New Year - New Characters..

After a busy Christmas, lots of knitting, singing with famous folks and general laziness when it comes to drawing, I introduce to you:


MAD IRIS

ArtRage is FANTASTIC!

Okay, I haven't yet received my drawing tablet.

BUT, I have been playing with ArtRage and "Hurrah!"
It is awesome.
And I don't even know a quarter of the available functions yet!

I even managed to create a half decent portrait of Boyface!

My tablet should arrive on Thursday.



CAN...NOT...WAIT!

I'm so excited!!

I have gone and spent money I don't have.

Now, I usually don't like doing this but I reeeallly wanted a drawing tablet and found a cheap one and well... one thing led to another...

I'm currently waiting for Thursday to come with anticipation as that's when it's supposed to be delivered! Eeeee!!
So here's hoping that many many pictures are on their way.

I have Friday off work to finish my university application, Saturday I will be in a day-long choir rehearsal with Imogen Heap(!), so that means that on Sunday I can draw!!

Hurrah! :-)

Flu sucks!

Sorry for the lack of pretty pictures of late.
I've been busy, then caught the ickiest man-flu off Boyface and still not fully recovered.

Hopefully I'll be back on the horse soon.

*Cough* *hack* *splutter* *snore*

How I became a Ginger Ninja

After years of torment at the hands of my older sister (who was sweetness&light in front of my mother but was extremely bossy and a bit of a bully in private) and a particularly nasty group of boys a couple of years above me at school who used to throw rocks at me whenever I dared venture towards the playground, I decided enough was enough.

I was going to learn Kickboxing.
I nervously went to my first lesson on a Sunday when I was around 16.
Two hours later I emerged, barely breathing, bright red, wet with sweat and with cracked knuckles..

Perhaps surprisingly, I began going every Sunday after that.

It was HARD! The instructor would push you to almost breaking point, enforcing continued situps by standing full on your stomach if you stopped or fell behind the count.

We would begin with sit-ups, press-ups, leg stretches, balancing exercises, circuits of the hall, more balancing exercises, a few more circuits, running on the spot THEN begin the hit combinations..

After a seemingly infinite amount of jabs, hooks, crosses, roundhouse kicks, push kicks, side kicks, ducking, leaning, rolling, elbow combos and knee combos we would finally move to sparring..

Every week I would dread going, remembering the pain of the previous week - still nursing my bruised knuckles and aching arms, legs and stomach.
But after the lesson I would feel such a rush of adrenaline, feel so energised despite tiredness that I always went back.

I began to go to gradings to earn belts, slowly climbing up the ranks and getting stronger and faster, improving my stamina week by week. I would do 150-200 sit ups every morning before school and every evening before bed. My knuckles became solid and my stomach rock hard. I could both see and feel my arms getting stronger.

Needless to say, I had no problem telling my sister I would no longer be her lacky, and the group of boys at school left me well alone.

Unfortunately I had to leave town for university a month before taking my brown belt grading, and thus would be doomed to remain a purple belt for the foreseeable future.

But it mattered not, for I had become the ultimate fighting machine:

The Ginger Ninja!

Larry The Litterbug

My first ever comic strip was a joint project with my friend Laura at primary school.

We used to draw things all the time and were at that time working on various projects for a school newsletter, such as interviews with the teachers, pupil's favourite school dinners and the new baby sister of a member of the class.
You know, the usual.

We decided we needed to come up with something a bit less serious and "newsy", so thought maybe a cartoon of some kind would lighten the formal journalistic tone..

Doodling away at random sketches, we somehow came up with a character that took our breath away with his awesomeness:
Larry The Litterbug

Larry would be a clean and conscientious bug who would take a firm stance on mess and the environmentally unfriendly.
He would go out of his way to admonish those who flaunted the rules (of litter-dropping).
He would be a force for good in this sinful litter-dropping world.

We wrote a fair few stories about Larry. We even developed a voice for him (obviously for when TV producers found our scribblings and demanded to buy the rights).

I'm not sure if he ever ended up in the newsletter, I have a feeling me and Laura found that we had stumbled into something too powerful for us to handle.. so Larry remained a relative secret to all but a few privileged souls..


Long live Larry the Litterbug: A hero to many, a friend to all and a slave to none.

Recurring Dreams: Spider Attack!

I have always had recurring dreams.
Some good, some bad.
When I was a kid, mainly bad!

Luckily in my adult life these recurring nightmares seem to have mainly been replaced by the downright weird (Gathering up stray cats in a floating ice cream van after central London has been engulfed in water, anyone?).

I am at least aware of the origins of one of these recurring nightmares: the movie Arachnophobia.
It was on the television one night and I really did not want to watch it. I also didn't want to go upstairs on my own because I was already creeped out for some reason or another.
So there I was, waiting for my older sister to come up to bed with me, trying desperately to keep my eyes on my sketchbook... failing miserably and being witness to massive spiders galore!!

For weeks afterwards I had the same dream:
I was sat alone on the sofa when suddenly giant spiders would approach from every direction.
I was powerless, glued to the sofa, just waiting and watching as they crept closer and closer....

I would dream this every night and feared the time I had to close my eyes and go to sleep because I knew what was waiting for me..

Then one day my family and I went to a science centre - you know, one of those places where you get to try out lots of different things and learn about how the human body works etc..
Well, my mum spotted a section on the human mind.
In the room on a table was a box.
A Dream Box.

Oh the claims it made! Allegedly all you had to do was write down or draw a picture of the nightmare you had been having and put it in the box. Once there, the box would contain that dream, and all the worry associated with it..

A miracle! Maybe I could get away from those blasted spiders for good!
I nervously drew my picture and put it in the box...

That night as I got tucked up in bed, I thought about the Dream Box.
There's no doubt I was skeptical, I had but also secretly had fingers on both hands crossed for the spiders to have vanished from my sleeping life.

I had no need to worry, I drifted off and all night dreamed pleasant dreams of kitties and candyfloss and all the lovely things that should fill a young girl's mind.

I know as a rational human being that the nightmares went away due to trickery of the mind and by writing my worries down I had externalised them and therefore lessened them.

But part of me still wants to believe it was also a little bit magic..