Elaby's LiveJournal - 57 Academics

I haven't posted anything in my art tumblr for years, but I was struck with the need to do Tolkien fanart and there seems to be a really nice, thriving Silmarillion fandom over there. So I drew a picture of Thranduil. If you like, have a look!

Last weekend, Rachel and I went to one of my favorite places in the world: the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Rachel’s library has a membership so we can reserve passes to go down there whenever they’re available. Rachel got up early to put the egg strata we’d made the day before in the oven, so it came out hot and smelling delicious when I woke up. She made it using a small loaf of bread we’d bought at the previous weekend’s farmers market and topped it with veggie sausage patties. I usually have to wait a few hours before I want to eat breakfast, but I snarfed this down right after getting up – it was that good <3

We drove down to Boston using a new route, because the last several times we’d gone, the GPS and Rachel’s phone had taken us different circuitous routes every time. This time, we used a freaking map XD And it worked out perfectly. I think it might’ve taken us a bit longer, but the route was simpler and didn’t require that we go all the way downtown first to get to the T station on the north edge of the city. We also went to a different T stop than usual, as recommended by one of Rachel’s coworkers :) It meant we didn’t have to change lines at all and we just had to walk a little ways to get to the museum. We left our house at 9:00 and were through admission by 11:30.

( Explore the museum! )

I'm extremely excited to announce that we've put our first original art prints up in Cerulean Tree Studios! They're pagan-inspired illustrations done in ink and professional art markers. You may remember one from the Yule edition of Nature Nurtured :) We only have two prints right now (both available in 5x7 inches and 8x10 inches) but we're planning to add to them soon!

We have prints available of these two illustrations:





Please visit our shop to take a look! I'd love to hear what you think of them, and if you have any suggestions for future illustrations, feel free to leave a comment! <3

I've been following a bunch of tumblrs lately (mostly focused on faeries and mori girl fashion and cute lesbians) and I came across a really adorable one full of drawings (misskattoart) that made me want to draw too. So I'm attempting to draw one picture a day - even if it's just post-it note art - and post it on tumblr. Maybe I can actually keep it up! XD

My tumblr is at lindenleafscribbles.tumblr.com. (I have one at elaby.tumblr.com too but I use it only to follow other tumblrs.) Until I find the scanner and/or tablet, what you get is iPhone photos ^^;;

I've been trying my hand at making chainmaille jewelry, and I found it really fun. Tiny little extremely shiny circles that fit together in patterns! For some reason that's really satisfying XD I had a little difficulty starting up because I had crappy materials AND a crappy tutorial (blurry pictures and skipped steps and typos in important number sequences! Awesome!) but Rachel got me a couple of books from the library that are super helpful for beginners.

Also, I realized I haven't scanned any drawings for, like, EVER, and so I thought I'd remedy that. I've only drawn a couple of things recently, but I had quite a backlog!

( Chainmaille jewelry )

And now for the drawings! Nudity warning.

( Mostly pencil but some ink and color zomg! )

This is how I spent my Presidents' Day XD

Okay, so, Macbeth, right? There's a version of it with Ian McKellen in the lead role and Judy Dench as Lady Macbeth, filmed in 1979. It's an extremely good production of the play, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes Macbeth. If you're unsure of your capacity to sit through hours of uninterrupted Shakespeare recitation, though, I'm not so sure I'd recommend it, because it's not the most... action-oriented of adaptations. And although the leads are freaking fabulous, it's somewhat lacking in actors who can say a line of Shakespeare in that tone of voice where you know what they mean even if you don't understand the exact words.

BUT anyway, aside from Ian McKellen and Judy Dench, Roger Rees plays the prince Malcolm and he is utterly wonderful. You may recall him, later in life, as the Sheriff of Rottingham in Robin Hood, Men in Tights. That's where I first saw him, and he's SO YOUNG as Malcolm. Not only is he young, but he is a literally shining paragon of virtue and kingliness - while everyone else is wearing flat black, very Victorian, very minimal costumes, he's dressed in a brilliant blinding white fuzzy sweater. He glows, for reals. And my favorite scene is the one where he tries (successfully, much to my shock) to convince Macduff that's really a ROTTEN PERSON - lock your daughters away, Scotland, and hide your treasure and don't expect vows to be kept or loyalties honored, because here comes Malcolm! Riiiight. Roger Rees plays the wibbliest Malcolm known to man. I can't figure out for the life of me how Macduff was fooled by this speech, because Malcolm is very obviously about to burst into tears through the whole thing.

The internets have nearly failed me in trying to find a screencap, but here's the one lonely picture I could find of Roger Rees as Malcolm. The graininess does not do justice to the SHINY WHITENESS that is Malcolm's sweater, but you can see that it does kind of glow. That's Macduff in the background, going "WTF about my wife and children, now?" and Ross with the curly hair on the right. Ohgod that guy (why hello Emperor Palpatine!) played such a bad Ross T_T Ross is one of my much-loved tiny side characters.

BUT OKAY, getting to the point, the comic. I drew a chibi comic essentially retelling Malcolm's "I'm such a heel!" speech and it's consequences. Aaand I gave it a new ending. The last panel is the only thing that DOESN'T happen in this adaptation of the play.

I'm linking it because it's like 3000 pixels wide and would hurt your f'lists if I didn't. It's horizontally paneled, unlike my usual vertical paneled meme things.

Macduff's day is going to get no better from here. And I don't care how cute and wibbly the guy is, if he made ME cry that hard, I'd want to lamp him one too.

"Lamp him one" is courtesy of my favorite the_arethusa, of course, and will forever be associated with what Tim Stamper wants to do to Sarah.

You know that Lord of the Rings meme I'd been threatening to show you all? It's ALMOST done. One more picture. But I scanned a bunch of my other drawings (mostly fan art) that I had been ignoring in my notebook in favor of the stuff for the meme.

( Fandoms include Bleach, LotR, Love Mode, and Caitirin's head )

In other news, I partitioned my MacBook and I'm now running Windows as well as OS X, so I can play LOTRO with all the cool kids :3 It's wicked neat. I knew other people had both on their computers, but that never translated in my brain to something I could accomplish too XD This also means that it's now possible for me to run Vocaloid on my computer! That is, if I can figure out where one would procure a copy, and if however much it costs is within how much I'm willing to spend on something I'm just going to be fooling around with for fun. I have no idea how to write music and have no instruments, so I'd only be creating vocal tracks, and the whole program is, I assume, in Japanese. Including, you know, the menus and instructions and everything XD But if it's not too expensive, I would SO GET IT just to make Miku sing silly songs for me.

RAR WAH DRAWING IS HARD.

And, can you believe it, all this whine from drawing chibis? I'm trying to do a LotR drawing meme I found on DeviantArt, and I had all these adorable ideas, and I thought "This will be much easier and save a ton of space (i.e. make it possible to draw scenes with multiple characters within the space of the meme template) if I do chibis!" And let me tell you, my friends, blobs of cute are DECEPTIVELY COMPLICATED.

I did an experimental drawing in five minutes on a post-it at work today and I seem to remember it looking much better than the ones that took me the better part of an hour. My hand hurts from drawing, and my neck hurts from craning over my lap with my face three inches from my sketchbook. Maybe I should start drawing on, like, a hard surface or something e_e

I did succeed in drawing a convincing hat on somebody's head for the first time ever, even if it is in minimalistic chibi form.

I keep forgetting to post both of these! I drew Konata a couple of weeks ago and used astillac's watercolor pencils to color her. I liked them so much I bought a set of my own :3

Link to the picture of Konata on my DeviantArt

And I got this meme from daegaer equally long ago! Yay for icons :D

1. Reply to this post, and I will pick five of your icons.

2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.

3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.

4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon squee. Whoo!

daegaer picked...

( ...the icons under this cut! )

So, you may have noticed that caitirin and I saw the new Clash of the Titans remake and really, really loved it XD Sooo... I drew fanart. Eh heh. Silly, chibi, ridiculous fanart. You've been warned.

( Wide image under the cut. )

Also! One more picture, one which I really like a lot more than the silly scribble above XD You know how I was trying to draw magical girls? Well, this is the only one I came up with that I really liked... which is indicative either of my tastes or my ability to draw frills XD

( Foom )