i n v o c a t i o n s

My last prac ever is over! Now, only thesis and one unit of coursework to go! ("Only"-- hah.) So I've had a little bit of time to fit some drawing in; this is about the Easter gone by.




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It's certainly been a while since I've updated this! Life has been pretty busy. I've gotten married since the last update, moved out of home, painted the walls of this new home, and celebrated our first anniversary. The doctorate is also limping along and I'm in my final year. This all leaves me with not much time to draw, although I have been doing some stuff that I've yet to scan.

I've decided to try and draw more often, even if its just telling mundane bits of my life in the form of a comic strip. (Or in the manner of hourlies.) Here is one bane of my life: headaches. Large image under the cut!


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After some careful looking, I think I've improved a little at drawing noses! YES!



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I've been out and about lately, which means (well, usually means) more graffiti photos. There's some 20+ new ones that I've added, and they can be found here. My favourite out of the recent lot:



YAY FOR ROBOTS!

Aside from that, I finally got off my butt and drew some stuff! They're just random bits from the last month or so.


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It's been a while. I can't believe it's 6 months into this year and a lot has changed. For one, I've only just starting seeing clients (as a psychologist in training) and the thought of it is downright scary. I also have been involved with research assistant work, bribing little kids with stickers to do language tests for me. Secondly, last Sunday (June 15) my boyfriend proposed and we're now engaged. So things have been frenetic over here!

The short winter break is here, so this means a bit more time for reading! (And perhaps posting some sketches and maybe writing.) My pick of books for the Herding Cats challenge has been dictated by what I could find in my local library or scrounged from friends, and here's what I ended up with:

1) Un Dun Lun, China Mieville. (Excited about this one; I loved Mieville's Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council!)
2) Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer.
3) American Born Chinese, Gene Yang.
4) Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clark.
5) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera.*
6) Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh.
7) Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami.

*In the middle of reading this one!

Anyway, some reviews.

( Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer. )


( American Born Chinese, by Gene Yang (graphic novel) )


( Shortcomings, by Adrian Tomine (graphic novel) )

Uni (postgrad!) is now taking over my life. I do have sketches, I swears, but haven't scanned them in yet. In the meantime:

I love reading, so I just had to get onto this challenge that Renay started! I thought I'd post it here, rather than my largely friends-only personal LJ.

So! The rules:
-- Make a list of ten books you love.
-- Share the list with Renay (and whoever else is participating).
-- Read three books from other people's lists by November 30th. And write reviews!

The more books the better, so do join and recommend some good books. ^^

Ten books that I love

1) Les Miserables, Victor Hugo.

2) The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy.

3) Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier.

4) Battle Royale [novel], Takami Koushun, translated by Oniki Yuji.

5) The "Gormenghast" Trilogy: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone, Mervyn Peake.
I'm probably cheating a bit by listing three! The first two books are my true recommendations; they flow onto one another and I've only read the first two in their entirety. I've listed Titus Alone for the sake of completeness, but since it is so tangential to the rest of the trilogy, I believe the first two can stand alone.

6) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen.

7) The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks. [Non-fiction]

8) Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes.

9) Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury.

10) Cloudstreet, Tim Winton.

When I have more time, I hope to edit this post to include a short bit about each book.

The three (or more) books that I'm going to read: TBA.

I'm going hiking in two days and I'm 90% packed and bored. I figured it was an okay time to waste time on LJ.

1) Eight new graffiti photos up. The orange one with the turtle on it is my favourite of this recent lot!

2) Some things I found in my officespace at uni:



(The postcard was really about raising awareness for schizophrenia)




Proof that Freud is a muppet.


3) Some charcoal sketches, including Selphie of FFVIII (G).


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Firstly, four new photos added to the graffiti set! I'd really like to go down to Fremantle because there's lots of interesting graffiti there. ^^

Secondly, a friend pointed me to this most excellent gallery of Dirty Car Art photos. This is much like another love of mine, reverse graffiti- two excellent examples are UK-based Paul Curtis and Brazilian artist Alexandre Orion. And while I'm mentioning alternate forms of graffiti, a very interesting one is Melbourne artist BUFFdiss' masking tape graffiti. One day I think I shall make the move into creating graffiti.

In other news, someone burned me some Korean drama (and Avatar: The Last Airbender) and so I watched My Name is Kim Sam-Soon. Anyway, the usual deal- watched with sketchpad and marker in hand.




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My sister expressed some interest in seeing Princess Tutu and I was really happy about that! We watched the whole series during the past few days. I wrote some squee about the series after I first watched it. There's so much to love about this multifaceted series and characters (and to this end there are some shining examples of Tutu-fic floating around on the internets)— and that is exactly what intimidates me about writing for it. Things have been done, you know? An idea arrives, I open a blank Word document, then realise I don't know how to put words to it and besides, it's been done more beautifully before. "Do you want to save the changes to 'Document 1'?" N!

This time an okay starting sentence drifted to mind. I only ever seem to write short bursts of things so I thought it might be interesting to distill the scenes further to 100-word drabbles. Here's three; I wrote two more Rue-centric drabbles but I want to let them sit.


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I love daylight savings! It's 5:33pm and still bright outside, still lovely as it was when I was at Cottesloe beach earlier today. More hours of sunlight for me to enjoy!

So, some pencil/charcoal sketches. Next time I'm bringing a freakin' pencil sharpener.

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