Truly. Deeply. Madly

I've been picking and parting this painting for the last few weeks. A sliver of cloth here, a layer of shadow there, all done in the cracks between other things, and then left alone to dry while I went off to still other tasks. I'm nearly done with the cloak, and it's been a bit of an adventure keeping the hue and opacity of the fabric reasonably consistent, I must say. Still working exclusively with watercolour pencils, but I think that for the skin, I'm going to have to switch over to my trusty pallette set. Skin tones, you know; I'm too much a perfectionist there to experiment too broadly.

Anyhow. Concurrent to my dallying along on this little scrap of amusement, I've been getting the underpainting done for the first of the two commission paintings I sold for the Live Long and Marry auction. Underpainting for watercolours is not something I'd ever really bothered with before just recently, but after I saw what a stunning difference it made in I'll Forget You, I have become a solid convert. Berol Colorase is mostly pigment, and so it doesn't foil the paint when I lay it down, but it lets me work carefully and deliberately with the light sources and shadows in the pic -- something you can't really do when you're racing the evaporation time of your washes, really. I'm experimenting with patterning in the underpainting currently, seeing whether I can't give a subtle depth of texture beyond the reach of water and pigment. Not sure how it's going to all work out just yet, but the pencil work thusfar is really shaping up nicely.

Anyhow: Here's what the watercolour version of Staunch looks like.
( D'OH! A deer! A female deer! )

You get in your car to go and get breakfast, only before you can safely drive anywhere, you have to use the ice scraper on the windshield.

On the INSIDE of the fecking windshield, I mean!

My packet of windex wipes that I bought last summer, for cleaning my toe-prints off the windscreen (Yeah, I ride with my feet up on the dashboard, but only when I'm in the passenger's side! Cope!) was stuck down between the center console, and the passenger's seat, and I couldn't get it out because it was F-R-O-Z-E-N! Ammonia wipes! Frozen solid, and impossible to ootch out from under the seat rails! SO NOT ON!

It's not quite to eyeball-crunching cold out there, but damn it, it's snot-freezing cold, and for this wayward Desert Blossom, that's entirely cold enough, thank you!

And the best part is? They're calling for another snowstorm tonight. Mind, the insurance guy still hasn't been out to assess the damage to my car that was incurred before the LAST snowstorm. (By the way, when my car was hit? The roads were dry and clear. Not a speck of ice, snow, or road salt to be seen. The idiot just hit me, and then, from what the police said about it, swerved into oncoming traffic, and twenty feet later on, hit someone else. They just didn't spot the damage to my car at the time they cleaned up from that accident, is all. Idiots; they abound.) So... yeah. Somewhat with the whinging, but a bit more with the bemused acceptance sheltering under a bit of wit-nibbling, and flexing of my sarcasm muscle. What? A girl's gotta get SOME exercize when it's too cold out there to walk without a vacume suit on!

Now for today's positive note: Dominus made a fresh pot of coffee this morning before he left. Thanks to ldybastet, I have the Kingdom of Heaven soundtrack again, so my writing playlist sounds right. I have a Sirocco on my desk, and a Godric in my chair, both of which are snoozing prettily, and therefore entirely out of trouble for the time being. (This surely cannot last.) The mail's here! *Scampers!*

So.

LJ's vital signs are inspiring concern. I get that. Totally, I do. It's never a good sign when a tech company lets its designers go, and keeps only its maintenance grunts around. LJ could very well go down in a shuddering thump of economic wangst, leaving us all huddled under our desks, wailing and clutching our CPU's because the internet is where all our friends live, after all.

Or it might not, too.

Either way, before we all run to the bank to liquidate our assetts and put them all into canned goods and shotgun ammunition, here's my info:
Cluegirl at livejournal.
Cluegirl at Insanejournal.

Those two journals are pretty much mirrored, give or take something irrelevant, or my adult artwork, which is ONLY posted on Insanejournal, thanks to 6Apart's corporate homophobia.

I also have Cluegirl at Journalfen, although I've never actually logged into that site, or updated anything there, and I have Cluegirl at Greatestjournal too, but I abandoned that blog when they started arbitrarily deleting people's pictures and icons.

My e mail info, as should surprise nobody at all, is Cluegirl (at) gmail (dot) com, and that one gets checked every day. Hell, let's be honest here; it gets checked several times each day. If I were being really honest about it, several times an hour, but why belabour the point, when we all know I'm a hopeless codependent with no actual life of her own?

I have a blogger account too, but usually forget to check it, let alone write anything there.

As for my other blogs; the creative ones, the beta ones, and the 'professional' ones, I'll be doubling those over at Insane Journal, or on Gmail's blogger here soon, just to be certain I don't lose the content entirely. In the meantime though,