Public service announcement

New Rain featuring Daleen Roodt

The amazing Daleen Roodt (see this post) has collaborated with Martie Erasmus of New Rain Clothing to produce a Summer 2013 collection that features prints from Daleen's paintings of indigenous orchids. I can't tell you how much I love these dresses, so I'm going to post a few photos from my sneak peek at the lookbook. Also, Martie and Daleen modelled the collection themselves; they are awesome.










That's Martie's email address you see above. Mail her and she'll send you the whole lookbook. There are also some custom options available, so get your orders in before the 26th of July.

Please note: I was not paid in any way or even asked to do this post.

Merry Christmas

to everyone who celebrates it, and a very merry anything else to anyone who wants one! 

I'm somewhat tongue-tied in matters of faith - whatever I try to say has a tendency to turn out terribly cheesy. So in lieu of a proper Christmas post, I will point you to three places on the Internet where I know I will always be able to find a good Christmas post when I need to read one:

The Internet Monk(s)

Rachel Held Evans

Jamie the Very Worst Missionary

I have linked to the home page of each one rather than to a particular post; although I see each has at least one Christmas-related post up already, it's not the 25th yet and I'm sure there's more to come. 

Cheers guys, it's a good feeling to know there are people out there reading my dim ramblings. And as not the most social human being, it's nice to be able to keep in touch with my real-life friends this way too - you know who you are ;)

All right, gotta go before this all gets too maudlin. Love ya!

Go and read this blog.

As you can see, I haven't been around lately because I've been doing nothing but drawing like a crazy drawing person. This has happened because I put things off a lot due to personal issues, and now I have to do it all at once. So when I resurface I'll have a lot to show you, but I don't really know when that will be. In the meantime, go and read this blog. It ends in 2010, but there's a lot of archive to get through. This girl writes like a freaking legend.

Chrissiesmeer photos, part one

Even if you live in these parts, I think, it's quite likely that you've never heard of Chrissiesmeer. Here's how to find it. Grab a map, and look just left of Swaziland. If you're on Google maps you'll start zooming in and there will suddenly appear, or coalesce, a scattering of lakes like a little blue rash - or perhaps, more poetically, like the Pleiades. West of Mbabane, north-east of Ermelo, south-east of Carolina.

It's very... countryside. Most of the time if you head off into the wild blue yonder, you're going to the bush, but this could never in a hundred years be called bush. It's grassland, wetland, pine plantations, farms. Countryside.

Rode on those horses around that lake at what felt to me like a flat-out gallop, although it was probably only a brisk canter. There were seven horses and although only four had riders, the others kept up with us anyway so it felt exhilaratingly like riding with a herd of wild horses, thundering through the long grass and reeds at the water's edge.

In the foresty area we saw a few shy duiker and a pair of new-to-me buck which I think were possibly reedbuck. It's such a treat to see an animal you've never seen before! All of them were too quick for my camera, sadly. But Chrissiesmeer is mainly about flowers and frogs. Oh, the flowers!

Why, yes, that is a couple of the fattest, healthiest Agapanthus inapertus you have ever seen, with a Eulophia leontoglossa orchid (yellow) and Brunsvigia natalensis in the background just for good measure.

And yes, that is a frackin' great field of the same agapanthus. What is this I don't even.

More botanical madness to come, but I'll leave you with this picture of the sweet pups belonging to the guest farm where we stayed (I highly recommend it). The border collie is my favourite, as he has heterochromia and can keep up with a herd of wild horses, but the pointer reminds me of Nosy in this book so I adore him (her?) too.

Fanart, sorta

Somewhat obscure and oblique fanart. I get very oblique when I'm at my most fangirly, to try and protect my dignity.

This is part of my ongoing attempt to learn to draw people properly. I started with the quote underneath. It took me ages to get the lines perfectly misaligned, by feeding the page into an old typewriter at a slightly different angle for each line. I discovered that the typewriter has a setting where it doesn't use the ink ribbon. I'm not sure what it's for - possibly cleaning the keys - but I used it for the last line, where it produced an attractive blind-embossed effect. Of course the scanner didn't approve of that at all, and I spent hours on GIMP with the clone tool, trying to recreate the letters.

After the words were typed I drew in the figure. Originally the plan was to colour it and go mad with ink and so on, but now I like it so much that I'm afraid to touch it again. I figured that if I scanned it in and posted it it would gain some sort of permanence, so if I mess it up completely after this it's not a total waste.