Eth0:2010 Summer
One of the things I mentioned in my last post was that I'd been visiting eth0. Eth0 is an event organised by a bunch of my friends, typically held twice a year (outdoors in summer, indoors in winter) since 2008. As quoted from their web site: eth0 is an outdoor computer event intended to bring people with differing computer-related interests and skills together for an informative and fun time.
Err, hang on. I use my computer to work on on a daily basis, yes, but other than that I'm not all that interested in how it works. (Hell, that's the reason I dropped out of my previous college studies a couple of years ago...) Nor do I have many computer skills besides digital painting. But, well, most of my friends were going there, so I guess you could say I really went for the fun time and not so much the informative part. :P
I went camping for the week in my Quechua 2" Light tent. The "two seconds" part (no, it's not "two inch", in this case) refers to the fact that once you've taken it out of its bag, you just throw it in the air and it'll unfold itself and then the next moment, your tent is standing there, all ready. No more having to spend 15-60 minutes setting up your tent once you reach a camp site. I love this tent. I bought it three years ago when my (now ex) boyfriend and I went on a camping trip to south England where we'd be spending every night at a different camp site. We already had a perfectly fine tent, very comfy and spacious... that therefore also took about an hour to set up, maybe 45 minutes with practice, and then another 30-45 minutes to tear down. And I was like, "well that's fine if you're spending 1-2 weeks at the same location, but there's no way I'm doing that every day for eight days in a row", haha. So I went looking for a tent that was at least a little bit quicker/easier and discovered the Quechua tents. They're dirt cheap, too -- I bought mine for € 39 and it looks like they've gotten even cheaper since then, which is a steal for a pretty high-quality two-person tent if you ask me.
Aaaanyway. Now that we've gotten that long aside-turned-Quechua-advert out of the way... This was actually my first time camping alone! I've gone camping lots of times with my parents when I was younger, and then later on with the bf as well, as I just mentioned. But this was the first time I actually had the tent all to myself and I quite enjoyed it. Since it's supposed to house two air mattresses (or one double sized) and I was only using a single one, I suddenly had a ton of space to put my clothes, toiletries etc. Among other things, this led to me actually bringing just about my full makeup stash from home, haha. After I got my tent set up (in about five seconds :P) and put all my stuff in it (in another 15 minutes or so), I took my laptop and myself out to the lounge:
The lounge was a huge tent with a wooden floor covered with actual carpet. I took this picture while sitting there myself, so it was even bigger than it looks -- this is maybe half of it. Spread out all over the floor were a whole bunch of old mattresses, pillows and bean bags, all custom-decorated to match. There were also several of those little tables spread throughout the room -- they're IKEA LACK tables with an extra wooden plate on top, painted to look like a slice of tree, with a little decorated lamp on top of each one. It's kind of a shame I took this picture in the middle of the day, because it looked really cool at night. You can also just make out a few of the various handcrafted birds hanging from the ceiling and one of the big plants in the corner. The Design team had a very busy weekend before the event kicked off, but it was well worth the effort :)
In the back of the lounge you can see the bar where I spent quite a bit of my time serving drinks. I'd never worked as a bar girl before so this was a pretty good learning experience, haha. I'd never even operated a beer tap before, so the first few glasses I pulled were full of foam only :P I slowly got the hang of it over the course of the week, though surprisingly few people ordered beer, making it kind of a slow process. Once I would start to get the hang of it after a couple of glasses in a row, no one would order any beers for like a full hour, and by then I'd have unlearned most of the "feeling" I'd just developed :P The Club Mate that we also served was way more popular. But anyway... I kinda liked working at the bar. I'd have thought the hectics of it, especially at peak times when you'd be working 3-5 drink/hot snack orders simultaneously wouldn't really be my kind of thing, but I was fine with it. It actually re-energized me instead of wearing me down... to the point where, when I was practically falling asleep on one of the lounge mattresses one afternoon after a short night, I volunteered for an extra bar shift and felt awake and energetic again soon after :)
The other main thing I did, along with a few other volunteers, was cook dinner for the event's crew (25-30 people) every night. Here we are cooking up shawarma with bell peppers and tomatoes on pita bread. Other dinners included pasta with meat/tomato sauce, rice with chicken and stir-fried veggies and tortilla wraps with beef, beans, corn and guacamole. We bought the meat and veggies pre-cut whenever possible, so it only took us about 60 to 90 minutes to cook dinner each day.
At the 2008 event, we cooked dinner for the crew and all visitors each day, which was about 60-65 people in total... and in addition to that we bought all meat and veggies whole to save on costs. This meant that each day, we literally spent about 1.5 to 2 hours just chopping up veggies and dicing meat before being able to start the 1-hour or so cooking process. This year, we weren't providing dinner for visitors (because there were much more of them), so we only had to cook for about half as many people as in 2008... but even so, we decided we'd rather sacrifice a little bit of money to save a lot of prepping time, hence the pre-diced meat and vegs. Pretty much the only thing we'd have to slice up ourselves were the bell peppers which simply do not seem to come in diced form. So yeah, cooking dinner was actually pretty fun (as opposed to slightly tedious in 2008 :P) and people seemed to enjoy our meals every evening, so that's a big plus :)
Even with the pre-diced veggies and everything, all our meals turned out quite cheap, so by the last day there was still quite a big chunk of the food budget left over. Our solution? Go to a local butcher rather than the supermarket, and order barbecue supplies to serve 30. Here's what you get: three large plates full of high-quality meat, four different kinds of salads, multiple bowls of sauce, six large french baguettes with three tubs of garlic butter, 12 small cheese and onion rolls, plastic plates and utensils for 30 and even three different kinds of wine. I realise there isn't really anything in the picture as a scale reference, but this had to be spread out over two full tables. :P
DIY barbecue! Made out of bricks and a grilling rack that we'd already constructed during the 2008 event. The brick enclosure was filled with about 6-7 packs of charcoal, one of which is supposed to fill up a large barbecue. :P
Nearly all visitors have left by now, so it's time for the event crew and tear-down volunteers to have a nice BBQ together. As you can see, the barbecue got so hot we had to raise the rack by another three full bricks, haha.
So, there was a lot to do at eth0; daily lectures and workshops, lots of hands-on activities, discussions etc. I just didn't really partake in any of that. :P Typically I spent about one shift a day at the bar, either in the afternoon or evening, got groceries and cooked dinner in the late afternoon/early evening, and spent pretty much all my other time lounging in the lounge with my friends. It was nice and relaxing actually :) And then on Friday evening and Saturday morning/afternoon I helped break everything up and got home by Saturday evening. :)
Amsterdam Gay Pride 2010 (well not really) – including FOTD
Last Thursday, Jildou and I were going to go check out the Amsterdam Gay Pride. According to the info we'd seen online, the event was going on from August 5th right up to August 8th, with the biggest event (the Canal Parade) happening today (the 7th) but lots of other festivities going on on the other days as well. So I arrived in Amsterdam at about 11am and met Jildou there, and under her supervision actually charged my public transport chip card for the first time. I feel all cool and modern now. Anyway, once her friend Sander (or is it Xander with an X? I'm not sure) had arrived, we headed out into the city, collecting programmes and maps and such. Over lunch, we had a look at those to figure out where we wanted to go.
Err... well. Protip: if you are going to visit Gay Pride, don't go on Thursday. At least wait until Friday, or even better, Saturday when the actual Canal Parade is taking place. We quickly discovered none of the festivities were taking place until about 8pm, and even then, that was just the opening ceremony/party that took place on some kind of ship. A ship that was actually going to sail out, so if you were going to come to the party, you'd have to stay right until the end, when the ship docked again, somewhere between 2am and 4am. (Well, or start swimming, I guess.) So, that wasn't really an option either, and other than that, there were really only two other events on that first evening, neither of which turned out to be interesting. So, we still had a fun day shopping, hanging out, sight-seeing for a bit like regular Amsterdam tourists and so on, it just didn't have a whole lot to do with the Gay Pride event :P
Here's the look I wore for the day:
On my face I'm wearing the same products I typically use when doing a full-face make-up look: Sunlight colour corrector, Multi-intensive concealer, Medium semi-matte foundation and Finishing dust by Everyday Minerals. I'm not using any lip stick or gloss this day, just a little bit of Rosebud Salve to moisturize.
For the eye look, I actually started out in the crease this time. I used the coppery brown colour in the lower left corner of the Sleek Storm palette and blended this along the crease. Then I took the black from the same palette and applied that all over the eyelid, so it became a very dark grey, blended into the brown above. I also applied the brown all along my lower lash line, smudging it out quite a bit, and used the black in the outer corners of my lower lash line. I then took a wet liner brush and applied the black along my upper lash line as well. Since the whole look was now a bit too dark and smokey for my liking, for a daytime look anyway, I put a bit of the golden champagne colour (upper left corner) in the inner corner of the eye, blended out to about the middle of the lid. I finished off the look with some Etos Extra Volume Black mascara and Automatic Kohl Pencil in 001, as per usual.
Blogger quiz
1. What time did you get up this morning?
8.30am. I prefer to sleep in on the weekends (and by sleep in, I mean until at least 10am, although I guess sleeping until 8.30am when I have to get up at 6.15 on workdays is already kind of sleeping in :P) But today is my mom's birthday so I was up relatively early.
2. How do you like your steak?
Rare. I love rare beef, raw-beef products like filet americain and ossenworst, sushi, sashimi etc... I'm going to have some serious withdrawal problems if I ever get pregnant :P
3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
Shrek Forever After. It was pretty good but I think I liked the previous parts better.
4. What is your favorite TV show?
Do I have to pick just one? Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Castle, Chuck, Fringe... I could go on. There's too much good stuff to choose from.
5. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?
I don't think I'd move, actually. There's plenty of places that I still want to visit some time, but as for a permanent residence, I'm happy right where I am.
6. What did you have for breakfast?
Two slices of whole-wheat bread with light cream cheese and a little bit of BaconSalt sprinkled on top, with a glass of semi-skim milk.
7. What is your favorite cuisine?
Italian and Japanese.
8. What foods do you dislike? or rather don’t prefer?
Onions give me really bad stomach cramps, so I suppose it's a good thing I don't like the taste of them, either. Other than that, there's of course things that I like better than others, but nothing I specifically avoid, I think.
9. Favorite place to eat?
Wok Het Oosten. It's a Chinese buffet style restaurant in the city I live in, where you pick foods you want to eat while they're still raw, and then they're stir-fried while you watch with a sauce of your choice.
10. Favorite dressing?
I actually often eat my salads without any kind of dressing and as such, I don't really have a favourite.
11. What kind of vehicle do you drive?
A 1993 Opel Corsa. Allegedly it was red one day, but it's faded until it's almost pink now.
12. What are your favorite clothes?
Very casual. Either jeans and a t-shirt or leggings with a tunic. But I also love dressing up for special occasions.
13. Where would you visit if you had the chance?
Japan is definitely #1 on the list. Also, Scotland, Italy, Greece, Australia, New Zealand, USA...
14. Cup 1/2 empty or 1/2 full?
Half full :)
15. Where would you want to retire?
See number 5. It'll be quite some time until I retire, so this is subject to change, but for now I'm happy right here :)
16. Favorite time of day?
Definitely evenings. I get the most creative/inspired and therefore productive once it's past 10pm. Also I'm pretty much useless before 10am. Yes, I'm fully aware my job starts at 8 every morning. Ahem.
17. Where were you born?
Hengelo, OV, The Netherlands.
18. What is your favorite sport to watch?
None.
22. People watcher?
Yes. But what happened to questions 19-20-21?
23. Are you a morning person or a night person?
See #16. Definitely night.
24. Do you have any pets?
I have a cat, Tijger. She's the daughter of the cats my ex-boyfriend and I used to co-own. The other cats stayed with him but I took her with me.
25. Any new and exciting news you’d like to share?
I would love to announce "I have a dorm!!!1" here, but sadly, that's not true. So, no.
26. What did you want to be when you were little?
A mommy. Seriously, I think that aside from all the various professions I might have mentioned at one point or another, being a mother one day was my biggest dream. And when I was a teenage girl instead of a ilttle kid, I always said I was going to have my first baby before I turned 25. As I'm now 24 and single, I don't think that's gonna happen, though :p
27. What is your best childhood memory?
Probably going to Disneyland when I was nine. I was super excited about that and looking forward to it for months, and it turned out to be just as good as I'd hoped.
28. Are you a cat or dog person?
Cat.
29. Are you married?
No.
30. Always wear your seat belt?.
Of course.
31. Been in a car accident?
Unfortunately yes. The roads were icy one day and I kind of... spun and crashed into the guard rail head-on. Luckily I didn't take anyone down with me and didn't get hurt, but the front of my car was busted up pretty good.
32. Any pet peeves?
Actually not really. I'm a ridiculously tolerant person.
33. Favorite Pizza Toppings?
Cheese, salami, mushrooms, pesto, bell peppers...
34. Favorite Flower?
No idea. I'm not a flower person.
35. Favorite ice cream?
Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough.
36. Favorite fast food restaurant?
Burger King.
37. How many times did you fail your driver’s test?
Once. I pulled some crazy dangerous stunt when coming onto the highway that I'd never done during any of my lessons, because I was that nervous. Even though the test continued for half an hour after that I knew it was over rightaway. The second time, I got my nerves under control and pretty much passed with flying colours.
38. From whom did you get your last email?
The eth0 mailing list.
39. What store would you max out your credit card?
ASOS for clothing, NailXL for nail stuff.
40. Do anything spontaneous lately?
Not really. I like to plan ahead :P
41. Like your job?
I'm quitting it in two days ;)
42. Broccoli?
Yummy! Especially with cheese sayce. Or as a soup. I should post my broccoli soup recipe some time.
43. What was your favorite vacation?
Probably going to England in 2007.
44. Last person you went out to dinner with?
My dad.
45. What are you listening to right now?
Noises from cars zipping by on the highway. (I'm a passenger, okay? Don't look so worried :P)
46. What is your favorite color?
Blue.
47. How many tattoos do you have?
None.
48. How many are you tagging for this quiz?
Anyone who wants to :)
49. What time did you finish this quiz?
11:02am.
50. Coffee drinker?
I love a good cappuccino, but I don't drink coffee all that much. 0-1 cups per day, as opposed to 2-4 cups of tea per day. Also why is this the last question and not the "when did you finish" one? :P
Jildou’s birthday – in pictures
Jildou (above on the left) had her birthday party last Saturday, and it was a lot of fun! A summary, in pictures.
To celebrate, we had a nice BBQ in her backyard.
In between the rounds of grilled meat, it was time to give the birthday gift. Who needs gift wrap when you have eth0 promotional posters?
The gift is unveiled.
Time for some more meat!
When everyone's satiated, it's time to turn your BBQ into a campfire! Right? Protip: toilet seats don't burn very well.
Protip#2: making popcorn in the middle of a campfire isn't the best idea, either. It gets all ashy and such.
The log's finally caught on fire properly.
Roasting marshmellows over the campfire DOES work, at least.
Need! Moar! Wood!
Building up the campfire some more with the new stack of wood.
As it grows darker, the fire grows hotter...
And hotter...
...okay, I'm gonna quit now before you guys make me join Pyromaniacs Anonymous.
Yeaaaah so I kind of ended up snapping a ton of cool fire pictures and not very many of actual people. Oops. Head over to Bugblue's gallery for that. :P
Mini break in Germany!
This weekend I went to visit a friend (Noëlle) in Goch, Germany. Friday after work, I loaded my things into the car and first went to pick up other friend Ilse. Together we drove to Goch, a fairly small town just on the other side of the border.
Goch, Frauenstrasse
When we arrived, it was already nearing 8PM, so the first thing we did was go out to dinner together. Behind the hedge that you can just make out at the end of the street is an Italian restaurant called La Grotta, where we ate a pretty good pizza.
Housewarming presents
We then drove on to Noëlle's apartment where we gave her our belated housewarming presents (she's been living there for about half a year now, but this was the first time we actually went over to visit). We then watched the sun set and moon rise while having a cup of tea on her balcony:
Me and Noëlle on her balcony
After that, we freshened up a bit and went out for drinks in Goch's city centre. In most of the pubs there, the folk were quite a bit older than us, but we eventually managed to find a place where the average age was probably around thirty rather than fifty :P
Goch by night
Ilse and Noëlle in the pub
We were back at Noëlle's apartment by about half past one. Ilse and I went to sleep on a double sized air mattress, which was fine in terms of quality and would've slept quite well, except that because it was the both of us on the single mattress, it would wobble around every time one of us turned over, jolting the other awake :P Noëlle didn't have such problems in her own bed, but then she had to get up at seven because the dog, used to getting up at 6AM, really wanted out by then :P
Ilse and I slept in until about 9AM, and then woke up to find Noëlle had also stopped by the bakery and gotten us a nice breakfast! Fresh croissants, strawberry cake... yummy! Once we had showered and eaten, we were ready to go out and drove to the nearby town of Xanten, a former Roman settlement. They have a large archeological park which we visited first.
Reconstructed temple
Foundations from the Roman camp
A reconstructed mill and bakery
To keep the younger kids entertained, they'd also built a large playground in the park, a great wooden structure with hanging bridges, slides, nets, monkey bars... and then, right next to it, a huge (like, 4-5 metres tall) inflated air mattress that was bouncy like a trampoline. Of course, we couldn't resist that...
The playground
Ilse and me on the trampoline
Once we'd had our fun with that, it was time to get a bit more cultural again and explore the rest of the park. There was a stone garden, a part where they'd recreated the walls/layout of old Roman houses with hedges, an old drain etc. And then there was the amphitheatre:
Old remains of the amphitheatre's walls
The reconstructed amphitheatre
Once we'd seen the amphitheatre, we were getting ready to leave and moving towards the exit when the rain began to pour down. We ran over to a nearby building -- which we thought was a cafe -- to stay dry, and it actually turned out to be the bath house that we'd previously missed completely!
Reconstructed bath house
Then we did leave the archeological park, and went into Xanten's centre to check out the church. This was a no photo zone, so no pictures there, but it was quite beautiful with stained glass windows, statues etc. By this time it was early afternoon and we were starting to get hungry and thirsty, so we sat down in the city square for some Kaffee mit Kuchen. Noëlle had strawberry cake, Ilse had Schwarzwalder Kirsch and I had raspberry cake with a rice pudding filling. Very yummy, and these weren't small pieces either :P
After we were satiated we walked around town some more and then went back to Noëlle's apartment. The original plan had been to go swimming for a few laps, as the apartment complex comes with its own swimming pool, but once we were seated on a the balcony for a drink first, we decided we liked that relaxing option better... After the either short or broken night, we could all use the rest and dozed in the sun for an hour or so. Then we went out again and took the dog for a walk.
Dazzle emerging from the river
Once we got back, we packed up and headed back over the Dutch border, to Malden, a town a little bit south of Nijmegen. We had dinner there and then went to the cinema next door, where we saw Shrek Forever After. And then it was already time for us to split up again, as Noëlle headed back home to Goch and Ilse and I drove on to Amersfoort. It was a very fun weekend! :)
New laptop! :D
So, as I've said before, in less than two months I'm starting college and (hopefully) moving into a dorm room. Obviously I'll need to buy a lot of new stuff, then; furniture, my own plates and cups, my own bedsheets and other linens and so on. One thing I'd also decided I definitely wanted to get before starting college, was a new laptop.
The PC that I had been using up to now, was still more or less the same one my parents gave me for highschool graudation seven years ago. Sure, some parts got replaced over the years, but I don't think there's a single piece of hardware in it that's under four years old. It still works... but it works pretty slowly, whenever I do something more advanced than browse the web or type up a bit of text.
Portability was also an issue; since I'll probably be living in a pretty small dorm room, and consequentially will have a pretty small desk, I wanted something that I could clear away if I need to do good old pen-and-paper homework and such. Easy enough to do with a laptop, quite a bit more work with a full PC with separate monitor, speakers, keyboard etc.
This past Monday was the big day! I spent the previous weekend comparing various brands and models, and then on Monday morning I finally decided on one and ordered it from the local computer store. Once I got home from work I rushed over there to make it to the store just before closing, and shortly afterwards I returned home with this:
Isn't it pretty? It may look black in the pictures but it's actually a very deep patterned brown. I had my doubts about getting a model with a high gloss finish because it's much more prone to becoming scratchy... but it was the only colour this one was available in, and I wasn't about to go for a completely different model just because of the colour. And now that I actually have it and have gotten a good look at it, I do have to admit it's quite pretty, the way it's all sleek and shiny.
Windows 7 was already pre-installed on it, which I hadn't used before - my old PC was still running Windows XP. That took a bit of getting used to, since various settings were suddenly in different places than I expected them to be and such, but I have to say there's some nice new features as well.
Of course, since it was a clean install and this baby is meant to replace my PC entirely, I had to get all my own stuff onto it. That meant reinstalling all my programs (Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning), reinstalling all my games (Wednesday afternoon) and copying all my files (Wednesday, Thursday AND Friday evening). I managed to semi-break my old PC in the process, so then I had two only-half-working computers for a bit, there... It wasn't the most pleasant of days. But, it's all done, now, and I can start enjoying it!
Long time no see! You’re not surprised, are you?
It's been a ridiculously long time since I last blogged, but then again, that's what you've come to expect, isn't it. So what's been going on in my life lately?
I guess to start that update off properly, I should flash back to the time when I'd just finished high school and was starting college. I went to study Media Technology, which they pretended was this cool combination of multimedia design, with just enough technology/programming thrown in that you can actually create the things you've designed yourself, instead of making the design and then handing it over to a programmer to actually make something workable out of it.
Well, it was pretty much true for the first year, I'll have to admit. Then in the second year, the focus shifted more and more towards the computer science and sysadmin type classes, until there were hardly any art/design classes left at all. And I was all like "I didn't sign up to learn the innermost workings of my CPU, I just wanted to make pretty flash games and 3D movies kthxbye" and dropped out at the end of the second year.
(Oh, and let's not forget the crazy math class from hell. I took it three times during those two years and managed to fail it each time. On the first try, I threw my textbook at the wall in despair halfway through. And then when I had to draw some line graph for one of the exam questions, I ended up drawing a flower on the grid because I had no idea what the words in the question even meant.)
I briefly attempted to get into art school after that but was promptly rejected. In retrospect I'm happy about that; as much as I like art and design and creating things in general as a hobby, I'm not sure I would actually have liked to do it full-time for 4-5 years straight. It did pose the problem of not knowing what kind of subject I'd want to study next... and so I just started working.
Well, here we are, four years later, and I'm still doing just that, and thus concludes our flashback. Over the last year, it's been starting to bug me that I never actually managed to get any sort of diploma besides highschool... and so I've made the scary decision to start all over and become a college freshman as of this September.
I'm going to be studying Nutrition & Health at Wageningen University & Research centre (WUR for short). I'm by no means a health freak -- I love junk food, actually, and have in fact been borderline overweight for most of my life. But I've always been almost obsessively interested in reading about which foods are good and bad for you, which vitamins do what, and so on. I was reading the Nutrition Info labels on food packages pretty much as soon as I could read, actually. Also I've always been fascinated by medical issues, but not entirely to the point of becoming a full med student, and Biology was one of my favourite subjects in high school. For the "Health" part of N&H you actually get to take some biomedical classes as well, which seems really interesting.
All in all, Nutrition & Health seems like the "why did I never think of this before?" choice and I'm very excited about it. Also I will need to move into a dorm for the first time in my life. I've lived with my mom up to my 20th birthday (well, a few days before the actual date) and subsequently moved in with my boyfriend and lived there for the next three years. Then when we broke up a year ago, I moved back in with my mom, and now I will actually get my own place for the very first time. It's a scary yet exciting prospect.
Well, enough of all this "personal life" nonsense, let's talk art!
The main thing since I last posted is of course the launch of Running on Adrenaline. It's been eating up most of my spare time since last September. I originally started out doing two-page updates twice weekly, but admittedly the art back in those pages was of rather poor quality.
Drawing the comic nearly every day has really improved my drawing and colouring skills, and I think the more recent pages look much better than the old ones. The downside to this is that it also takes much longer to complete a page these days. Think six to eight hours per page, with some complex pages even coming in at ten hours and up. Because of this I eventually downgraded to single page twice weekly updates. I dislike the slow pace at which the story progresses at this rate, but it's still preferable to rushing through each page, I think.
I now typically divide my week into 8 time slots: Monday evening, Tuesday evening, Wednesday afternoon, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evening, Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon. In each of these slots I try to spend 2-2.5 hours working on the comic, to get both pages done each week. So, like I said, yeah, that's eating up most of my free time. :P Most of the time I don't mind, in fact even like drawing so much, but sometimes I get a little fed up with it and it begins to feel like work, which is why I called a little hiatus at the end of chapter four just recently. (Remember how I mentioned I was glad not to have gotten into art school in retrospect? :P)
I've also begun to experiment with actually painting, using, you know, real paint. For the comic I exclusively work digitally, from the initial sketch to the end result, every singly line is drawn either in openCanvas or Photoshop. I do occasionally draw stuff in pencil or pen, but never really use any other media. Then in October, I took out my mom's acrylic paints and brushes and actually made a few small abstract paintings (that's two separate links there). And now, with the sudden abundance of free time due to comic hiatus, I've actually sat down and created my first real painting! You can find it below.
Also, over the past year or so, I've gained a much greater interest in beauty stuff. I mean, I'm a girl, so of course I've always liked pretty clothes and make-up and such, but I never paid that much attention to it (aside from dyeing my hair every possible colour of the rainbow, I guess). As of fairly recently I've been putting more thought to applying my make-up properly, for instance, using various different eye shadow brushes to create nice looks with various shades of eye shadow, instead of just quickly slapping on a generic shade of nude-ish brown with a spongelike applicator or even my finger. Even more noticeably I've bought a ton of different shades of nail polish and have been experimenting with creating pretty nail art.
But I'll save that for a different post, because this is getting crazy long as it is.
