perevision

So many of my favourite anime series revolve around the twin concepts of 'loneliness' and 'friendship'. More precisely, almost every anime I've seen from the simplistic to the weirdly convoluted hinge on the idea of 'connection'. Sometimes it's more 'you are like me', but often it's also 'I did not expect to find this common ground with someone so apparently different from me'.

Lately I found myself between projects (trying not to translate this in my head as 'unemployable'), so I finished the Natsume Yuujinchou anime and the Nodame Cantabile manga. They are surprisingly similar. Beings with talent, finding each other. Growing a connection between them, and working to strengthen it.

Sometimes anime has a funny way of externalising these inner concepts. How lonely do you have to be to make friends with spirits? Or defeat someone (often brutally) in battle, before they can become your friend or lover?

I can't say making friends in the 'real world' feels the same as trying to get along with a giant tikbalang or being punched repeatedly in the face before someone pity-friends you. But as someone who grew up VERY awkwardly socialised, even meeting people the normal human way is a bit difficult. It's easy to add someone on Facebook, but isn't it better if you know this person thought about you at least a few times a week? If they kept you in mind? That seems to me just as hard to achieve as battling monsters.

( rambling on about building good habits )

I wrote 1000 words last night on the interdimensional Mughal-era Benedictine nunnery YA novel. This is more words than I have written for it in literally years. I really need to work harder on these projects I supposedly really care about. I also began to sketch out a watercolour illustration which is going...about as well, considering I am terrible at lighting in illustration.

Besides that I actually have been writing stuff, mostly journaling and reviews, because when applying to be a copywriter it might help to have some writing with my real name on it that isn't for my awful former vanity-press employer. However the stuff I post on the semi-serious writing blog is taking an alarming turn for the personal. Maybe I'm too self-involved. Not sure that bodes too well for my origfic, or is that actually what origfic is supposed to achieve? Not self-involvement, obviously, but something personal that I don't really have to confront or get to play with when I'm writing fanfic.

Speaking of origfic, I may have forgotten to post the other watercolour illustration from the merboy story. ( See below. )

Reading William Gibson's Distrust That Particular Flavor at the moment. He mentions reading reviews of albums in Melody Maker as if they were SF novels, and it clicked in my mind.

I like a huge variation of different recording artists over different styles and genres. What is the thing that they all have in common? Narrative, of course...so many musicians and composers are storytellers, but what kind of story attracted me more strongly than anything else? My favourite artists tell stories with strong images, that bring out colours and pictures in the mind, even when I don't understand the words. So I thought it would be a fun exercise to match up some of my most-listened albums with some very distinctive comic book artists.

( warning: image-heavy! )
Okay, your turn! What are your favourite albums and who would you want to draw them?

(Note: where sources are not indicated, pics scanned from copies I own)

I spent the whole day reading coffee table books about window displays and now all I want is a fic where Arthur and Eames are window dressers and Eames keeps having recurring dreams about Arthur in window displays.

( I even drew art for it, what the hell )

In possibly related news, my art is also in this video, which makes me weirdly happy. I drew the dinner. JGL is eating my turkey.

Oh, Iceland. Why is your music so lovely?

It's not like I didn't love Björk already, even in her more experimental modes, but when my friend introduced me to Sigur Rós it was like a completely different world.

Then my illustration teacher got me into múm. While Sigur Rós is operatic and emotionally devastating in its delivery, listening to múm feels more like spending a drizzly winter morning snuggled under your duvet with someone you like very much, who's humming nonsense love songs into your hair. Comforting doesn't begin to describe it.

And now Jónsi's got his solo album, and it's so gorgeous I have to do a painting for each one of his songs. Here's one I did a few months back. I've been working on the third one for ages; I keep screwing it up.

I think I had my wangst out about this on dreamwidth last night, but now it is daytime and I am feeling a bit braver.

Still, have a picture, and some thoughts.

( thought balloons )

Also angelthorn linked to some beautiful videos that make me want to travel again, or at least write about it.

I was extremely bored and Teen Vogue is extremely boring this month, so I thought I would take a couple of girl models and draw them as boys.

( Read more... )

Do you know what would be so much fun to do this with? American Apparel ads!

Yay for Dreamwidth and having a mostly public blog again!

I celebrate with Art!

( playing with stamps )

I do have work tomorrow, but I've just re-installed the driver on my Wacom tablet and I had to try and test it.

Experimenting with Photoshop colouring and my perpetual love of the Smudge tool, I wanted to work in a more conventional, sort of comic book style. Doesn't harm the fanart either!

( shiny! )

It does take forever to do though...I could fiddle with different brushes, colours and permutations of the smudging for hours. This bit alone took at least half an hour...

When I saw ( this ) on zakobushi's blog, I thought it was pretty amazing but just a novelty article. "Oh cool, someone's made a movie Bumblebee out of paper and card." Then I went to check out his blog. Apparently he was a crazy fan of Transformers when he was a kid; especially struck by the production quality of the toys...

However, other toys cannot be mentioned in the same breath. Because its materials, style is far beyond to compare. Even I was shocked that the logo of Transformer could change its color, which is the clearest memory on my mind till now. I cannot believe that a transformer toy can be made in such an excellent level.

But because he couldn't afford a proper toy, he made race cars using boxes of pencil lead. Then after experiments with paper, he made a full model of Starscream, from scratch. Nothing to copy except the TV series. I'm not kidding. ( the process in his own words )Then, like me (and many of us), he forgot about TF while busy growing up, until he watched the movie...

Freezing Enthusiasm has been ignited again. People can be easily influenced, but something in one's heart cannot be changed. The first time I saw the foreshow [sic: trailer?] of the transformer, I felt that my feeling comes back. The moment I enter into the cinema, I feel that my dream will soon come into true. According to familiar names, strange faces, classical actor's lines, and fashionable and brand-new Camoro, I exert myself to recall things in 1988. Something just appears and then dies away silently. People always touched by recalling. I'm touched and excited during watching film. It's time to do something to express my true feelings. For I know that I'm still passionate.

Just LOOK at his designs. He made those from MEMORY. From watching the movie a few times.

Go read the whole thing. Seriously. I know it seems like just a fannish thing, and it is, but it's such a fannish thing that...to me it goes beyond Transformer-specific fandom and touches the heart of all enthusiasms and true inspirations. It's like watching my own childhood over again--"if I watch this, then I want to make this, and making this makes me want to do this and..." Plus, English translation aside, his actual writing is really touching. I welled up when he talked about his excitement during the movie, because it matched my own...it wasn't what the movie was, but what it awoke in us that we loved so much. The fact that a movie based on a cartoon based on some "toys that transformed into some other toys indistinguishable from the first set of toys" (to paraphrase Gaiman and Pratchett) could spark so much crazy productivity from a bunch of otherwise reasonably sane and mature people...it awakes a kind of hungry ambition in me. I want to do something like that, or help to do it. That's why I'm doing what I do, after all. This IS my life: not one specific fandom, but the whole of it, the continued perpetration of it, whether through fan work or my own work. Fan work is like getting into practice for what I REALLY want to do, which is make more reasons for nerds to spend days at a time on the Internet. :P

I am now scrambling through the guy's blog to find some of his original work, but am thoroughly lost as it seems to be in Chinese. Help?