Euphoric Blog

I’m an alternate candidate for the JET Programme, and this week was spent seeing a doctor and getting fingerprinted to complete my paperwork.  But I need to keep my art habits going, or rather, re-establish them, so I went outside to draw from life today.  Never mind that it was raining.

I love sharpening pencils in the rain! I wanted to do it outside so I wouldn’t have to gather the wood shavings and dump them in the trash.  It started raining while I was out there and lasted just as long as I had pencils to sharpen.  But it was fun, at least until it *really* started to pour and the lead dust started to smear on my hand.  But after I finished sharpening pencils the sky cleared up, so I went on with my plans to draw from life outside.

I did three five minute sketches, two ten minute ones, and one 15 minute one.  During the second ten minute one, it started to rain and my dad said I shouldn’t sit outside.  But I had set a timer and was two minutes in, and the whole point of this exercise was to build discipline, so I snapped that I’d be in in seven minutes and I kept going.  It wound up only being an eight minute sketch though, since it started raining hard enough that I was afraid the paper would soak through.  It kinda looked like a watercolor even though it was done in 4B pencil, and I may try that again in a more controlled way  next time. The paper didn’t soak through, and it dried pretty fast as well.

I am not posting sketches today, but I intend to keep this habit up for two weeks and post the best ones at the end of that period.

In other news, I am now the proud owner of a little metal tin with a see-through lid.  Yay!  Too bad the face wash powder I want to keep in it has not yet arrived.

HERE you can listen to Neil Gaiman reading The Graveyard Book, which he just won a Newbery for, in its entirety. How cool is that?

This Cat and Girl comic pretty much sums up how I feel these days:

Blasphemers

And yet, I’m also considering going back, albeit for different reasons than the first time.

This has to be the coolest contest idea I’ve ever seen. io9.com is accepting creature ideas based on real scientific research or sci fi speculation, and the winner of the more reality-based category gets a trip to Hong Kong to attend the Synthetic Biology Conference. And the winner of the more speculative category gets their creature drawn by a professional comic artist.

Kinda makes me wish I had taken the more rigorous Biology class in college instead of going with easier Astronomy and Entomology classes. But maybe I’ll learn a thing or two by digging through the BioBricks registry.