Kids these days

The Ensemble as Children.

Expect lots of angsty angst angst because I love torturing the Ensemble, adding flavor to their lives... the least angsty are probably Yoshua, Colleen and Skye haha XD

The dragons

Two nights ago, I had a strange dream.

I was running with the Ensemble. I think I was Colleen. Maybe it was that I'd been thinking about her for her birthday, but I was her, and I was flying while being buffeted by the wind. I was killing dragons.

Maddie kept screaming something. In my dreams I see her a lot, screaming always, pointing and warning me of danger ahead. Silver was hitting the dragon, Skye was dancing below it with daggers in her hands; I don't know where Valor and Aidan were. And Yoshua would not be there; he had refused to hunt them with us.

I think Lale was there, but not wholly.

He doesn't exist in my dreams where there is a lot of light.

These dragons were not good. Ethically, they were not good. They were not sentient; they did not think. They were cruel and unjust and fought for the sake of fighting, killed for the sake of killing. I was flying and panting and there was so much sunlight in these marble-pillared ruins that I felt ill. But I kept fighting them amidst blue sky, white clouds, and crumbling rocks. There was nothing in my hands; I commanded my friends below.

Somewhere after we killed a red-scaled, slithering dragon, it writhed and shot a beam of fire. I saw Lale then, just a dark shadow, slicing it's belly open, but I saw a claw come down to crush him, so I shouted. The shout tore the dragon's talons in two.

I felt something extremely heavy slam into my side. I careened and tumbled forward and was flung into darkness.

Colleen Emberem

Oh, Colleen. Colleen, Colleen, Colleen.

The above is like a metamorphosis. It was by luck that it was arranged in the right order.

Happy birthday to you, my OC.

If I could write a letter to you... well, you're already laughing. You know all my thoughts, so why should I bother fumbling to explain myself?

But I will write a bit. Or a lot. I will write because I'm pretty sure nobody reads this and I can probably spill my heart out to someone imaginary, so real to me, here in a corner that is also imaginary and real. Tongue-in-cheek, I could say you are the highest part of my religion, whatever that is.

You

Juxtaposed masquerade designs for the Ensemble. Interesting. :)

... FOR MY FRENCH EXAM I WILL WRITE THIS IN FRENCH. I started Maddie's in english but I will switch now. There will be so much conditionelle, it's not even funny, as all of this is what-if.

Maddie would be in something sweet and princessy. Lots of pink and green lace, pale pastel colours and chiffon. She'd have kitten heels of some dark colour to contrast, and her hair would be pulled up with flowers.

New Year

So on New Years Eve, I drank a lot, dance a lot, and ultimately felt like it was way too soon for 2010. Why is it that every single moment time passes, we regret that it's passed, or someone else wishes that the future would come sooner?

Inevitably time is fixed and in place. Time is what kills us in the end, not the other way around.

2011 came around with a whisper, not a bang. It came with a quiet apprehension, with sullen blinking and questioning as the previous year passed away.

Years are trivial; time is absolute. So we follow the sun, but not every sun is the same.

---

Costume!

EN MASS, ALL THE PHOTOS OMG.

First the shots of the dress costume :D I got some actual full-body pictures of the dress with me in it, but because it's also showing a large portion of my neighbourhood in each shot, for privacy reasons I decided to remove them ^^;
I was a Fallen Angel! Built most of the costume and did all the makeup plus sfx. I feel a trend coming on :O

The editing layout of blogger confuses me (failure ugh) but I'll have all the photos here :D

Front of dress

Back of dress :D

The forsaken jump

<--THIS

























<---TURNED INTO THIS.








I never understand my own trains of thought. As I draw, an expression, a power comes into my art... and then when I colour, my muse takes hold, takes the picture further.


Wait doesn't that mean I understand it? XD

Prayer

My absence makes them weary.

---

"God," he breathed.
His hands--they shook, jerking so violently that he could not fold them right. He clamped them to his breast, weeping and shaking and holding the fragments of his fragile, broken heart together, thump thump thumping shards of glass through his veins. With bruising force, he clutched the red jewel closer, yanking it into his chest as if the broken heart inside could somehow absorb it, and be soothed.
"God," he said, again, "God, please, please..."
The man sat there for hours in the dusty, sky-lit church, watching the stained glass of the angel under the solid cross change and glow and fade. He watched as little bits of dust were shot through with light, as if the angels that people spoke of were there, listening to his grief. He sat and wept and prayed and trembled until time blurred into lethargic counts of his staccato breath, and all he could do was continue on.
"Give her back to me," he begged the cross. "Give... give her back to me. God. I-I... I can't..."
I can't live without her.
God.
Please.
Please.
And his prayers fell silent, to deaf ears. Who would he kid? There was no God for him. He could not dream, nor could he fancy. He was not one who could reach the omnipotent being; his voice was not one that could travel that far.
His prayer--his strangled prayer, the one he knew that could never fly, even if his voice could carry, repeated over and over without relent.
So he climbed, suddenly, with bitter conviction; he sat on the altar of the cross, head buried in his arms. His clothing--her clothing, really, for he wore her cape to torture himself with her lingering smell--draped over the sides, touching the ground, and he watched his shadow with nothing but hollowness. He clutched the red jewel in his hand, strangling the blood out of the useless limb, the only reminder left that she had been there, whole, breathing, loving, real, living, real--
For him, time slowed; the seconds drooped into minutes, into hours. Perhaps he sat there for days, uttering a useless prayer in the back of his mind, back against the cross that wouldn't bend for him. He prayed and prayed, remembering some sort of logic long ago: someone said praying could help anyone heal.
Could he heal?
And when he next lifted his head, there was no longer any tears. Nothing but a swooping, echoing empty, nothing, nothing.
There was nothing but empty, nothing but empty.
(And his eyes--they grew cold. They grew bright and lifeless and lucid, his consciousness slipping, searching, wanting. Those eyes, normally warm pebbles of thought that echoed what he mused, they grew as cold as the earth that had its arms around her--)
His voice couldn't travel that far.
Could it?
"God," he whispered.

---

Daphne

Nearly four weeks went into this mask, every day for at least two hours. Wows.

For art class, we had to make papier-mâché masks. Our theme, like most of this year, was mythology. We could choose anybody from mythology and make it. So sticking with my love of trees and such, I decided to do Daphne. Scroll down for the myth, it's Greek.

Started at the end of April, 2010, I finished sometime around May 24th 2010

<-Here's the mask lying down on my back porch :D I dislike how the photo turned out; it doesn't show the depth of the mask, or the many, many translucent layers of paint that I slaved over. -shakefist- Contrary to popular belief, this mask is fairly light; it's about a pound or so, which is--really--the average weight of a head. Look, ma--no eyes. Adds mystery... kind of scary, tho. . <-Neck detail. Ohmygod. Individual rolls of tissue paper waded and shaped to look like bark. There's fine metallic gold paint dusted over the bark, copper paint in the hair, and silver paint lining the leaves. Most of the branches on this mask are adjustable, along with a nice rustling sound if you shake the head.

The branches are pipecleaner wrapped in maché and painted. Tips of pipecleaner are painted green to look like buds... this shot shows the underside of one bud I didn't paint too well. Woopsie.





Bark bursts forward. This was done with rectangular pieces of cardstock angrily--furiously!--taped and wrestled onto the face, then wrapped in maché. You can see the edges painted in gold and the leaves in silver. The eyebrow is also kind of visible here.

The wrinkles also add nice effects,thank goodness. This mask was painted in 100% acrylics, which is nice as the colour is very vibrant on the paper.



Veins on the cheek-barks were also quite painful. Tissue paper is hard stuff to work with. (At this point I realized I didn't take pictures of the nose, which was also a feat in itself).

The ears are pointed and also tissue paper'ed for texture, pointed in shape with one branch extending out from the back. The mask sits flat on a table sans problems.



Seventeen branches in total. Seventeen. God I'm never doing a tree-maché (LOL IRONY...) mask again. The pipecleaner was taped onto the top of the head of the mask, and then wrapped. The wrapping wouldn't stay so I had a lot of trouble with this.

The inside of the mask is painted dark brown.