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This was a drawing challenge: over at kakao-karten.de, there's a thread with weekly drawing challenges for one's sketchbook. This week, the task was to draw various objects that accompany you. Sure, I can do that! XD



Shown in this sketch:
One of my MANY MANY MANY puukkos. (Stacked birchbark handle with metal end caps; drop priofile, though that's not really visible from this perspective and at this level of scribbly-ness.)
One of my MANY MANY MANY travel watercolor boxes. (I refrained from adding paintbrushes, pencils, and pens - imagine my bag to contain a lot more art stuff than this! Also, yes, a watercolor box in monochrome looks kind of sad, but it couldn't be helped.)
One of my MANY MANY MANY travel chess sets. (No, I don't go anywhere without a chessboard. Not without chess pieces, either, but I was simply too lazy to draw those they would have distracted from the composition... Also, the wood of this set is actually much more reddish, but never mind.)
One of my MANY MANY MANY sketchbooks. (It's a new one that I received as a gift in my advent calendar from Taddi. Ironically, most of the art supplies I used to draw this picture - with the exception of the Liquitex marker and the book this sketch is in - are also from this advent calendar. It was a good opportunity to test the new art supplies!)

Not shown in this sketch:
The boring stuff. (Keys, wallet, feminine hygiene products, though in hindsight I almost regret not adding the latter.)



Materials:
- suuuper awesome sketchbook from antaresnox; a beige double page. (Yes, I deliberately used very thick black outlines and positioned the objects in a way to minimize the visual impact of the black bookbinding yarn... XD)
- Acrylic pens: Marabu YONO in black and white; Liquitex acrylic marker in Unbleached Titanium
- Glitter gel pens: Ohuhu Gel Ink Pen in gold and silver (on the knife)
- waterbrush (not in the photo)

A very fast drawing today. I was busy playing a game of chess (online) and scribbled while thinking. :)




Materials:
- suuuper awesome sketchbook; a light brown page this time
- Fineliner: Staedtler pigment liner, black, 0.4
- Markers: Faber Castell Pitt artist pen brush in Raw umber and Warm Grey III
- Acrylic pen: Flysea Acrylic Painter Extra Fine in white

Questions fromyhlee. :)

If anyone wants five questions from me, just say so in the comments.

1. You can magically make any THREE watercolor pigments lightfast that aren't currently, but you have to GIVE UP a pigment forever that you currently use in your main palette(s). What are your choices?!

Oh, that's easy. I want alizarin crimson, real indigo blue, and aureolin yellow in lightfast versions, please. For that, I'd be willing to give up even my beloved indanthrene blue (PB60), because I'd replace that with the indigo and feel okay about it. Though it would probably even easier to give up my current standard cool yellow (PY184, which is very similar to aureolin in hue and wonderfully intense but unfortunately more opaque than I like) for magically lightfast aureolin.

2. What food/drink local to you confuses foreigners/tourists the most?

Mett. (Wikipedia says: "The name is derived from Low German mett for "chopped pork meat without fat", or Old Saxon meti for "food".") That's raw pork, usually eaten on bread rolls. It's very typical, and very confusing to tourists who can't believe anyone would eat this. Or should I say, it grosses out virtually all tourists?!? Tastes great, though. (Geographical food rule of thumb: the further up north you go, the more likely you are to find cultures willing to eat raw meat. It's possibly related to vitamin D intake?!?) Americans are typically entirely unwilling to even try the stuff, which is unwarranted: it's typically served with onions, which are not only a spice but also pretty good disinfectants... (Also, unsurprisingly, the local food safety rules around meat are really strict when compared to the USA.)

3. You gain the ability to magically talk to one animal species (they can talk to you too) - which one is it?

With my luck, it's probably squirrels. Dumb, noisy, aggressive towards anyone and anything, love to throw stuff... Yep. Squirrels. I'm sure those are going to be some great conversations. (If I get to choose, I'd love to talk to an octopus, please. But if it's the universe that assigns superpowers, um, yeah, I'm afraid it's really squirrels.)

4. You're trapped on a desert island with a chess grandmaster, past or present. Which one and why?

Oh hell no, that would mean something has gone very wrong in my life. I mean, of the present ones, I would have to choose one of the guys I'm personally acquainted with, simply because that's less awkward and would assure at least a minimum of cooperativeness towards mutual survival. Otherwise - I'd really want to play chess against Mikhail Tal, but that's the predictable answer, isn't it? For non-chess issues and general attitude... Probably David Bronstein. He was interesting.

5. What is the most cracktastic/bizarre Nibelungenlied-inspired work of art (opera, novel, poem, artwork, whatever) you've experienced?

I think some Nibelungenlied-inspired Third Reich propaganda fits the bill of bizarre for sure, though the 'work of art' aspect is usually questionable... (Humor is if you laugh anyway.) Otherwise... The Wagner opera stuff is also pretty bizarre on the narrative/fanfic level though at least parts of the music are pretty good. Um. And obviously there's a lot of pretty kinky fanart that's cracktastic but also true to the spirit of the original.

The Unforeseen Gambit (100 words) by EllerWrites
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Original Human Character(s), sentient sword - Character
Additional Tags: Chess, Swords, Fantasy, Chess Tournaments, Drabble, Magical Artifacts
Summary:

Eileen and her magical sword are playing a chess tournament.

Everyone, look at this, yhlee made me a sketch book! (To fully admire the craft that went into binding the book, look at his journal entry with more pictures and descriptions how it was made.)



The chess position on the cover isn't random - rather, it's the end position of my favorite chess grandmaster game ever, Tal - Hjartason, 1987. I squeaked when I unpacked the mystery package and saw this diagram! (It's the kind of super-weird position that, uh, has a lot of recognition value.)



The back cover is chess-themed, too. :)



And the book holds a selection of different papers in different colors! YAY! I knew some of them, but others were new to me, so I couldn't wait to test them all! The book is suuuuper fun to use, and for dmonstration purposes, I decided to show the first page of each paper section, with the picture I painted on it. Recently, I've mostly sketched with black and white acrylic pens and my watercolors, so that's what I've used here as well.

( Behind a cut, because hey, these are a lot of pictures. )

As you can see, I'm enjoying the book a lot already! :D It's not full yet, but... Only a matter of time. ^^°

It's after midnight, so, it's technically Easter Sunday now where I live... Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates, and a wonderful time to absolutely everyone! I actually don't celebrate, but I participate in the fun local traditions anyway - and clearly, the best of those is getting to paint eggs! (I'm just treating it as a generic celebration of spring.) Any excuse for some creative activity! :D



This year's easter egg theme was actually a bit of an emergency solution - I usually prefer having a variety of colors, but the only eggs available in all the local supermarkets were brown (and, let's face it, with the food situation being what it is, we were lucky there were eggs), which means I was somewhat limited. (Green and blue dyes only look good on white eggs, and yellow on brown? Forget it!) I mixed red and orange food colorant to get the background color, because I figured pure red would be too dark for proper contrast with the drawings, and pure orange wouldn't really show up on brown eggs. I drew the chess pieces with a brand new food pen (you know, the kind you also use for drawing on fondant and the like) that will be getting a 1-star review from me because it ran out of ink and I wasn't able to fill the dark areas properly, which if you ask me is wholly unreasonable after only six tiny drawings. Anyway, as improvised as they are, I'm happy I have chess easter eggs now. Silhouette style always works for me! And they were so much fun to paint! Maybe I'll eat them while playing online chess? Then again, I wanted to do some old-fashioned baking tomorrow, so, we'll see. :)

This time, it's super awesome fanart by yhlee that I had in my mailbox a few days ago. YAY!!!

Click here to see the wonderful ATC

The ultimate chessmaster and Shadow Queen! :D (I'm the luckiest person in the world to receive super nice fanart!)

By way of yhlee:

Comment below and I'll ask you five questions. Answer them in your own journal, offer to give the first five commenters their own sets of questions, and let the cycle continue!

1. If you could play chess against any chess player, present or past (or even fictional), who would it be and why?

Mikhail Tal, who else? :D I mean, I'm told often enough that my style is as weird as his - unfortunately, that's not the case, because he was brilliant and my chess is just weird but not nearly as good... But, oh, the result would be fun!

2. What is your favorite dulcimer song?

Eh. Are there songs specifically for dulcimer? I'm clueless. XD If it's "song that can be played on a dulcimer", that would be German folk songs like "Es geht ein dunkle Wolk herein" or "Ich hab die Nacht geträumet". They'll work on any type of zither, really.

3. What is your favorite meat dish?

Steak. XD
...okay, that's a primitive answer, but really, I love a good steak. I also like any and all casserole dishes involving ground meat, like moussaka. I love roast wild boar in plum sauce. And I like pizza with salami and bacon. And... I like most meat dishes, really!

4. If you had to use a limited palette of six colors/pigments, which would they be? (Sorry not sorry, my obsession with limited palettes is a DISEASE.)

Oh, that's easy.
PY154, PG7, PB15:3, PV19, PV23, PR254. These are the ones I keep buying and keep running out of. Where does all that PG7 disappear to, I wonder? XDD

5. What is one algorithm that you find aesthetically really pleasing?

This could become a very long list. :D One of my all-time favorites is one I learned as a little kid: the Monte Carlo approximation of Pi by throwing darts at a circle drawn in a square. Soooo much fun, and I remember being very impressed by the beauty of that approach! (It's also one of the first algorithms that nerdy kids learn; every single programming book and course has it as one of the first examples. Guess what? That's BECAUSE it is so neat.)

Sooo, the chess world has its newest scandal: a young player, GM Hans Niemann, is accused-but-not-quite-accused of cheating after winning against Magnus Carlsen in the Sinquefield Cup. Magnus Carlsen rage-quit the tournament with vague insinuations but no direct accusation. This is understandable either way. If Carlsen seriously suspects cheating, he'd bring that up with the arbiter(s) of the tournament, but would not say anything in public: if the accusations can't be proven, there's a real risk he'd be sued for slander. His re-tweet of a certain Jose Mourinho statement is a pretty clear implication, though. Now, does he suspect slander or is he simply being a sore loser? Of course, without hard evidence, there's no way for me to tell. I'm just interestedly observing everyone's reactions. And I mean everyone's. Everyone is talking about this! (So am I. LOL)

The facts of the case:
- Magnus Carlsen lost to Hans Niemann in round 3 of the Sinquefield Cup, an on-the-board tournament.
- That was not a particularly good game by Carlsen's standards.
- It was an extremely good game by Niemann's standards. GM Niemann has "only" a rating of around 2700, which is GM level but not world-class GM level. However, he's also only 19 years old, improving fast, and may be a better player than his rating indicates. Anyway: he won against Carlsen. (For that matter: repeatedly.)
- Hans Niemann has apparently been previously suspended on chess.com, presumably for cheating in online games. (No details are known, but the 6-month ban is a fact, and difficult to explain otherwise.) This may explain why some well-known chess personalities are unwilling to give him the benefit of the doubt.
- After the game, GM Niemann gave an extremely weird interview, in which he a) came across as a complete a**hole (which is not the weird part but rather usual for chess grandmasters), and b) claimed to have looked at just that super rare opening just before the game (statistically very unlikely but not impossible) and had some weird mix-ups in his chess evaluation of the game.
- Carlsen did not show up for the next round of the tournament. He did show up on Twitter, though.
- World-class player and popular chess streamer GM Hikaru Nakamura also showed up. (It needs to be mentioned that Niemann is also a chess streamer.) I guess he simply enjoys the drama, as usual.
- A summary of what everyone tweeted can, e.g., be found here: https://worldchess.com/news/all/did-hans-niemann-actually-cheat-all-the-info-so-far/

What would potential cheating look like, anyway?
- Is it possible to cheat in on-the-board chess tournaments? Yes and no. I think I've written extensively about the instances of cheating I've observed during my time as a chess-obsessed teenager. I've also mentioned that chess players tend to have a tendency to cheat. Anyone who ever organizes a chess tournament, however, knows this. Chess arbiters are some of the smartest, toughest, and most paranoid people on this planet. To cheat at a high-level tournament is... Near-impossible, I'd say.
- The first way would be direct communication with someone. This... is difficult when everything is being filmed. (At the board, there are cameras on the players at all times. Even microexpressions are recorded. You can be sure that body language experts are now all over the Niemann game to see if there's anything suspicious showing up.)
- The second would be computer use. Preferably done in the toilet stall, which is the one place that's (hopefully) not being recorded on video. However, I believe, these days, it's the standard that players and visitors are searched and have to pass a metal detector before the enter the venue. Bringing an electronics device would take some serious subterfuge. (Recent incidents of suspected computer cheating included compression socks and a tube of lip gloss.)
- The third would be off-the-board cheating. This would be... the easiest to manage, and (because of the absence of arbiters) near-impossible to prove. Basically, this would involve stuff like hacking Carlsen's computer with his opening preparation (though I don't think any of the top GMs are stupid enough to have that on a device with internet access), having someone break into his apartment (though I'd think someone at that level has private security), or paying off someone on Carlsen's team. (Seconds-turned-traitors are a good old chess tradition, after all!)

My personal take on this:
- I'm not going to hazard a guess whether there was any cheating involved or not. I don't have any evidence either way.
- Yes, GM Niemann is assumed to have cheated before. However, I'm being cynical here: even if that's true, that doesn't mean he's more likely to cheat than other players. It just means he got caught. (Also, he was a kid at the time. Kids make mistakes.) If anything, it may even imply he's just not very good at cheating, and as a result, more honest than the average chess player. We don't know.
- Also, Carlsen is known to be a sore loser. Rage-quitting a tournament with vague statements that are not-quite-accusations seems just like his style, whether he has grounds for suspicion or not. After he's also refusing to defend his world championship title, there's, of course, a lot of speculation about his current attitude and whether he even wants to keep playing professional chess or not... Again: we don't know.
- There's no evidence of cheating.
- There are other, innocuous, explanations for the weird interview: like, say, a lot of stress after a difficult game. Getting the details of your own tournament preparation wrong is still somewhat unlikely, but not unthinkable. Also, you'd think that someone who just successfully cheated against the world champion would be careful not to comment the game on camera... Though, of course, weirder things than that have happened, too.
- Computer assistance would not just be difficult to pull off. If anything like that occurred, however, several top players have pointed out that Niemann's style during the game in question was "human", that is, he made weaker moves where humans generally go wrong compared to engines. That is: the player would have to be able to decide when not to accept the engine's suggestions... Which, at that level, would imply a level of play that makes engine use quite unnecessary.
- So, if there was any foul play involved, my guess is it was most likely off the board... Which will make an interesting chess story one day. Because, hey, chess players are highly paranoid individuals, and circumventing a world champion's personal security measures would take something. XD
- Carlsen suspecting someone in his inner circle to sabotage him would, of course, also be an excellent reason to quit a tournament...

, pa

This is a painting I made for makkapakka. Originally, it was supposed to be square format, so most of the motif is centered in the middle - but I don't own any square watercolor paper, so... I filled the rest of the format, too.

The size of the painting is A6 (postcard size). I used a variety of materials, here: the drawing was made with black fineliners including a broad chisel-tipped one. The coloration was done mainly with watercolors (different manufacturers), with some acrylics and acrylic pens for highlights and to correct "mistakes" (especially on the yellow pieces) where I accidentally overpainted. The white sparkle is acrylic ink.

I really like the result, and I think the next time I get postcards printed this will be one of the pictures... Because, clearly, I'm suffering from a lack of chess postcards. LOL