The trip

You read things. You hear stories. You think that all those random and interesting things happen to somebody else. And then, one dark cold night, there is a knock on your window. Right when all you want is to crawl into bed and go to sleep. In one of those rare moments when you seriously couldn't care less that interesting things don't seem to happen to you.

There it is. That interesting thing. That story you will be able to tell. But you don't know that yet. All you know is that it's after midnight and you want to sleep, but there is the knocking. So you go to check it out.

Ok, maybe you are a sensible person and you make a point of not opening your door to randomers late at night. Maybe that's something we all should start practicing.

But then again... If our door remained shut I wouldn't experience a conversation which easily gets a place in the Top Ten Weirdest Conversations of the Decade.

We opened the door to find one of our neighbours. Innocent enough. She wanted to come in for a minute and since she seemed a bit distressed we let her in. Like a bunch of knights in shining armours, saving her from the shadows of the night. We even offered her tea.

Ok, J. offered her tea. I'm rude and I don't offer people tea. Not even when they are in distress. I mean, we already let her in right? I was prepared to fight off any zombies if need be. That should be enough.

We assured her that it's ok to come in (mainly because she was already in) and asked what was wrong and if we could help (see, knights!). With each passing minute and each sentence it all became clearer and clearer.

She was high, tripping on acid like a goofy baby elephant trips over a strategically positioned log. Just less cute. A lot less cute in fact.

She told us things. There were amusing things, boring things and random things, but there were also things that we didn't really want to know.

You want for instance, you say? Well, we already knew that our darling neighbour is a fan of reggae as we can hear her and whatever music is playing through the walls. She told us she went to see the Wailers. Yes, THE WAILERS. Then she told us and showed us how she danced. So now we have her acid tripping, dancing and punching the air with her fist, shouting yeah-yeah, while holding a cup of tea in the middle of our very tiny living room. My third eye can see that tea going everywhere and managing to soak both sofas, the three of us and the printer.

But somehow, miraculously,  all the tea stays inside the mug and the neighbour progresses onto telling us just how, quote, erotically charged she was during that gig. Oh, did I mention she is about 50 years old? Puts things into perspective, doesn't it? We then get informed that she wanted to go backstage and get on with the band. And that she wanted to bring two of them home to have sex with (and yes, still quoting word for word). It was apparently very important that we understood it had to be two of them too. We didn't ask why.

Most of the conversation revolved around the variations of the above. We were also informed that she knows all the best places around to pick magic mushrooms (again, didn't ask) and were assured that since we are good people she will have a big house party before she moves away and that she will tell us where those mushroom-picking places are.

We also found out her general dislike for uniforms and police, were told she wouldn't let the police in under any circumstances because they would see her maize (once again, didn't ask). Oh, and the grass looked like an alien planet apparently. Looked normal to me, but what do I know, I don't have a maize growing in my bedroom and don't go magic mushroom hunting. My life is so ordinary.

The whole happening was rather draining. She was going from uber-excited to depressed in a matter of seconds, swapping from jumping around and an excessive amount of hugging to throwing her hands over her head and crying. My facial muscles got a real workout that night - have you ever been in a situation where you have to keep switching between a happy/excited face and a sympathetic/serious face? About half way through the visit I wasn't even sure what my face was doing anymore, as soon as I forced a smile on she would start crying and then my brain would freeze for a split second and go into an overdrive, desperately thinking make a sad face, sad face! NOW! and trying to figure out how on earth one makes a sad face.

We have managed to finally calm her down enough to start directing her towards the door. We had to promise that we will keep all the windows shut, since she was absolutely convinced that someone will get into our house through one of the cracked windows, then get into my housemate's room and then get into her house (she skipped the bit where our houses are separated by a solid concrete wall, but nevermind). Once they get into her house they will go to her bedroom and torture her. Because that's what robbers do, they squeeze through barely opened windows, float through walls and torture people.

There is a life lesson for you there somewhere.

Three little piggies...

So three little piggies went to the market. Since I don't know how the rest of this story officially goes I drew three little parrots instead:

Reference photo was provided by Raffy. Not sure I did the little bundles of cuteness justice, but I tried.

P.S. A proper post is in the making. Stay tuned in.

A different life

I watched a documentary with my Mum the other day. It was great, an hour long and almost entirely in French.

Mum doesn't speak any French, the only word she understood was Bochimans (Bushmen). I tried to learn French six years ago, so I understood a random word here and there. Not that being able to understand "three giraffes" while there are three giraffes on the screen and someone pointing at them makes that much of a difference.

So we didn't really understand what was being said, but we loved it nevertheless. It was the documentary about Tippi Degré and her childhood in Namibia. She was born there to a French couple of wildlife photographers and lived there among wild animals. Needless to say that I see it as a pretty awesome childhood and that I'm horribly jealous. I can't really complain about my childhood, but I didn't have an elephant to ride or a giant bullfrog to snug. And trust me, normal frogs are not as snuggable (let's pretend that snuggable is an actual word) and are way too easy to squish.

Frogs definitely should be harder to squish.

Anyways, Mum suggested that not all is lost yet. I could always move to Africa and raise a child there. While this sounds like a brilliant idea (doesn't it? doesn't it?) I think I might struggle to convince my partner just how awesome it would be. I mean, if I said we should have a baby or that we should move to Africa he would probably think that this is still within the levels of my inherent madness, even if it's more extreme than normal. But I fear that let's have a baby in Africa might be a little bit too much, even for him.

No place like home

There is something in the water, there is something in the air. And in the food for that matter. It's all different here.

Being home is busy, but lazy. I try to do all those things like relaxing and being helpful and getting work and reading done and I fail miserably. My Mum even plans work so that the important things  get done before I get here. Otherwise they don't get done as my presence makes everyone (and especially my Mum) lazy. But somehow it's ok and it's a part of it now.

My dreadlocks are apparently still a novelty here. The woman queuing behind me to get on the plane told her grandson to sit as far as possible from me once on the plane so that he doesn't catch something. What was he going to catch, good manners? The lady on the plane on the other hand was super interested in the dreads and was asking lots of questions. In Ukrainian or maybe it was Slovak?  Anyways, I don't really speak either of those, so it was an interesting exchange where we just talked at each other using our respective languages. Once I got home I had a slightly less pleasant experience - I made a boy crash his bike. He cycled past me and kept looking at my hair while cycling ahead, then run over a cat, crashed his bike and scraped the hell out of himself. I felt bad. Generally people still stare and whisper, I thought that they would be used to it by now. Oh well. I'll take the whispers as compliments, bad press better than no press, right? Put some controversy into their lives!

I also watch lots of older and cheesy movies, usually the ones I've seen before - which I try to avoid otherwise, as there are still so many movies I want to see. We have a whole list of movies we watch when I get back. This is caused partially by the fact that the same movies are on tv over and over again and it's just easy this way. And partially by the fact that my Mum has her favourites and Dad "has never seen that movie before". It doesn't matter what movie we are talking about and how many times we watched it together, he just hasn't seen it.

Food is different too. Great home cooking. Not to mention that we have a garden and so a bit of our own, fresh and really good produce. It's great to be able to get outside and water some plants, to pick strawberries, raspberries or tomatoes, to sit down under a tree and pick on sunflower seeds from a whole sunflower head.

I also get to plan and dream and talk through all those weird and silly ideas I have. I can do it knowing that it doesn't matter whether I go through with it or not, whether it works out or not, whether I change my mind, give up, or come up with something different. I rarely get specific advice, more of the "it's your life, do what you want" sort of thing, but even then it's good to know that the family is supportive no matter what I do and no matter how weird and silly it is. And I've been testing them over the past 10 years with more and more ridiculous ideas. They either became immune to the craziness or figured that there is no point in trying to change my mind and it's easier to wait it out. Whatever the reason, I'm glad. It's both refreshing and reassuring.

Being home is great, even if I don't get much done. Even if it's not super exciting. It's great, because it's so different, but so familiar. There is just no place like home.

Like falling in love

In my head, I'm an ornithologist. I don't know whether anyone else would agree, especially taking into account that I've had considerably less contact with birds in the last couple of years.

But it doesn't matter. I just am one. Period.

Why? Because I get this feeling in my stomach, half way between indigestion and butterflies, every time I see a bird. It's similar to falling in love. Somehow birds manage to creep into my life, no matter what I do and where I am. They manage to make my serotonin levels drop and push me straight into a state of obsessiveness. It happens every time I go back to the parrot world - it's like a drug. I'm fine for a while and then I see a photo, a video, or Merlin forbid, a live parrot. All of the sudden my brain is not only choking on the parrot beauty and intelligence, but also starting to pick and choose which parrots I should keep, what would the dream aviary look like, where in the world are the best places to go to see those amazing creatures in their natural environment. From there it's straight into forums, articles, conservation initiatives, books, whatever I can get my hands on.

I wonder whether others get that, maybe not necessarily with birds, but anything at all?

Currently birds are creeping into my attempts at art:

Blue-and-gold macaw; chalk and coloured pencils

Goldfinch; coloured pencils

Orange-bellied parrot; watercolours

Maybe I really should push for a PhD involving parrots... Hmmm... Then I could obsess on a daily basis for three full years!

Portrait

Throughout school I was made to draw humans. I hated it. None of my humans looked, well, human. They resembled very deformed, humanoid-like creatures. Sometimes they looked almost human, maybe like some poor diseased alien who came to visit the Earth and tried to blend in, but failed miserably - with one eye bigger than the other and a comically crooked nose. Sometimes the drawings were almost Picasso-like, but not in a good way... Who knows, maybe I'm just REALLY ahead of my time. Fingers crossed my childhood creations are going to be re-discovered one day, almost like Mendelian genetics, and they will change the way people look at the world. It will most likely be after the Earth has been taken over by poorly-blending-in aliens. The world will be convinced I predicted the whole thing. They will put my name in the history books and the human survivors will tell tales of my wisdom to children...


...or not.

Anyway. This is my attempt at a portrait. I'm pretty pleased, it's light years ahead of any of my other attempts. I think it actually looks human. Or maybe it doesn't, but I've been looking at it for too long. It definitely could be better, but to be honest I'm not the most patient person in the world and so I'm giving up.

If you click it, it should go bigger. Can you tell who it is? You get a free hug if you can. Oh, also I think all my paintings look better if you stand further away from the monitor... Ekhm.

Technical note: This is mostly oils. I discovered for certain effects other tools and brushes are waaay easier to use, so I used whatever. For example the background is painted using watercolour brushes.

Progress?

Seems like I'm failing utterly at this blog. I have many stories written up and ready to be illustrated, but unfortunately I don't have the skills to do it yet and so I'm eating lots of chocolate and drawing other stuff. Or attempting to. Watching YT tutorials doesn't really seem to improve my skills greatly and I'm too stubborn to read "theory of art" type books.

I figured I'd try landscapes. Not great for illustrating stories here, I know, but I figured I'll start big and then work on smaller, more detailed stuff, like, well, everything else besides sky, water bodies, mountains and grasslands with an occasional tree.

So I've been drawing clouds and little landscapes and other things, like those weird green sort-of-goblin-like-creatures playing with little girls' dresses, while spinning around in a circle. I think they might be somehow related to the Laundry Goblins, but I'm not entirely sure yet.

Ekhem. So as you can see at the moment I lack the skills and focus, which makes illustrating stories difficult. I should practice one thing till I get it right, but my attention span... Oh, look, a bird!

Disclaimer: some of those are going to be based on photographs/paintings found somewhere else. I am treating those entirely as training for my own use, not commercial action of any sort.

Playing

I've been ill, so not really getting anything done. Couldn't even deal with drawing, as brain decided that focusing on continuous breathing is all it can handle. I didn't want to argue with it too much.

I got a few random things done. Here:

This is Dragon. It's a sad dragon. Or maybe it's just a stupid one - it inhaled too much smoke and now it's choking on it. Eyes watering, cursing its own stupidity.

This is Fluffy. It likes long walks on the beach at sunset, but doesn't like getting wet or the taste of ketchup. It prefers garlic sauce on its pizza.

This is Grass, Tree and Bunny. They were an attempt at learning some of the tools and unfortunately do not have a cool story. They are pretty sad about it, but life is unfair and they'll have to get over it.

It's here! It's here!

I was chatting with my brother when I heard some really loud and urgent banging on the door. I run downstairs convinced that someone is chased by a whole bunch of hungry zombies: tired from all the running away, they (the victim-to-be, not the zombies) are desperately trying to take refuge in my house.

Ok, I can't really draw zombies. Yet.

I got to the door and opened it, ready to fight off any zombies that might be getting too close. All the kitchen utensils are by the back door, so I was sure I could grab a can opener or spatula if needed.

Zombie spatula

But there were no zombies, there was only a grumpy old guy there. As soon as I opened the door he put a sizable box next to my feet and instructed me to sign for it. I signed quickly and shut the door, just in case the zombies were around the corner.

I picked up the parcel and looked at it. It was for me. For ME. It could only be one thing. It's here, I thought, feeling a bubble of excitement appear in my stomach. I run upstairs and started clawing at the box. It felt like Christmas Day.

The box was sealed pretty well with lots and lots of tape. I clawed some more. I tried pulling. Then pulling and clawing simultaneously. Then I remembered that Egyptians invented scissors and that I own a pair. I found the scissors but couldn't really use them properly - I was getting too excited and needed both my hands to operate the scissors. I finally got into the box and inside...

...there was another box.


I took it out and tried to slow down my breathing, as it was getting out of control. I felt very excited and a little lost. For a moment I didn't know what to do, but then I peaked into the box and inside...

...there was another box.

It was all too much for my little head. The excitement bubble was growing and squishing my organs more with each passing second. I was so excited that I felt confused: what the hell is going on with me? Any more excitement and I was going to hyperventilate and have a panic attack.

I gave myself time out: left the third box unopened and went downstairs to get some food. I figured that putting some food on the excitement might help to control it. Either that, or I will just choke on the pasta bake and end this ridiculousness for good. Win-win.

Eating helped a bit. I could return and face the third box and anything it might contain (although I prayed silently for no more boxes).

I opened it and inside...

...was my new shiny graphics tablet.

The excitement bubble growled under the pasta bake, but I shushed it and relatively calmly unwrapped the rest of the contents. It's here.



End Notes:
1. I can't draw zombies. I'm not sure why I did, but I did, so here they are.

2. I don't normally get this excited, I think it must have been a mix of post-exam stress, hunger and delay-frustration. With a tint of excitement.

3. I spent that day drawing lots of random things just to get a feel for the tablet, as I've never used one before - turns out it's quite tricky and it will take a little while to get used to. I need to sort out my computer and some drawing programs. I hope that things will get better and easier over time. For now I'm just playing around. Sorry if it's not up to your standards. But then again, if you got through all of the above nonsense and you are reading this - then maybe it will be fine.

4. I wanted the drawings to be in colour, but I quite like the sketches... What do you think? I think I'll pick one style and be vaguely consistent in the future. Might take a while though.

Delay

I hoped to have at least one proper post up here by now. That hasn't happened.

It hasn't happened because I decided to buy a graphics tablet before I start blogging. I was about to buy one off Amazon last week when a random clicking through sites led me to a land of Low Prices. The prices were a lot lower than on Amazon and, the poor student that I am, I decided to buy the tablet from the magical Low Prices land.

After initial troubles, error pages and a few emails to ensure my payment was received I managed to place an order and decided to give it some time to sort itself out, as I imagine even computerised-order-systems have the right to take a day off during a long bank holiday weekend. I waited till Tuesday morning and then climbed up onto my chair and switched my laptop on. I waited for it to boot.

Yes, this is the way I sit on a chair.

I got rather excited when my mail program updated and made the familiar PING! I got even more excited when I noticed that one of the emails I received is indeed from the Low Prices land.

I hoped my tablet has been dispatched and is on its way. I would have it soon. I would have it soon and could start drawing all the awesome pictures bashing against the walls of my skull. It was going to be truly awesome and everyone would love it... 

Then I read the email. It wasn't an order dispatch, it wasn't even an order confirmation. It was a question regarding my order and a stupid one at that, as I already provided those details earlier.

That meant a delay. My tablet is not on its way, it's still stuck somewhere in a horrible and dark warehouse, all by itself, wondering whether it's ever going to find a new home. I was disappointed, but answered quickly to ensure that the order gets processed asap. I sat back, but promptly received another email with a new question. I answered the email. They couldn't open the pdf file I sent and so emailed me again. Then told me to email another person. I emailed that person and explained the whole situation the best I could. They had questions though. I answered. They directed me to someone else. Who had questions and wanted the files. Then couldn't open them. I sent info in a different format. They had questions...

I tried to be understanding and stay calm, but with each PING! something in me rattled. Maybe those were all the awesome pictures increasing their against-skull-bashing rate and desperately trying to get out. Maybe it was the realisation that the poor little tablet would have to be lonely and scared in the horrible dark warehouse a lot longer than I anticipated. Maybe I just got conditioned against the PING! sound and associated it with problems leading to unpleasant delay. I'm not entirely sure. All I know is that with the last PING! I suddenly had enough. 

The frustration erupted in an aggressive, although short-lived fit. I growled at the laptop waiving my arms at it, as if it could solve all the problems and stop the PING!-ing. It didn't. The fit was quickly over though and after answering the last email I received a confirmation that everything should be in order now, they have all the information they need and will proceed to process the order for me.

So hopefully I will have my lovely tablet in a week and can actually make a proper start here, drawing some slightly more impressive pictures than the ones above. I just hope that the tablet will make it out of the horrible warehouse without any serious psychological damage caused by the prolonged wait. Psychologically damaged tablet + contents of my skull might be too much for an average reader.

Under construction

This blog is going to be full of illustrated stories. There are a few things I need to sort out first, so...

...please. Thank you.