barbarafett

The last two times I've 'fallen in love with' a work of fiction and gotten involved in its fandom, I've written an essay about how I became a fan of that work, why I like it so much, and what being a fan has been like so far. Before that, I also wrote two other LJ entries describing how I got into two of my earlier fandoms. I've recently gotten into yet another fandom, so this entry is the fifth in my series of essays on that topic. All previous entries in the series are filed under my "newestfandom" tag, but it's neither necessary nor required that you read the previous ones first.



(I've realized that I never wrote one of these for "House" when I started getting into it last year. Oops. Maybe I should write a mini-post about why I like it.)



( Cut because it's LONG. Spoilers for Inception, of course. Also, the scene that ends both the movie and graphic-novel versions of Watchmen is alluded to, though not described. )

I have been waiting impatiently for August to start since Sunday. The first of August is the first day of two month-long creative challenges that I'm really looking forward to.

naarmamo, National Art Making Month, challenges members to create a piece of art a day every day in August. This will be my third year participating. Any and all artistic media and levels of talent are welcome here. My preferred media for the challenge (and in general) are photography, colored pencil, and MSPaint. Other people like to work in beads, or Photoshop, or watercolors. It's always a lot of fun to see what everyone has created each day.

august_writing similarly challenges members to write something every day in August and share it with others, either on the community journal or on their own journals. Your writing can be any format, genre, and length. There are writing prompts posted to the community journal, but using them is optional. This will be my second year participating.

If you are reading this entry, you are invited to join in one or both of these challenges.

It's August, and naarmamo is here again. I'm having just as much fun with it as last year. I wish I had taken the time to do more drawings by hand, but the month's not over yet.

One thing I'm doing differently this year is drawing a series of pictures in MSPaint. I decided to draw this series after feeling inspired to draw views from the deck of a sailing ship on days 2 and 6. This inspiration is, of course, the result of my new membership in the Pirates of the Caribbean fandom. So far, there are five pictures in the series, and they're all different views from the deck of a sailing ship, which I named the Carefree Artist in the fourth picture. I'm enjoying painting this series.

Of the 18 pieces of art I posted during the first 15 days of National Art Making Month 2007:

8 are drawings done in MSPaint
6 are photographs
3 are drawings done by hand with pencil and/or colored pencil
1 is a tote bag I sewed

I'm a participant in naarmamo, National Art Making Month. We're all creating and posting a piece of art every day for the entire month of August. I'm really enjoying it. I love doing stuff as part of a group. It motivates me really well.

My preferred media for art of my own creation are drawing (pencil and colored pencil on paper) and digital photography. Of the 15 pieces of art I've posted so far:

8 are drawings
- 5 were drawn and colored entirely by hand
- 3 were drawn by hand and had some or all of the coloring done by computer

6 are photographs
- 4 are unedited except for resizing and cropping
- 1 had text added to it
- 1 was turned into an animated icon

1 is a piece of calligraphy done on the computer

The following is a recap of my art from the past 14 days. Each link leads to that day's piece of art (I didn't want to use up still more of our site's bandwidth by making more thumbnails).

Day One - Osaka (left) and Puchiko, anime characters, on the front of a belated birthday card I made for one of my friends.

Day Two - The branches of the crepe myrtle tree in my front yard.

Day Three - Two of my original characters, Annie and Shanelle, in their superhero outfits from the virtual reality they play in. I liked the flare effect I used on their clothes to represent light flashing off sequins. :)

Day Four - Jadzia Dax, cast in the role of Rei Ayanami. Of my eight drawings, this is one of my two favorites. I copied the pose from an existing picture of Rei, so it came out really well.

Day Five - This was the day I took two pictures while we were having dinner at a restaurant with an outdoor patio:
Sunset view of the mountains, with silhouetted palm trees (This is my favorite photo so far.)
Flowers

Day Six - My first-ever drawing of Christy, another original character.

Day Seven - A jewelry box with a flame in it. This is from my story Life After High School.

Day Eight - Asuka, in a ball pit, with a laser tag gauntlet on. This is an illustration from my story A Tubular Twentieth, and it's my other favorite drawing.

Day Nine - This is my animated icon. It's not the first I've ever made, but it's the first I've ever made that has text and is specifically for LiveJournal. The photo is of my new MP3 player, which I received on that day. I dubbed it the "INGPod" after ING Direct, because I got it from their online store. The sentiment expressed by the text stems from my desire to be different from all my peers who have iPods. (I apologize to any iPod owners or Mac users out there.)

Day Ten - An experiment in doing calligraphy using my laptop's touchpad. Japanese characters read: "What time is it? It's nine o'clock. Go to bed!" Hey, it's what was on my mind.

Day Eleven - A drawing of a friend from college as a ninja, using her special technique, Ten Thousand Years of Fruit. It was a joke we came up with in our class this past year.

Day Twelve - A cute photo of my doll, Molly, sleeping.

Day Thirteen - A political cartoon in response to a certain company's not allowing product demonstrators to take leftover food samples home with them.

Day Fourteen - A photo of someone's glasses, lying on the bleachers at the local high school.

Man, this is so much fun. Here's to the remainder of the month! :-)