Sticky Rice

Daigoro, Ogami Itto's son and Lone Wolf's Cub. Gift art for Nout :).

It does not often happen when I paint, but this time round, I felt like I knew what I was doing. And *maybe* this also works well because the approach is kind of Japanese :). AND because hot-pressed Arches paper is pure love.

Today is Oscar Wilde's birthday.

Oscar Wilde is the man who proclaimed that what happens in the mind is far more interesting than anything that occurs in actual life. He valued art and the imagination above all else. For me, personally, he turned into a true Master, a sensei who shaped my views on many aspects of life and art.

Happy birthday, Oscar, despite the fact that the number 158 probably makes you shudder :).

Shaggy Cloak

It's Dark Ages fashion: the multi-coloured shaggy cloak for posh Irish gentlemen... ;-)

It's ... Gawain! ;)

The - so far - modest adventures of the future Ladies' Knight will start posting again soon... Work on the draft pages continues :-).

Abbess Morgana

Lord and Lady Stark

Finally got around to colouring this :). The texture is by Princess of Shadows @ dA; the letters were Photoshopped in.

A Song of Ice and Fire

So! I started reading A Song of Ice and Fire early May and have progressed to the fifth book in the meantime. Since I started reading this series, I haven't read a newspaper or a comic. It's All ASoIaF, All The Time XD. Yep, it's that engrossing. On the tram. In the train. In my bath. On the toilet. At the table. Even in the street on my way home from work, I'm reading. *sigh* My life is at a standstill because of the Starks, the Lannisters, the Tyrells, the Greyjoys and their ilk. This is really why I don't read a lot of novels anymore: if I don't like them, I can't finish them. But if I do like them, they swallow me whole.

"Why do you even read the books? Watch the tv series!", I have been told. But you see, a tv series can never be as engrossing as a book. I never fall in love with characters from tv. I cherish and adore characters from books. On tv, a character always gets an existing face. Tom Hiddleston. Benedict Cumberbatch. Alan Rickman. Sean Bean. Oh yes, they are excellent actors and they take me along for a fun ride. But they are real people in costumes. And much though I love Hiddleston's Loki, Cumberbatch's Sherlock, expect to love Sean Bean's Eddard Stark, and did, um, not love Rickman's Snape, I will never feel compelled to draw actors. I mean, there's no need. Turn the tv on and you can see them. They are already presenting an image of a character; there is no need for me to add to that. To be sure, I can be perfectly content with a tv series and enjoy it (a lot). I loved Boardwalk Empire. It was great! But do I feel the need to draw Nucky, one of the most enticing characters I have seen on tv lately? No.

Is 'wanting to draw' a quality measure? No! But if I want to draw something, that means my imagination has been engaged. I have been inspired to create something. Books engage my imagination far, far more than any film or tv series ever does. If a series or film is good, I do come away with a sense of something, with certain feelings that may inspire me. But I never live with characters from films like I do with book characters. Because I cannot make them mine. They are the actor's, the production designer's, the director's. And you cannot look into their heads. They are too much action and too little thought. And the best thing about books, for me, is that they allow you to look into people's heads. Plus, you get to give them a face all your own.

So, why read thousands and thousands of pages instead of watching tens of episodes? Because reading, and imagining, is so much more fun. And inspiration is such a wonderful feeling.

Now, forgive me, I have to end this post and continue reading...

Last page of my mini-Moleskine: Gawain!

Gawain, for once with a beard :). A knight without a beard is like - well, say, me without shoes. Because knights say things like, "By my beard!" Therefore they need to have beards.

Gawain remains the most difficult character to draw right. This is sad because he's also my main character, but kind of normal because I want him to be perfectly like the Gawain in my head, and perfection is by definition hard to reach. *sigh*

From my sketchbook: Lokiiiiiii!

Kundry

It's my favourite snarky lady, Kundry! This is an exercise, drawn/painted in my mini Moleskine watercolour notebook. It taught me that I actually like working with my good old Staedtler pens best, but for some reason I like the result of the brush pens better :/. Sometimes with my Staedtlers I drift towards a kind of half-baked realism, whereas I prefer a more stylised drawing style. I'm just no good at realism - of any kind.

I like the colours in this one. About the rest I'm not so sure :p.