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Life's good! :D

- My robin postcards FINALLY arrived from the print shop! I can start to write! :D

- I had lovely mail! A large letter from yhlee, and I'm irrationally pleased with that tiny blue watercolor sketchbook... SO CUTE! And a fascinating mushroom card from ursula. THANK YOU! :D

- Mysteriously, I received an Etsy order from Korea today. Mysteriously, because... I ordered that in April. It was sent in April, too - just took a while to reach me. And I'm super pleased about the address label in beautiful calligraphy! Granted, that Etsy store is specialized on calligraphy supplies so they'd better make nice address labels (LOL), but still...! I'm going to keep that one. It's a piece of art. (Hell on the postal system, though.)

- Chess software! I upgraded to the new ChessBase 16. Pricey, but I'm one of the few people with an actual use for a chess database system, so... LOL. I also bought some training software. They publish ridiculous amounts of chess DVDs but it's usually good stuff, so, while I'm busy wasting spending money, why not?

- Used a Black Friday sale to get some new Roman Szmal watercolors. I didn't have the ones that were released this autumn yet, and 30% off is a good deal, so... More colors. There can never be enough watercolors... Yes, I'm hopeless.

- I played a game of chess against an extremely rude opponent. XD It was funny. He blundered a piece. He used the button to ask if he can take the move back, wrote the message "misclicked". Okay... Not likely (there are typical "misclick" mistakes, like letting go of a piece one square too early, but this was not the case here) but I let him take the move back. He didn't bother to thank me... Just put the piece on another square, where it was also blundered. Oooo-kay. We played on. He asked to take back another move. I thought that was getting ridiculous, clicked "no". He started insulting me. XDDD Chess players. You simply have to love them.

I joined the Multi-Fandom Postcard Exchange a while ago, and received my confirmation in the physical mail today. That means I can start sending fanart postcards to people there! :D I already drew two, one for The Queen's Gambit (because, hell, I just needed an excuse to draw fanart for that show), and one for Anastasia (simply because I grew up with that one and loved it). And I want to do Sailor Moon, too, for nostalgia's sake... AHAHAHAHA.

- ADVENT CALENDARS! I have two calendars this year, a "large" one (with the days 1 to 24), and a "small" one (with the Advent sundays and the 24th). See the pictures!





This is the "large" one, with a pretty hexagonal main calendar and multiple large mysterious packages... Doesn't look very pretty on the photo, but the design is actually VERY nice: black, with iridescent green shimmer. Unfortunately, my camera can't deal with the effect. You'll just have to believe me it's very pretty indeed!





And this is the "small" one, with the numbers written in "code" (AHAHA not really, but a nice imitation anyway). I could already open one of the parcels today, and I received...

INK! Diamine, "Smoke on the Water". It's, apparently, turquoise with red effect, and I can't wait to try it! Unfortunately, all my fountain pens with broad nibs (effect inks need broad nibs) have other inks inside right now... I just don't have enough fountain pens. But... AWESOME! I looked at this review, and really, the ink looks awesome! :D

WHEEEE! :D

The design of the star clock is strongly inspired by a piece in my collection. :)

Minimalistic, and yet I almost destroyed the paper... LOL

This is more like scribble held together with sparkle, but at least I'm only one day behind now?!?

With the prompt "A Game Begins", it was clear I'd draw something involving chess! Here, two characters from one of my stories are just starting one of their games. Anhai, my favorite demon general, is losing against his sort-of-girlfriend Yora. I mean, they've only played one move so far, but Anhai is totally losing. :D I've just noticed that I draw Yora-playing-chess a lot (here's another pic of her) and that most other pics I have of her are NSFW stuff involving her and Anhai. (And no, I haven't posted that anywhere, and I don't intend to.) Anyway... This was fun. I like how the light turned out.

Again, a fast and scribbly one - but at least I'm up to date again... I drew this at work, while my colleague was making me a friendship bracelet. Yes, we were actually working - except with computational modellers, casual observers don't always notice that. (I'll never forget us being introduced to someone as "those two are our modellers - they're geniuses, which explains a lot". Still waiting for anyone to refer to me as a genius in any other context, though. XD) Anyway - we were discussing Hidden Markov Models, and actually making a lot of progess, but to an unitiated observer, it would have looked like drawing and macrame, respectively. With tea and cookies.

My warm grey watercolor marker finally died completely, and the replacement ones I ordered have not arrived yet. That means I had to use a Faber Castell PITT marker, also in Warm Grey III, for parts of this picture. Which annoys me a lot. Not through any fault of that marker (I was happy to discover that Faber Castell seem to use the same pigments for their PITT markers as for their watercolor markers, so the color is indeed identical) but simply because I wanted to limit myself to one type of marker, and this is the wrong one. :(

Quick and dirty. Also, I had fun with the composition. XD Phoenix lady has a braid because I can, and so I didn't do that practice tutorial thingy for nothing. My grey marker is mainly pushing ink around by now. Still, I'll use it until no more color comes out or until the replacement arrives, whichever happens first.

Not even an attempt to be tidy - but at least I'm not behind anymore. XD Birdie was fun. (Perspective, what's that? LOL) Also, I think the grey marker is finally empty, which is kind of annoying - I mean, I already ordered two more (hoping they will last me to the end of the month), but it will also be a few days until they arrive.

Okay, so this should probably be called "Silver Map of Shores" or something, but I didn't know what else to do with the prompt. (I know it's technically my own prompt list but I used rune castings and random associations to generate this, so the prompts were a surprise for me as well.) Was not feeling very creative - I actually drew most of this last night (after midnight, LOL) and finished this morning. The hand is specially for aliax_alexandre. XD

I hate drawing feet! Usually I duck out of drawing them but in this case, I took the prompt as an opportunity to practice... That never hurts, right? XD