I very quickly sketched this today. Will probably add Captain Hammer and Penny to the sketch tomorrow.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure Lent was basically created so I could some day draw a dapper robot riding a penny-farthing bicycle. SO I DID!

I also wanted to share a photo of the Big Damn Heroes piece all finished up:

(I’m posting this on Monday because I was busy yesterday)

Today I:
Went to a brunch
Finished the Big Damn Heroes chibis
Watched Groundhog Day
Drank a Shiner
Sat on the patio and drew
Scanned tons of movies into Delicious Library
Made brownies
Bought a bunch of new movies
Bought some new Star Wars toys for my desk
Bought a book for book club

Today I did not:
Post a blog post

fin.

Today, I really just played around with my Prismacolor markers. I also transferred the Firefly chibis onto Bristol board and inked the drawing. It needs to dry overnight before I add color so I should have the final piece ready for tomorrow.

I am still planning to draw some more tonight but since tomorrow is a day off for Lent (no seriously, we get days off), I’ll post it them as a continuation of day 4.

For day 3, I decided to appease Ryan and do some Firefly chibi characters. Decided to do the muscle and drew Jayne, Mal, and Zoe. Things I learned while drawing this: tight pants are harder to draw in this style, Zoe wears a lot of belts, I don’t really like drawing guns.

I will probably tweak Mal’s pose and Jayne’s hair prior to inking but, here ya go:

Sorry about the crappy pic. I’ll scan it in it’s final form.

I decided to try my hand at some chibi characters this morning. This is the first time I have ever tried it and I think they came out pretty well. I drew John and Aeryn from Farscape, complete with crazy!John hair. I am pleased with the way he turned out but I will probably tweak Aeryn before I ink/color.

I’ll probably do the rest of the crew eventually and maybe the Firefly people too.

I sketched this today. I’ll be inking and coloring it on another day.

As you can see, it isn’t very cleaned up but the idea and majority of the sketch is the way I want it.

I had to take that with my iPhone camera because my PowerShot is on the fritz and my scanner is too far away. I have no idea what I’ll be doing tomorrow since I have plans from the end of work until midnight or so. But never fear, more art to come!

I keep hearing it. I keep hearing how I’ve changed since moving to Austin, how much happier I am, how big of a difference this city and this job have made.

I can’t really deny that it’s true. Towards the end there, at my last job, I was miserable. I hadn’t done anything I enjoyed or that was challenging in a long time and budget issues meant we lived with the word layoffs buzzing constantly around our heads. I had headaches constantly and it was totally a shame because I loved that job and that place once.

Houston was never a great fit for me. Sure, when people asked, I told them it was fine. That the traffic and lack of things to do and being away from all my friends was fine. But really, I can see now with distance, I kind of hated it. Fine, I suppose, was the correct word. I got my degree and had a good job and lived just fine. But Houston is not a place where you meet people naturally. All the friends I made in art school lived on the other side of town (an hour drive in Houston traffic) and at work, there was only one other person my age. I often just lived as a hermit in the evenings and on weekends. I am a homebody naturally and it is an all too easy habit for me to fall into.

I love my job so far. I love the challenge and the hectic pace and the people and the food. Last week, we had a shot luge and a money booth at a meeting. At 9AM. But, beyond that, I even enjoy when I’m alone in my cube, headphones on and code laid out across my monitors. It is always where I have felt the most comfortable and I think I have the potential to be really good at this. I learn something new every day. I don’t expect to love it forever or to want to stay for the rest of my life. That has simply never been my way. But for a few years, for several years, I could happily stay and learn and love what I do.

Austin was never supposed to be where I ended up. This was the move that was finally going to take me out of the state. But things work out as they do and here I am. I don’t think a better fit for me is out there. Austin is just so perfect for a geek like me. I can turn to anyone I’ve met and say “It’s my secret wish to be a novelist one day,” and they’d say “Why secret? I want to open a model airplane store someday!” OK, so maybe not model airplanes but illustrate a graphic novel, design a line of men’s shirts, own all the Lego sets, etc. People’s passions run deep and true here and I love that.

There is always something to do in Austin. There are always movies or events or conferences or festivals. There are weird shops and cool restaurants and arty theaters. I’ve been here two months and feel like I haven’t seen a twelfth of it. I’ve made new friends and gotten involved in after work activities and Aimee and Josh and Eric and Brent are here.

And I think this is home. For now. For awhile. Maybe for a long while.

I just bought my ticket to this:

Jealous?

Although I had the best of intentions of watching all the foreign films today, I only got to one. I decided to watch The White Ribbon first because it looked creepy and I had heard really good things.

The first thing you need to know about this movie is that it’s long. 137 minutes, to be exact. Also of note, the subtitles are white. The movie is in black and white and the subtitles show up fine on the dark scenes but the outlined them in black on the lighter scenes and the words are nearly impossible to see.

That’s the bad.

On the other hand, I think I really liked the movie. I think The White Ribbon is a film you need to think on for awhile to truly form an opinion. The film, at its most basic, is about a small town in Germany just before the outbreak of WWI. Strange and horrible things start happening in the town and the children of the town always seem to be situated near the crime scenes.

The narrator lays out the goal of the film in the beginning. He suggests that telling the story of what happened in the town will help to explain some of the things that happened in Germany. It is truly a film about the seeds of fascism and cruelty being sewn into the children. It is no wonder that the town turns evil when the children are subjected to ritual punishment, sexual abuse, and are horribly repressed. The adults are all hypocrites and there is almost no one and nothing to root for in the film. However, it is an interesting look at evil and the ways in which evil is bred.

Somewhere in the midst of the film, I was reminded of the scene in Schindler’s List when the train carrying the women gets routed to Auschwitz instead of Schindler’s camp. Mila looks out the window of the train and sees a young girl near the tracks. The girl drags her finger across her throat, clearly delighting in the fact that all these women were going to die. That girl could have been any child in The White Ribbon. The spark that sent the country hurtling towards Nazism started long before the first camp was built and this movie gives a look at that spark.