Attempting To Animate My Life. Or At Least My Blog.

So, tonight my friend Aysha requested/demanded politely that I do a Christmas blog, and that it include paint pictures. I thought to myself "Yeah, of course. A Christmas blog should be simple enough. Time with family always provides golden material for funny stories." My next thought was "Paint pictures...Sure! I can handle that." So, I downloaded Paintbrush and started playing around. Drawing circles and smiley faces. Simple.

At this point I'm thinking "Yeah! I'm Master of Paintbrush! I can draw smiley faces and circles!" Then I realized making pictures to go along with what I write might need to be a little more involved than circles and smiles. Smiley faces are awesome, and they totally can capture the emotion of "I'm two dimensionally happy!" but they don't quite do justice to emotions more complex than than.

On a completely unrelated side-note, my sister and I just spent about 10 minutes throwing Starburst® wrappers at one another. (Mature, I know.) Totally nailed her square in the center of the nose with one. Bullseye style. I was proud of my achievement. Because I was so happy about that, I'll try to relate it to the topic of the post and include a happy face that I drew.

Yup, drew this one all by myself. If I had a proud face, I'd insert that too.

Anyway, so after mastering the smiley face, I figured I should probably start practicing drawing people. Or something that might resemble a person anyway. Art has never been my strong suit. At all. In sixth grade art class, we had to make something out of clay that was a combination of an animal and a fruit or vegetable. My creation? A little gem I called The Porcupumpkin. Yup. My little sixth grade genius mind decided to combine a porcupine and a pumpkin. Almost solely for the fact that a pumpkin was one of the roundest fruits or veggies I could think of at the time, and round was basically equivalent to simple in my mind. Pretty much I rolled out a ball of clay for the body, blobbed out a goofy looking head, slapped some shady legs on it, and flattened out something that looked a heck of a lot more like a beaver tail than a porcupine tail. (Wait...as I write this, I'm trying to remember if porcupines even have tails...Oh. Yup. Google images saved the day. They do. Should have remembered that on my own, but I haven't really had reason to think about porcupines lately. Or for several years for that matter.)

Anywho, the thing is atrocious. First of all, the body is orange obviously. Pumpkin. I hate the color orange. No offense to anyone whose favorite color might be orange. But this orange was a special brand of ugly. Next, the legs, head, and tail are brown. Like...poop brown. So the whole thing is just a bad color combination. To top it all off, I stuck a little stupid looking stem on top of the body. It's really just a mess. Funniest thing is, I was proud of that mutant. So I gave it to my dad. To this day, it's still sitting in his office at work, proudly declaring its message to the world: "Joanna has no future in the art industry!" Although it does make me happy that my dad really seems to love that thing for whatever reason. He recently moved from one office to another, and in the move, Porcupumpkin was injured. Its tail broke off. My dad was seriously concerned it would get lost, so he made sure my mom put the body and tail in a cup and took it home so she could glue it back on. Once repaired, Porcupumpkin returned to the office. Maybe one day I'll go to my dad's office and take a picture of it so I can share the horror/joy with you all.

That was a long story to explain just how bad my art skills have always been. So it really came as no surprise to me when I started trying to draw people on Paintbrush and they turned out pretty horrifyingly bad. Like...deformed. Disproportional and just...creepy. I'm going to keep practicing so that maybe when I get around to that Christmas blog I'll have something semi-decent to show, but for now, here you go. (Especially you, Aysha. This is my Christmas Eve gift to you.) This is a picture of my sister and I. I've labeled the figures for you so you can tell who is who. You'll need the labels, because neither of them resemble us at all. Also, it's clear I put more effort into "me." By the time I got to "Laura" I was no longer concerned with "proper" limbs and such. Enjoy.