Sometimes,

nothing much interesting happens for months on end.

Other times, you get a rock concert and a stakeout in the same day.

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.

Out of the attic: That thing you did in primary school

No, not the time you caught an outsized locust and kept it in your uniform dress pocket, so that when you had to say goodbye to the deputy principal who was moving to another school, you tried to shake hands with him using your left hand, because your right hand was fully occupied preventing the monster insect from escaping and jumping all over him. Oh wait, that wasn't you.
That was me...

No, I'm talking about that thing with the wax crayons, where you fill in the whole page with brightly coloured crayons, then cover it in black crayon and scratch through the layers to make your picture. Well, you know what?

Crayons suck.

While for the most part growing up tends not to be as great as we think it'll be (mainly, I think, because kids are never really taught to make meaningful choices, so as adults we just kind of drift into things), we do learn certain liberating truths, and this is one of the best: The art materials they give to kids are really horrible. The paints, the brushes, the coloured pencils, the crayons, all might as well have been specially designed to make us think we were no good at art. Those of us who persevered, learned something wonderful: out there, in the non-kid world, are proper paints. Proper brushes. Coloured pencils that actually leave a mark on the paper. And... no, not crayons. As far as I know, crayons pretty much always suck. But there's something much, much better - oil pastels!

So, if you're an adult and you don't think you're any good at art, try this: Go to an art supply store. Buy a box of oil pastels, or coloured pencils, or watercolour or oil paints and a brush or two. But here's the difficult part: get the most expensive brand of whatever medium you choose. Your well-behaved self will try to tell you that you simply can't. Don't listen to it. You're all grown up, you've probably blown more money than this on a haircut or a restaurant meal. You have no idea what difference quality makes, and here's the thing: it probably makes a bigger difference to a learning artist than to an experienced one. Picasso could create a masterpiece with one scratchy pencil, but bad materials quite likely taught you, way too young, that you're not an artist. Treat yourself to one box of really good oil pastels.

Now go home and play with them.

Post-apocalyptic

So, I had this cardigan coat thing. I bought it about two years ago because I loved the buttons. Sadly, after hardly wearing it that winter, I realised that much as I loved the buttons, they made it look a little bit like a clown coat. Also, it wasn't that great for wearing open as it didn't have buttonholes, actually closing with giant press-studs that showed when not fastened. And if you can't wear a coat open around here, it's not likely you'll be wearing it very much. Plus, it was just a touch too big for me and the sleeves hung down over my hands. So I decided I'd have to do something to make it more interesting.

Here it is with the brand censored out (I'm sure they wouldn't like the clown comment). When I took this picture I had already removed the buttons and studs - I just balanced them in place here to show you what it used to look like. It sat in my pile of stuff-to-be-mended for a whole year, while I imagined learning to crochet and making sweet flowery edgings... but then I changed my mind.

You see, I'll buy with glee and wear to pieces anything that looks like it comes from one of my favourite movies, and a lot of my favourite movies tend to involve fighting, running, aliens, zombies, fighting aliens, running from zombies, vice-versa, etcetera. Which means that I'm guaranteed to fall for anything that's full of buckles and belts and pockets, and looks as if it were cobbled together some time after the apocalypse from an old pair of cargo pants and anything else that was unwise enough to wander past at the time.

So that's exactly what I did. The day after what some people thought would be the end of the world, I chopped up a pair of cargoes that had finally given up being pants (I haven't shown you the pants as they were because I know you'd know I was still actually wearing them right up to that point) and cut out the pockets, the waistband, and all the double seams with a bit of fabric on each side. Then I hemmed all the bits on a sewing machine and stitched them onto the cardigan by hand. I had to be careful, especially with the turned-up sleeves and the waistband, to bunch the knitted fabric together as I sewed. Otherwise the wool wanted to stretch out and go all curly at the edges. You can see it's still a little like that at the cuffs. So after much sewing and diligence....

Yay! I've been wearing the heck out of it since then. My mother thinks I'm odd. And the buttons? I'll just have to think of something to do with them...

Out of the attic: Lotus flower

Just a simple chalk pastel drawing from way back. Did you know that the lotus is most closely related to proteas and plane trees, and not at all to waterlilies?

For Science!

I've been really busy lately. This, when one's income is directly linked to one's busyness level, is unquestionably a good thing. What's odd, though, is that this type of drawing, my main business really when I come to think about it, is seriously underrepresented on this blog.

This sort of thing. Let me introduce you - probably for the very first time - to Commiphora otjihipana. It's a new species in the genus of plants that includes myrrh, and it comes from the Kaokoveld in northern Namibia.

Shades of primary school. These are peas, beans and mealies that I'm sprouting in order to illustrate the germination process for a textbook/set of class notes/thing. That project involves over 200 drawings.

I adore scientific illustration, because I get to sit in a lab and use a microscope, and run around in the veld looking for things, and draw things that no one has drawn before, and feel all science-y. It also caters directly to my inability to stick to one thing. My university professors must have hated me for it. I was always trying to combine, compare, or mash together things that have never before been mashed. It's great. You avoid being bored, because you keep adding information from different fields. And when someone's better than you, you have the infallible comfort of going "Oh well, she can draw better than me, but can she analyse Hebrew verbs?" And the star ancient languages student can't dissect Commiphora flowers, and the botanist can't ride horses, and my horse-riding instructor... oh dear, I think she can do anything. Seriously.

But anyway, it's fun to dance around the edges of things - art/science, science/religion, all three at once. Even though people who prefer to stick firmly in the middle of their own patch and mistrust all others will likely think you flaky, dangerous, and possibly even quite dim, the edges are where the magic happens. (And how flaky did that just sound?)

The barely mediated contents of my brain

This is what happens when I'm sitting around with drawing materials and no idea of what I'm about to do. It started in the bottom left quadrant with a spontaneous phoenix and paisley explosion. Above the paisley is a city of bird people, the project of much more conscious thought and one of the last things I added.

As you can see, I'm a maximalist.

This painting was made with watercolours and a lot of black ink, and was bought by Lisa, which makes me happy.

!

What's your favourite road sign?

I bet you don't get asked that question very often. I have a very definite favourite, and on my way to Verlorenkloof, I had the pleasure - nay, the privilege - of spotting it in its natural habitat.

Isn't it beautiful? Such purity of emotion. Such endless possibilities.

Usually, this sign is qualified by a sort of subheading affixed to the pole beneath it: !Falling rocks. !Pedestrians. !Potholes. A sighting of it in its pure form gives me intense joy. Look out! Look out for what? I don't know! But look out! With an exclamation mark!

The best thing about my favourite sign is the images it conjures up in one's head. Images like this:

Or this:

Or this:

I say we have a meme. Is anyone with me?

Does anyone know what this character means?

So, at Saturday's market - nearly 300 cranes down, 700 to go! - I got a real, live customer who wants to buy this little still life in oils that I did some years ago. The thing is, she'd really like to know what she's buying, and sadly I have no idea. The candle was a present from my friend Lauren (hi Lauren!) and is labelled "Chinese pyramid small candle" which may help. Or not.

So... does anyone out there know what that character means? Of course I may have copied it wrong, but hopefully not egregiously so. Anonymous (whose mother is the customer, hi Anon and Anon's mom!) thinks it would be really funny if it means "candle".

I like this still life, it's got some of my favourite things in it - a shell bought in Cape Town when I was eight, the candle from Lauren, an amethyst candleholder given to me by my husband (then boyfriend), and jasmine, the very best smell in the world, in a vase belonging to my mom. All arranged on one of my nighties. Oh, the things that inspire us.

The 1000 crane project

I didn't post on the day of the Sendai earthquake because I didn't know what to say. I still don't know what to say, but I figured out something to do. I'm folding a thousand paper cranes, because of the legend and cultural significance which the Wikipedia page explains better than I can. The way I intend it, it's sort of a prayer, sort of an offering - not at all meant to be magical or to affect events directly. But since one ought to affect events directly as well, I decided to also use it to raise money and moral support for those affected. Here's what happens: I take my cranes to the market that happens on the first and third Saturday of every month outside this gallery, I get people to make a donation and then write their name and a message on one of the squares of paper. It will take me about a month to fold them all, so I'll be there at the next one and possibly also the one after that. I collect all the cash in a shoebox, and I'm going to donate it online to the Japanese Red Cross. Once all the cranes, some with messages folded into them, are finished, I'm going to post them online here and wherever else seems appropriate, and also see if I can hand them over to the local Japanese embassy as a gesture of support.

How you can participate: Obviously, if you live around here, you can turn up at one of the markets in April and sign your bit of paper in person. If, for some reason, :) you can't make it to Pretoria in the next month, you can do the following.

• One, donate any amount of money to any one of the charities doing good work in the area. Do it via someone who's collecting where you live, your local church, online, whatever you like. The Google crisis response page has a number of options. Also, here's a blog post with a number of useful links for figuring out where your money should go.
• Two, once you've done that, post your name (if you want) and message in the comments here, and I'll write it on one of my bits of paper and turn it into one of the 1000 cranes. I don't mind how much or little you donate (on Saturday I got two rand from a little girl who was helping her mother sell brooms at the market. Her name and age are on her crane - Bonthle, 8 yrs). I also don't need any proof that you did donate. Just post your message and it goes on a crane.

Let's go!