Unicorn Tea Party

of selecting the light that gives the most grace to faces

So, last weekend I got to drag out my watercolors and make something! I got to spend almost three days with all my crap scattered over the dining room table, and do basically nothing but work out experiments. It was pretty nice! Life is good like that these days and I get to spend almost all of my time working hard on drawing and painting, and thinking about drawing and painting!  This is pretty much exactly how I like my life to be so I must have made a correct choice at a crossroads at some point, somewhere. 

You guys, I have decided I’m going to start up a new webcomic, (you may have seen me mention Cherry Spaceship before?) because I really miss the fun of doing comics. It’s in my blood and won’t come out.  HOWEVER, for this time I have to write it myself, and writing is a pain in the ass. BUT in this case it is necessary to persevere, so I’m making myself write sentences every day, and things are coming together. It is going to be a long form webcomic like Busted Wonder was, online on my own site. (I refuse to give up my independence, I accept any hardship that comes along with that decision.) Cherry Spaceship is a story about finite biological organisms living in an infinite universe. There will be robots, spaceships, and fights.  It will be up soon-ish. This year. I will try to remember how time on earth works and plan accordingly.

In the mean time, I decided to start up a tumblr:  http://www.penciltool.tumblr.com

If you are on tumblr, please follow me so I can follow you back. I don’t think I’m going to re-post the art I make for there here, so you may want to grab the rss at the top. (I will re-post it on flickr, if you follow me there then you are good).

HERE I will continue to post things that I make that are not done with the pencil tool in photoshop, including more writing.  I still haven’t told you about my wedding, and I have a thing I want to write about Naruto. I apologise about the legarthy that has been living here since I got married, but I have been angry about the fact that in the united states of america in the year 2010, the gays are not allowed to marry each other, so on the best day of my life I have to feel vaguely like shit because I can enjoy a civil right that my friends can’t? F-ed UP, PEOPLE OF EARTH!  EFFED UP.  But I’ll keep that for later, thanks as always for your kind attention and support, & let’s all keep moving forward in a positive direction!

All this was very loose guessing, and I don’t pretend it was ingenious or scientific. I wasn’t any kind of Sherlock Holmes. But I have always fancied I had a kind of instinct about questions like this. I don’t know if I can explain myself, but I used to use my brains as far as they went, and after they came to a blank wall I guessed, and I usually found my guesses pretty right.

– John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.

In Salvador Dali’s “Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship”, he mentions that painters should not live in a land filled with green. If you are going to have green let it be the peaceful silver green of olives and myrtles, as the screaming oxygen vomiting chlorophillic greens that surround us here in western pennsylvainia will suck the painters will right out of you.  Also flowers, also the sea. Painters are delicate and thier eye is fragile. Too much breaks things, so have a care what you turn your eye to, painters!  Dali, savior of painting, talks through his moustache at us, you are meant to paint, not drown, so don’t drown it in it!

Late July is my favorite time of year for flowers, the tail end of daisys, the full glory of the orange day lilies, and the queen anne’s lace just starting to wake up alongside the less common, but prettiest when it happens cornflower blue flower that pops up on the edges of the queen anne’s lace. The corn is high and vibrates that green screaming noise over the rolling hillsides, and most days are sunny and blue and full of fat fluffy clouds.  I spend my time motoring around in my tiny silver car, drowning with a smile.

Life has not always been as good as it is now, and sometimes it feels like, never mind the green and the flowers,  I’d be fine drowning just in how greatful I am.

My grandfather passed away last month. My grandfather and I had been sadly estranged for the past couple of years, because of the evil curse my family labors under, but the last thing he ever gave me was a golden book of Dali paintings. It sits by the treadmill in the basement, as I like to put it up on the magazine rack and stare at Columbus Discovering America as I sweat out my three miles. It feels good, and I’m greatful.

My sister put on a world class bridal shower for me this past weekend, followed by a night of epic partying with our ridiculously awesome friends. In little over two months I get to marry my best friend, and it’s all starting to feel like the countdown to christmas.

This week I get to wait out on amazing news of a dear friend of mine possibly being prego, and there is a new issue of Phonogram out.  (buy it!) You may notice my name in there, as this is the issue my backup Indie Dave short runs. It vibrates weird in my head like an inside out mirror, but there it is. From the first time I read something of Kieron’s writing and he called all the trees sluts, I knew we would be jolly friends. Without him I never would have made it over here to this land where everything I see is wonderful all the time, and I will never forget the lessons I learned fighting by his side in the comics trenches. Long live Comics and Dali and green growing things that scream!

Meanwhile, instead of throwing out all the concepts and procedures of the past, let us search them for values that can be put to use today.

Yesterday I collected up the past six years, put them in an envelope and mailed them off to Sacramento California so that they can be here:

I’m not going to lie, it feels good! I know they are going to be happy hanging at the Vox show, getting looked at by hordes of wandering Sacramento pedestrians. Then on to further adventures, any of which will be better than sitting out eternity in a pile here deep within the unmentionable recesses of Unicorn Tea Party headquarters.

Speaking of the past and unmentionable recesses, a couple months ago my high school boyfriend gave me a blog award! It’s true:

I think it is very shiny and awesome, and it’s also awesome to win a blog award! It seems so quaint,  like out of the past when blogs ruled the earth… It’s nice to hear from the past, and it’s even nicer to hear the past appreciates the future. There’s some wormholes getting kicked up around this event but I’m just going to ignore them and move on, it’s all good, right?  There were rules associated with this award but I think the statute of limitations is expired on that so in exchange I’m just going to set up a permanent blogroll of awesome.

Pretty soon though, not right now, right now I have to finish up this afternoon’s work so that I can get home to sushi and rifftrax Casablanca with my future husband!

PS: Sorry I’ve been away from blogging for so long – obstensibly this place is supposed to be for book reports, but believe it or not I just haven’t finished A World Between yet – I think I was too heartbroken over Anathem to be able to get into anything at all – it seems to be subsiding though. Right now I am completely absorbed in Drawn To Life, 20 Golden Years of Disney Master Classes by Walt Stanchfield.  It’s causing revolutions and the next step is going to be a doozy folks, thanks for hanging on with me, whoever is left! Peace out for now.

There are machines that can do this way better

You know how sometimes it feels like your face is smashed up against the ceiling? Like there is a pocket of helium in your skull and you keep bouncing off the top? All you can see is all the other faces smashed up against the same ceiling and all you can feel is all the piles of the past faces filling up the space under you, till there is nothing left except to feel the pocket of helium in your skull push against the barrier?

The rest of this blog entry is going to contain spoilers for Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

Usually I don’t buy books in hardcover, I prefer the paperback experience for the most part, but I was too excited to wait around past the hardcover cycle for this. I haven’t read everything Stephenson’s written up to this point, I still have The Diamond Age to get through, and the rest of The Baroque Cycle after the first book to read, but I’ve read enough to wonder what there is left to write about after you have written about the past and the present and the future.

I didn’t read any reviews or blurbs or interviews, I just ordered the book from amazon and opened up to the first page. I read the first sentence of the forward that said if you like surprises skip this, so I skipped the forward, and I was surprised, and I liked it.

For two seconds I almost groaned at realizing this was going to be a whole book full of made up science fiction words, and then I immediately stopped caring and loved it, because the ceiling opened up and my head stopped hurting and there was a whole long world where you had a bolt and a cord and a sphere and a giant clock and you could spend your whole life reenacting an ancient battle with some weeds in a back garden, drawing pictures of it on some leaves and shoving them in a nook in a stone wall that you knew was going to last forever until someone else a thousand lifetimes later could find it and say hey that’s cool, I can use this.

I was immediately envious of this life and world, while not perfect it seemed to flow correctly, taking into account the pockets of helium inside our skulls, opening up the ceilings wide enough for each little skull balloon to float up as far as it could.

If you like to think about things like the flow of information through time, isosceles triangles, cats that are both alive and dead, orbital mechanics, phonomancy, and what it means to be a finite biological organism exsisting in an infinte universe, this is a fun book to read.