Here’s a bit of love for Ashe from League of Legends. Not my usual style, especially with the armour and everything, but challenges are good. The bow, especially, was fun to do.

Stick around after the jump to see my progress!

Just a random 5-minute doodle to start with. Wanted some amazonian forest fairy sort of feel to it.

Did most of the face work, then played around with possible foreground options.

Scrapped foreground and gave her a forest-y dress.

At this point realized I wanted this to be Ashe, so I adjusted some colours, & worked on the hair and face.

A bit more work on everything.

Decided the background was washing everything out. Also started the adjustments for the top & added highlights to the face. I really like the way the top looks this way, too bad it’s not Ashe-y enough…

Armour begins to take shape. Most things just get refined as I go (especially hair.. it changes pretty much every step).

Added the bow and finished her hair. Smoothed out the roughness here and there.

Cleaned up a few problem areas, and pretty much done.

This was originally something else and then it wasn’t and now it’s just this.

#thereisnolist

New arts! It’s called Globophobia, since it addresses my fear of balloons. Bigger version in my gallery & stick around after the break to see my progress steps!

Skipped over doing a sketch straight into doing a full body.

Changed the hideous peach background to a hideous pinky purple background. Man do those balloons look horrible.

Worked on just the face. The face pretty much doesn’t change at all from here on. Unfortunately it also doesn’t go with the rest of the drawing because I made it too sharp and detailed.

Made the hair less horrible, started to add smoothness to the skin.

Got rid of the hideous background and balloons once and for all. Changed the pose to be less closed in & cropped it to reduce unnecessary white space. By this point, I no longer hate this drawing.

Drew in the balloons, made them pretty. Smoothed the skin a bit & finished the hair. Upped the contrast a bit, added texture.

Previous version felt too flat so I changed the gamma to make the whole drawing darker. Feels done now.

Luckily, it’s unlikely anyone will see it, because I live in a land somewhat devoid of nerds. Man do I miss Toronto…

In the unlikely case that you see this, HI THERE I’M ARISUKI. If you want my friend code let me know by posting yours!

On a side note, I’m currently playing Zelda 3d & the newest Layton game. Both are most excellent. I’ll try to review them ASAP, but I don’t know where to post. Layton arrived to me a month after launch, so it’s too late to do it for future shop.

This one’s less awesome and took about 5 times as long. SUCH IS ART:

You can see more art on my dA.

Yesterday I was in town on some errands, and since I had a bit of time to kill before my first student (about half an hour’s worth), I decided to go nailpolish hunting. More specifically, I was looking for Nicole by OPI’s Rainbow in the S-Kylie (sorta similar to Lippman’s Happy Birthday), which I’d seen in passing only two days earlier. All sold out.

My dreams of an over-the-top glitter manicure tragically dashed, I ended up getting a silver Sally Hansen on the cheap. I don’t often use the Hard as Nails line for polish beacuse the formula is terribly stodgy, but it’s great for details once diluted.

After another shop with no luck, I ended up at The Bargain Shop, where I found, well, a bargain. I stumbled upon a Wet N Wild that looked close enough, and also got a lovely teal glitter that lay between two colours I already had. That’s when the idea for today’s manicure came about.

I like to think of it as an unholy union between a mermaid and a unicorn. It turned out so ridiculously bling that I’m literally blinded if I look at my nails for too long. I feel like Edward freaking Cullen every time I glance down at my hands. It’s fantastic.

Now that you’ve decided you want to cause retinal damage to your nearest and dearest, I’ve put together a little tutorial for you!

These are the nail polishes I used: China Glaze’s Turned up Turquoise, Sinful Colors’ Nail Junkie, China Glaze’s Dorothy Who?, Sally Hansen’s Mellow Yellow, Sally Hansen’s Celeb City, and Wet n Wild’s Party of Five Glitters. You can use whatever you want though, I won’t judge.

Start off with your base coat. Then paint your main colour all over the nail. Pretty straightforward. Ideally, use something thin that applies in one layer; China Glaze worked fantastically for this. I got Turned Up Turquoise a while back but I never wore it much because it’s a matte (I didn’t know much about topcoats then).

Next, use your in-between shade starting from 1/3 of the way up all the way to the tips. To soften the harsh horizontal line, I grabbed a nail art brush and blended the glitter into the base colour.

The tip colour is Dorothy Who, a lovely blue glitter I recently got but hadn’t yet had the chance to use. It just goes on the last 1/3 of your nail. Blend it in with the teal glitter and add a second layer on the very tip to darken the effect.

Finally, on the first 1/3 of the nail, use your nail art brush to make little dabs of yellow. A few flecks of the yellow on the center and tips will tie in the colour palette quite nicely indeed. Don’t just scatter the yellow all over the place though; try to shape it so that it mostly goes down the center of your nail rather than evenly all around. Otherwise, your nails will look squarish rather than rounded and scale-like.

With the gradient done, I used Celeb City to emulate the look of fish scales. The silvery nail polish is highly reflective, and I used it more or less as the opposite of Mello Yello – highly concentrated on the tips, with some random “scales” creeping toward my cuticles.

Finally, I applied Party of Five Glitters on the very tips of my nails. There are far too many gorgeous colours of glitter in this polish to accurately capture in my sketch. Other than the somewhat noticeable sparseness of the glitter pieces, this makes a great accent polish. In the end it looks like I’ve encrusted jewels into the tips of my nails, which is just awesome.

I still do want a better dupe for Deborah Lippmann’s Happy Birthday, but that’s probably going to be hard to find ’round these parts. This does satisfy my desire to do nothing but GLITTER at people all day long though, so it’s alright in the end.

By now the tips of your nails probably have about 6 layers of nail polish on them, give or take. Seal up this bad boy with liberal amounts of Seche Vite. Say a little prayer to the gods of nail drying.

And there you have it.

a book of truth & lies

by Arisuki

I wondered then, as I often did, if it was me or if it was the world that deserved the accusing fingers and sidelong glances and jesus christ, the talking behind hands clasped firmly in front of one’s dignity. Let their eyes pass over your face in your moment of weakness. Let their thoughts turn not to your own virtues and vices so terrible you cannot even give it a proper word. Only the concept of demons and Hythloth.

You, the accuser. Let everything turn out OK for your sake – no, for the sake of the kids oh god think of the kids. That’s who you’re doing this for after all. You who uphold the laws of a city founded not on truth, love or courage, but a terrible chimaera of all that could be good combined into a useless faith that benefits no one. Not even your own children.

Not that they care about your imperative to honour your responsibility as their disenchantor & to uphold tradition until they grow up old and bitter enough to want to force those same ways and habits onto those who are stumbling into the youth and hopefulness that they forsook long ago. It’s a big responsibility but you’ll manage. I believe in you.

The question simply remains: why was it me? Why did you pick me to parade as an example of treachery and failure?

I, who saw the seasons in the blink of an eye – the rains of spring and the blizzards of winter passing in a fraction of a second, breaking up the solemness of a life in the wide blue-green-crystal-white-navy infinity. Only it isn’t infinite and it isn’t even round and I’ve been to the end of it and there was nothing more than a line that did not exist that demarcated the boundary between Things That Are and Things That Could Be.

As for whether the sky is blue, not even your faith can give you a promising answer.

And I am not mad.

I urge you to look at yourselves the way you look at “them”-selves. Yes, things had to be done a certain way. That’s always been the reason. But when the oceans dissolve and the skies burn up and everything you have fought for disappears, will it matter that what has always been done continued to be done until it was no longer possible to do anything at all, not even speak of the way things were back when Things were being Done?

Will it matter to anyone, anything but whatever remains of me after everything ends, that an accidental pirate was exiled?

That’s it actually.

Man, I really thought I’d have more to say by now, but… nope. My faucet’s fixed, guess that’s something to celebrate. Also, I have two new drawings which you can check out in the art section. Since that’s now a thing.

TEASER OF WHAT YOU’LL BE GETTING IF YOU CLICK:

I keep meaning to put the link to my rss feed in the main menu place, but I’m just too lazy. I’d have to make another image in the banner, and that’s just soooo much work. Then I’d probably be compelled to make links to my twitter and my not-yet-existing facebook fanpage. So maybe it’s best that I don’t.

Sometimes it drips in time to the clock that ticks noisily downstairs. Like when the turn signal click of your car lines up with the flashing signal of the car in front of you. It’s a temporary relief until it slowly goes out of synch. And then it drives you insane.

But I don’t go insane. It takes me to the state of mind that Tetris once put me in. Lucid hypnosis. Wakeful sleep. Unconscious awareness. Something. It used to make me think of death in its various forms. Now I just savour the sensation of not having to take responsibility for my thoughts. The feeling of numbness and freedom. Not like I didn’t before. Sometimes I just sit on the bathroom floor to listen to the dripping.

I have a long history of sitting on bathroom floors when I’m upset or afraid or uncomfortable. In hotels, at home, at parties where I’m uncomfortable. It’s soothing. I need to be very alone sometimes and a bathroom is guaranteed privacy.

This was yesterday. Today I played the piano for two hours. I couldn’t help myself, I was desperate to hear music pouring from my fingers the way others did. I tried but I wasn’t able to grasp that sense of detachment from my playing – I even took the batteries out of the clock downstairs to stop the ticking from taking over my playing. But the only special thing that happened was that in one particular waltz, my fingers flew to where they knew they should go so swiftly but deftly, that I felt like a ballroom dancer covering the floor with flawless twisting steps and a swirling sequined dress.

I used to read the blogs of strangers who were as lonely as me. I wished I was the subject of lonely blog posts rather than the one writing them. And that I would somehow know about them and be able to read them. And how that would make my own loneliness better.

A long time ago when I learned to feel happy again, I wrote a litany against bitterness. It ended like this:

I will not crawl in the dirt,
I will not be pinned to a card,
I will rise past the glass limit of my jar,
metamorphose into something, anything beautiful.

I feel like that’s finally happened maybe.