Wearing of the green

Ok, this has nothing to do with St. Patrick's day (except for a couple of clovers :-) Happy Leprechaun celebration day/ rainbow-pot-of-gold hunting day and general drink 'til your face falls off day.

All the above forgotten-travel clothing events are true... arg!

Cheers
Suzanne.

PS--thnx to Gilbert Shelton for the great Freak Bros.' quote ^__^

Bean squeezer

I suppose there is a certain irony to flavouring roasted, ground bean juice with pressed bean juice... hmm...

Thanks to Brain Power Studio, I'm going to be at Wizard Con this weekend in Toronto! So, you will notice a delay of comics for a few days. I won't have a table, but will be circulating around. Hopefully I'll see YOU! I'll be the girl that looks like my comic-persona... and I will have a fuzzy ex-Saskatchewan guy with me.

I'm looking forward to getting all creatively reinvigorated with the comics everywhere and also catching up with the creators of Angora Napkin: Troy Little and Nick Cross! Get out to the Con and check out their stuff.

Cheers!
Suzanne.

Crappy Tire

I thought the blond college kid was going to get punched out today on TPIR, but no luck. That's what you get for consistently bidding $1 more than your neighbour in 'contestants' row'.



The Fortune Express kicks butt! The parking lot is terrible! This was the first time we couldn't find a spot though. We parked over behind the spa and took our lives in our hands crossing the road. Clay favours rice wrapped in leaves, I like the little potstickers and Mom was adventurous with calimari ^__^




It was one of those crazy days. At least I had good company while I waited to hear from the guys at Cdn Tire. I'll eventually have to get the rest of the work done, but the quotes on everything were ridiculous ($150 for 4 spark plugs & labour??) Anyway, clearly I should've gone into auto mechanics rather than art apres High School :-P

The Ox Head Restaurant was faboo--I'd never tried it. It's across from the AMC in the Centrum plaza in Kanata. Had a giant noodle bowl for about $10. You can't beat that.



I started watching the Food Network after my surgery last year which is kind of interesting. I got hooked on cake decorating contests, then Chopped and now enjoy the dubious pleasure of watching Restaurant Makeover (and recently the Opener). Sad I know! ^__^

Cheers & bon apetit
Suzanne.

inky fingers

The irony is not lost on me that as I upload this image, the ink bottle is sitting open on the table, along with the ink wash jar. Duh!

Cheers
Suzanne.

for all your spatula needs...

Some people love shopping. I don't understand those people...

Cheerio
Suz.

Caffeinated

Remember to drink when you drink, breathe when you breathe and try not to combine the two. Arg!
I finished re-reading my Dragonriders of Pern book and now I'm onto Anne McCaffrey's Dragonsdawn, which I probably haven't read in 20 years. It's nice ^__^

There are two fresh panels on Deviantart in my 1,000 Themes folder. Check 'em out!

if you are inclined, there is also a silly 'blast from the past' comic over on Deviantart as well. Remember, you can click on the image to make it bigger!

Cheers,
Suzanne.

Acceptance

It's a Grateful Dead type morning: possibly 'cause of IWD making me want to hear 'The Women Are Smarter'... then I was desirous of hearing 'Touch of Grey' (because I figured out how to make my new journal grey in PShop (yay!). So.. we will get by, we will survive!

The Antigonish Review accepted my piece on Carol Little's kickin' novel Hide Your Life Away, which is righteous! I'll post when it'll appear as soon as I know. In the meantime, if you are interested in picking up Carol's book, you can contact her directly, or truck on over to Amazon.

Another 1,000 Themes panel done today #6 "Break Away". Thoroughly enjoying myself, experimenting with pen & ink, ink washes, Pantone greys and smearing with my thumbs everywhere.

Cheers!
Suzanne.

One down one to go

Well, I finished off my cute lil' Moleskine notebook yesterday. This morning I got to crack open my new, bigger Moleskine notebook. It is fun drawing bigger'n with more space to move my elbow and less hand-cramping action. Nice!
I cooked all weekend, and moved between pots, pans, broiler racks, cookie sheets, freezer bags and the like. My kitchen is ridiculously messy now. Which is annoying to me. So I'm ignoring it-- I'll probably venture back in there later today.

I'm well on my way to my 1,000 Themes project, which is a lot of fun. I finished page 5 Saturday evening. I'm not going to call it the 1,000 panel project, because my strip template can have from 1-3 panels on it. It's also taking me far longer to do this than a panel would normally take. I'm probably mad I suppose.

I'll be posting the panels on Deviantart soon and you can go and check 'em out.
I'm very open to suggestions and things like that; so if you have some swanky/cool ideas for the direction of the 1,000 Themes throw them my way. Who knows YOU could find your suggestion on page 162! Or even.. page 680! Or I might just ignore your suggestion ^__^

Cheers
Suzanne.

It's not me, it's you...

Yeah, so I got the crummy-mc-crumb-bum email from the NFB and didn't make the cut into this year's round. Ahh well, it was a little disappointing, but the competition was pretty fierce, so I'm not going to let it get me down too much. I will post the art I put together for my proposal anywayz.

It was awesome going out and about yesterday; it was sunny and every time we got out from a store the temp had risen bit by bit. Ishina is a delicious restaurant, though their Bells Corners' locale is only open for lunch, and only open M-F. The people are awesome and food is spectacular (and it is reasonably priced :-)

adios!
Suzanne.

===
Hothouse 7

The theme this year was 'Here be dragons', so of course I had to give it a try! Here are a few conceptual sketches of dragons (and the maiden-chained-to-a-rock of course). Don't worry, in my 1 minute short, I had a great M. Night Shyamalan tweest all planned out, so the girl definitely came out on top. Which is how I like things to run :-)

Stranger than fiction

Weeiiird!
I actually called my Mom to confirm her absence(?) I was absolutely sure she'd come into the house while I was showering: but of course, she replied that she hadn't! I can only guess that perhaps the strong outside winds had banged the screen door and that I'd conjured the voices myself, thanks to an overly fertile imagination and the muffling sounds of the shower.

OR PERHAPS IT WAS SOMETHIN' ELSE?!

"We may never know the answers to these questions, but our bullshit recreation team thinks it might've gone something like this..."

That's not the electric light my friend, that's your vision growing dim

So I've realized I've had to wear my glasses much more frequently as I read, draw comics and work on design work. I used to only need them in the evenings, if I was tired, or had been staring at a computer screen all day. Now as I type this, the words are a bit blurred...arg. Should find my glasses for this too, I suppose! (The Subject Line's quote is from dear Mr. Leonard Cohen.)

Anyway, the back gate that won't close is another left-over from our 'non-handy-man'. My brother, when he fixed it the first time said to me gravely: "You know it was put on upside-down?" Ahhh... incompetence ^__^

Well, c'est tout. Perhaps I shall get inspired for more later. Speaking of inspiration, I have been toying with the idea of working on some comic stuff, driven by my pal Kattanine turning me on to "500 Theme Challenge". CapTreasureTroveTi on Deviantart posted a list of themes and as I trundled through various members over there, I realized some other folks (Cathaline on LJ) had posted lists of themes and that they were different! So I grabbed two of them (thus having about 1,000 themes) and thought it might be good for a panel or two/ day of work. (Although if you did accomplish 3 panels/ day for a year, that'd get you up around 1,000 or so).

So that's what I've been mulling about in my head.
Also I'm trying not to think of the Hothouse 7 results. I'll post news if I get chosen.. and if I don't of course! If I don't, I'll post my artwork from my proposal on here. And shit, I might do the animation anyway for fun. (Apparently there were 146 applicants this time 'round) ^__^

All best!
Suzanne.

28 days later

Happy St. David's Day everyone ^__^ (Or "Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant" for you Welsh folks out there :-)
Will probably stew up some leek and potato soup in honour of the day, though it has been delightful reading up on traditional 'Cawl' (lamb broth w/ veg) Check out the recipe here.

Keep warm and enjoy the sunshine.

Cheers
Suzanne.

That was the weekend

So yeah, that was the weekend. Whee! The Drink & Draw Saturday night was sweet! Westin & I worked on more 'Leprecant' adventures, as well as a crazy story about ear-candling. Nadine worked on her loom and made a fantastic scarf while we watched. Pictures may follow ^__^

The next day it was adventures in domesticity, culminating with shopping. We actually got severely overcharged at Sobey's for some snausages, so had to truck back in and bring it up. They apologized, gave us the breakfast meat for the posted price as well as a free one. So that was nice. A pain in the ass, but nice.

Then I got to drink coffee, take acetaminophen and nibble cookies.

SUCCESS

Got all the artwork sent in to Brain Power Studio for the GDC stuff in San Francisco--so *huzzah*! Also, finished my application to the NFB's Hothouse 7 and got that sent off yesterday at 4pm. Whew! My hand feels like a lump of twingy-numb pseudo flesh, stretched over angry broken branches. So, I'm officially on break, heading to Westin and Nadine's place.. to eat pizza, drink blueberry ale and .. well.. yes, we'll probably do some drawing in there too!

Cheerio
Suzanne.

Repetitive stress

Deadlining is always fun (no wait, shouldn't that read "never" fun??) I remember once doing clean-up on an animated show years ago and I think I probably did over 100 drawings in a day. My hand got completely mad at me, it was numb, tingling and pulsing. I'd abused the thing so badly I couldn't even write my name!

I try and take care of my drawing hand a little better than that these days...but it's still very easy to overstrain the poor darlin'. Frequent stretching breaks are good..but it's easy to forget when you're rushing to do a pile of drawings. Arg!

Hackin

It is one of those days. I have a zillion things to get accomplished and...no time of course :-D
And..I'm not really sick..hack..not really... grumble!

Cheers
Suzanne.

Boris the spider

Stranger than fiction! ^__^

It was a tasty dinner. The corn bread stuffing's from a recipe from the classic "Joy of Cooking". I can't find a direct link to it, but may copy it down later if I get the time. It was different than the classic bread crumb dressing I was used to, but I'm always up for trying new recipes (especially when there are guests involved). Isn't that funny?! :-D

boo-urns

I also made yummy apple-cinnamon pancakes...but that might be for another comic ^__^
To check out Westin's cool comic, head over here! If you're keen on Palladium Books and role-playing systems, you can go on over to their site too.

Cheers!
Suzanne.

eyeball

Live and learn I guess!
Eye is much better today ^__^

Cheers
Suzanne.

key