his uniform.  The trim is slim, silver ribbon that's been glued on.  The buttons I actually purchased as do-it-yourself covered buttons, meaning they're meant to be covered in fabric, so that they blend in with the material of the clothing.  But I had no intention of covering them.  I needed smooth silver buttons for his uniform, and buying covered buttons was cheaper than buying the real thing.  The buttons come with a front, that gets covered, and a back that pops into place afterward.  Since there's no fabric, I hot-glued the front and back together and then sewed them on as-is.

And that's about it!

Now that I've got Javert done, and I've got Tokyo in Tulsa out of the way, I feel like I'm open to start up new things.  I'm not totally sure what I'm going to start on, since I have a few different ideas of things I'd like to do.  But I do know that I'd like to get started on some writing.  (Remember earlier when I said my muse wanted me to write stories about some guy named Charles?)  I need to get all my ideas written down and organized, and I have a lot of research and world building to do before I start actually writing.  I debate a bit whether or not to post my writing as I go, but I doubt I will, mostly because I have a habit of getting half-way through a story and then deciding to make major changes to the characters and plot.  If I posted it as I went, I'd end up saying, "Um... guys?... Pretend the last chapter didn't happen.  Also, Riley's name is now inexplicably changed to Emma.  For reasons."

So, yeah, that's where I am.  We'll see what happens from here.

Peace out!

Painted Cork Board

This week I hung up pictures in my bedroom (finally).  I have a cork board that's been hanging around for a while now, and I wanted to hang it in my room because it's so darn useful for pinning up stuff that I have no idea what else to do with.

Originally, it was just a cork board with a wood frame, the wood being about the same color as the cork.  A while back I painted the frame blue to make it... prettier, I guess.  But blue isn't one of my colors I (try to) use in my bedroom, so I figured I'd use the day off for Independence Day and give it a repaint.

My bedroom is roughly Japanese themed.  I've got a few pictures with bamboo and kanji and that sort of thing, some hanging lanterns, a katana sword, etc. and I try to go for a color scheme that's cream, bamboo-green, and maybe a little red here and there.  So, how about a cream colored cork board with a green boarder?  Then I thought maybe I'd take it a step further and paint some kind of picture or symbol onto the face of the board.  I decided using a picture from a hanafuda card would be cool.

Hanafuda is a deck of cards from Japan that uses pictures rather than symbols and numbers.  I've loved them ever since I was introduced to them, because I think the pictures are gorgeous.

The cards are organized into twelve suits (with four cards per suit), each with a different plant/flower.  Each flower corresponds to a month in the year, so to narrow things down, I went with my birth month of February, which is plum blossoms.

Thank you hanafuda.com for this picture.  You're a life saver.

After that, I chose the card with the bird on it, because... birds are cool, that's why.  After a little research I learned the bird is a Japanese bush warbler.  They're a common and popular songbird in Japan, and hearing the warbler sing is one of the first signs that spring is on it's way.  Since plum trees bloom so early it's practically still winter, both images on the card are associated with early spring in Japan.

And a partridge warbler in a pear plum treeeee!

So then!  Ready!  Set!  Paint!

Here you can see the color the cork and the frame were originally, and the new color for the cork.

Once the cork was painted, I drew the image on with pencil and then outlined it with sharpie.  I knew as I was outlining it that I would end up painting on the lines on accident and would have to redraw the lines.  Honestly, though, I'm such a sucker for being able to see my progress that sometimes I jump the gun.

The image got painted and the lines cleaned up.  Painting was pretty easy because the cards have a limited color pallet, so pink flowers are shown as red, and there's no shading or color variations.  For the green, I had to add some gray to the paint to keep the bird from being neon, but for rest of the colors I could use the paint straight out of the bottle without having to mix colors.

And the frame was painted the same shade as the bird.  All done!

All painting was done with acrylic paints and just slapped on there without any prep work or post work or sealers or mediums or any of those darn fangled contraptions.  Just good ol' paint.  That's how I roll.

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In other news:

*I've got my saddle bag for my Fluttershy cosplay.  I went ahead and bought the purse I had seen at Walmart.  Then I cut a butterfly out of felt and glued it on the front.  Nothing really special, so no picture.

*Javert-Plush has pants, and a pattern made for his top.  Pants aren't really all that exciting, though, so no picture, either.  Once he gets his whole outfit, I'll post a pic.

That's all!

Peace out!

My Little Pony: Cosplay is Magic!

Remember when I said I was going to make a costume for My Little Pony, and I had a bubble-gum pink wig?  Well, I've gotten pony ears, pegasus wings, a dress and shoes.  All that's left is deciding what I'm going to do about a cutie mark (the picture the ponies have on their flanks).

Okay, ready?

The skirt of the dress goes down to a few inches above my knees.  You can't tell in the picture, so just thought I'd say.  With the skirt length and the spaghetti straps, and how skinny I know I am, I feel like I'm a dress with noodles sticking out of it, like one of those awkwardly lanky teenagers.  Oh well.  Whatever.

My shoes look like this.

I was after flats or sandals in yellow or pink, and I think I checked every single place in town that sold shoes.  Stage, Maurices, Penny's, Factory Connect, Payless, Brown's Shoes, Chapman's Shoe Emporium, (That was an interesting place.  They sold every kind of shoe, some sports stuff, and skateboards; and it looks like it might be converted from an old steakhouse or something.) and Walmart.  They either didn't have anything in pink or yellow, or they were ugly.  (There's a certain shade of pink that just shouldn't happen in shoes.  Neither should neon yellow.)  Finally, I was at Walmart, and was at the stage where I'm ready to throw my hands in the air and shout, "Whatever!  I'm going home!" when inspiration hit!  I grabbed a cheap pair of flip-flops and found the flowers in the craft section.  And there you go: pink, flowery, slipper, flip-flop, feet protection devices!

I want to carry Fluttershy's saddlebag with me, as a place to put money, keys, a camera, etc. while I'm roaming around the convention.

I'll wear it as an over-the-shoulder messenger bag.  I was planning on making one myself, but while I was at Walmart, I saw that they had purses that were pretty close to the right design.  I may just buy one of those and add the little butterfly to it.

Then I'll be set to go for Tokyo in Tulsa this month!

A couple of friends are also going as ponies.  This will be my first time being part of a group cosplay.  I'm excited about that.  Because, you know, friendship is magic and all that.

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The credit where credit is due section.
Wig: www.thefivewits.net
Ears/Wings: Ya Ya Han's cosplay store.  Her website is down right now, but here's her deviantart account: http://yayacosplay.deviantart.com/
Dress: bought through the brand's store on Amazon.  http://www.amazon.com/TRIXXI-Stripe-Floral-Burnout-2489786BAI/dp/B0082F2Q7U/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_t_1
Shoes: Walmart

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Peace out, guys!

New Project full of Les Mis-y Goodness

I've been very busy crafting this week.  Have I been sewing a dress?  No.  Have I been drawing?  No.  Have I been putting together costumes?  No.

I've been making a plushy, because my artistic ADD kicked in hard core this week.

Mod Podge, Guns, and Other Things

So, I believe I ended my last post mentioning that I had another drawing up my sleeve.  Unfortunately, it didn't happen.  I got hit with Artisting ADD, then I got hit with a cold, then I got hit by the holidays, then I got hit by laziness, which is no excuse at all, but something that happens to me more often than I ought to allow.  But here's what IS happening:

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.