Recent work

My website is still down, I know. I'm waiting to get some help with it right now. So, still working on it.

I've been sketching daily at work to get back into practice. Here's one result that turned out rather well:

Something I'm finally starting to work on after wanting to for several years is a series of illustrations based on my dreams. Back in university, I was required to start a dream journal by a drawing teacher. This was when I discovered that my dreams are, apparently, far more peculiar than the average person's. Which, I suppose, bears out with me being far more peculiar than average in general.

Anyhow, I feel like I've finally achieved enough skill in my drawing to really do this series justice. So the other night I did a preliminary sketch based on one of the dreams that has long been a favorite of mine: I dreamed an evil robot was going to destroy the city unless I could make it a good margarita.

I like the face on the right-most robot the best, but the body on the middle robot is my favorite. So I'll probably switch heads on those two.

Where the hell have I been???

So I just wrapped up a one year volunteer gig as Chief Script Writer in charge of herding cats coordinating writers for a local amateur theater company known as FASS. It's a group affiliated with the University of Waterloo that writes and puts on a musical comedy each year. The show is in January, which meant that during November and December I was wrapping the script, and January I was busy rehearsing for the performance in February.

But Anna, you say. It's now most of the way through March. Well, my time since then has been spent on three trips to Ohio, battling the plague, and recovering from a cracked rib. (Tae kwon do sparring accident, nothing sinister, I promise.)

And now I've got a lot of catching up to do. So first thing's first.

Yes I know my website is down.

My webhost went out of business in December and I somehow didn't get notified. I didn't really find out until we were about to go into production on the play, and I'm only getting to rectifying the situation now. I know, I know, bad me. But I hope to have something up no later than Easter - I'm making inquiries about new hosting right now.

Secondly, I'm getting back in the swing of being creative. For the past year, I pretty much haven't done anything creative that wasn't script-writing; I just didn't have the creative energy to work on FASS and my own projects as well. Unfortunately, my drawing and writing skills are horribly horribly rusty. I have two different plans for this.

Getting back into writing form

So I started another blog. It's rather embarassing as of yet, but it's a blog in which I will attempt to force myself to do writing daily. It hasn't happened yet - getting back in the groove is hard. But I'm hoping by mentioning it here that will make me feel a bit more accountable to the five of you weirdos who have actually followed this blog and to the ten or so of you who check in every several months or so.

Anyway, here it is: Wundergeek Writes. Fair warning that I fully expect the things I post to suck for at least the next six months. I've had to do this before and I'm pretty familiar with how it goes. But the only way to get good again is to actually write, so I suppose I'd better get the pain of sucking over with now.

Getting back into drawing

Drawing is a bit of a harder faucet to turn back on, since it's not so much a thing that you do as a way of thinking. I've found that when I sit down with my sketchbook, I have trouble of thinking of things to draw. So I've been visiting the Daily Sketch Group over on the ConceptArt.org forums to mine old DSG topics for ideas of things to draw.

It's been working out well, so far. I'm starting to get back into the groove. I even did an original sketch the other day. So I thought I'd at least post some of those here so there would be something concrete to show:

Dude, the topic was "freaky looking creature that has the qualities of owl and grub". I kinda freaked myself out drawing it, which is why I draw an owlcat to make sure that owlgrub wouldn't get too uppity. Brr.

The Valkyrie is one of my favorite roleplaying characters ever. When I was playing her, I would draw her with a silver-age style costume - very skimpy and superhero-y. But I thought I'd try my hand at a more heroic and less scantily clad Valkyrie. I like how it turned out.

Zombie Santa! I had a lot of fun with zombie Santa here. I hope you can read my hastily scrawled notes.