Revving Up My Artsy Side

I drew a picture of a baby Night Elf. It didn't suck :). I am cautiously really excited about this. As soon as I get a little colour on it, I will scan it and share.

One of the ways I want to improve on myself this year is I really want to work on my writing and drawing. I am not the best artist, in fact usually I can't draw anything at all. But every now and then, I can turn out a good picture. I am hoping that if I just make myself sit down and work on it, I will get better at it. My mother is a really good artist: she and I have drastically different tastes (read: she made herself a huge fluffy coat out of realistic cat-print fleece. and wears it. IN PUBLIC) but I can't deny she has considerable artistic talent. She can draw, paint, design, work with colour or black and white, cartoon, etc.... I am limited to some black and white pencil drawings that I can occasionally add some coloured pencil too. And I am perfectly happy with this medium, if I can just get it to work with some reliability.

As far as writing, I consider myself a halfway decent writer. If I want to write something and make it sound a certain way, I can usually get it done. When I was in high school I had this huge notebook full of story ideas and sketches of characters that I usually never did anything with but I did have a few snippets here and there of longer pieces. One of my better pieces and ideas had a main character named Zarabethe, a name I felt I made up on my own (I've seen it other places since so it's obviously not a complete unique snowflake, but I was proud of it at the time). I like/liked the name so much I've used it as a re-occurring name throughout many projects I've done since, finally coalescing into my World of Warcraft main character, a night elf hunter. That is now the name's permanent home: as I've played the game and slowly developped storyline and personality of her, I will never be able to think of the name in any other way again. I still use it as a username or even a sort of "alter ego" (hence the title of this blog) but I will always think of my superlogical, OCPD, purple-skinned hunter with braided hair and her feline companion.

On that subject, the story I am working on right now is what you would I guess call fanfic: it's based in the WoW universe and is all about my character and the most important quest and journey of her lifetime. I'm not writing it to get published, I'm not writing it to submit to any fanfic websites, I'm just writing it for me. I don't have to please anyone or make anyone happy, and letting go of that is really helping to get me going creatively and write it the way *I* want it to turn out. This also means that I will write and re-write and re-write and re-write one little paragraph or even sentence until it is exactly perfect. This takes FOR-EV-ER. I have completed exactly two chapters in one year :). Now I am busy and I do have a few other things I do every day, but I really want to crack down and get this out of my head: this story is begging me to tell it. I also want to write it before I forget important details that are different in the game now than they used to be. As right now I'm a little stuck as far as the writing goes, I'm going to work on illustrating some scenes that are flitting around in my head, and hopefully jumpstart the writing again.

I was going to get into a little more on this subject, but Lachlan has just dumped the sock hamper all over the living room, so back to my motherly duties.