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An ATC I made today, with material mainly from my advent calendar! Because it's one of my more detailed cards, I took photos during the process, so if you're interested you can view the step-by-step (with materials and methods) behind the cut.

( Documentation of the ATC )

Here's the finished picture:

So, this is for an advent calendar game thingy... You know how much I love those. XD We have 25 participants, everyone draws 24 inchies (yes, little 1x1 inch drawings) and sends them to our victim organizer, who then builds advent calendars for all of us... With one inchie from each other participant. YAY! (Holy crap, I'm so f*cking glad I don't have to pack those letters!) These are the 24 inchies I drew. The topics are varied because I looked at everyone's profiles to find something that a) they will like, and b) I can actually draw. (Occasionally, that was one small Venn diagram.)



My favorite is, of course, the bog landscape - out of principle. (Yes, someone asked for that. Can do... LOL) I was also surprised that someone requested minerals, because, hey. XD From a purely artistic standpoint, I'm especially happy how the dragonfly and the fern turned out.

I used Staedtler fineliners (different tip sizes), watercolors, Posca white acrylic pen and Sakura white gel pen on KREUL mixed media paper (which is one of the very few "mixed media" papers that actually work for wet media).I don't know why the scan is so blurry - maybe something in the scanner settings.

So, this is basically... a math-y reading recommendation? Prompted by something mostly unrelated in a Discord chat that reminded me of all the ways divination and computer modelling can interconnect. (And not just in the way I use runes and tarot cards for math-y brainstorming; that's not divination at all.) Anyway. One of my favorite publications in recent years is this one:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7387702
It's called "I-Ching Divination Evolutionary Algorithm and its Convergence Analysis" and it's a perfectly serious paper, and one that I want to cite in my own work very badly; I just can't find a justification (yet) for doing so. (The topic is close enough to what I work on, just this type of algorithm I've never implemented, nor will I do so in the foreseeable future. Too bad.) The authors developed their lovely algorithm based on the traditional Chinese divination system of I-Ching which I unfortunately don't know enough about to make any intelligent comments... Just: this is not only creative and fun, but actually good (from the algorithmic side of things).