All I Want for Xmas --

My husband is a mean ol' man. I adore him. And I'd rather draw him a thousand thousand times than keep his photo in my wallet. He's a patient model, and very game for anything.

And did I mention he's a mean ol' man?

He came home from work on the 23rd with a bag from Best Buy which he put under the tree, after informing me that it was for me. I was a little surprised, simply because earlier in the month he'd asked me what I wanted for Xmas, and I told him. As far as I know, downloadable audiobooks don't come in Best Buy bags. I looked askance at the package.

"What is it?" I asked.

He smiled at me brightly. "It's a present!" he replied in a chipper tone designed solely to annoy.

No matter how much wheedling, whining, whinging, asking, prodding, needling, pouting or otherwise making a pest of myself, he remained stalwart and refused to answer my question.

Though he did offer to let me peek. But really, where's the fun in that?

So, I waited (im)patiently, until the husband came home from Midnight Mass, at which time I was permitted to (finally!) open up my gift, which was way cooler than what I got him.

The marvelous bastard got me a Wacom Intuos 4.

Dear Barnes and Noble:

I understand that when I place an order and check on the free shipping thingy that you'll hang on to my order until it's complete.  It's a fact of mail order that I know well.  I can be patient and accept this.  But why must you hold my entire order until the day my pre-order comes in, and then proceed to ship the pre-order separately from the rest of the in-stock items?  You're very silly. 

So far, I have received Donato's very pretty picture book, Stephanie Law's gorgeous instructional book and Jim Butcher's latest oeuvre.  They all arrived yesterday in great condition.  But really, my time could have been better spent in poring over them lovingly these past three weeks while I eagerly await Jim Gurney's Color and Light.

I think it very shameless that you should tease and taunt a poor bibliovore like me.

Yours sincerely,

Pat

Improvement

Just to show how far I've come since May of '09:

(stock courtesy mizzd-stock)

When I did this piece, it was the best thing I'd done to date digitally.  This was done in OpenCanvas 1.1 with a graphics tablet.  I didn't know how to floodfill the canvas in OC, so in order to introduce tone to the canvas I had to ruddy well paint it in.  I did this in a single layer, in one hour.  Even then I was aware that the likeness simply wasn't there, but I was quite happy with it.  It looked sorta-kinda-almost realistic.  Yay me.

Recently I discovered OC's ability to create event files of the paintings one creates in it, so I went back through and watched myself paint.  When I came to this piece though, I was horrified by how bad the initial drawing was.  Was I --?  Did I --?  Eek.

I'd forgotten how that drawing looked since it had gotten painted over in the process.  Compare to the drawing of my recent self-portrait:

Granted, painting the self-portrait took several hours, and as a result, it's a great deal more polished -- but my drawing technique's improved quite a bit. Even now, with my hour-long (not quite) daily sessions of painting, my drawings have more information; are less . . . slapdash.

Thank you, Evil Professor Rex.

(note to self:  must draw a portrait of Evil Professor Rex as the supervillain he is.)