Urgh! I’ve been trying to upload this picture for over a week, but my uploader was not working properly. Luckily, I’ve gotten it to work right again!
My in-laws have alpacas. They’re sweet, they’re adorable, and they look so cute covered in fluffy fluffy wool. I’m even getting some of the fleece from the recent shearing to try my hand at felt-making. Won’t that be fun?
I think alpacas are an under-appreciated animal, all in all. Ok, so it might just look like a small llama, but doesn’t that make it even more cute? After all, a toy dachshund is even cuter than a regular dachshund, a miniature pony has a greater ‘awww!’ value than a draft-horse, and for some reason, restaurants certainly have a way of making us pay greater amounts for tinier, over-presented servings of the same food.
Ok, I’ll admit it… I shelved this post for a few days because I was just feeling too ranty when I was first going to post it.
Long story short, I recently had a bit of surgery (I made it!) and then had a follow-up appointment where I was offered… more surgery. Frivolous surgery, even. Surgery with questionable actual benefit, a long recovery time and that was of absolutely no necessity (at least at this point). Needless to say, I decided to reply with a nice, firm ‘No!’
So yeah! Today’s picture is of a chop-happy surgeon… a chop-happy surgeon with a stethoscope.
The Albero Gatcha Festival has just launched its second half, and once again there are a bevy of awesome designers from Artilleri to fri.day stuffing prizes into gatchas for your enjoyment. These cute heart hairbows and heart flats are brand new fro Sanu and are currently only at the festival!
Some of the other items I have up you’ve already seen: there are the love letters and poems, as well as the chibi-heart pets. Since the hairbows and flats were specifically designed to match these other items, I just thought it right to set them all up together. Now you can be coordinated from top to toe!
For those who aren’t sure what a gatcha (otherwise known as gacha, gachapon or gashapon) is, it really isn’t all that mystical. You remember those little machines that were around when you were a kid? The kind you stuck 20c (or a quarter, I am assuming, for the American among us) into, and turned the crank to receive a gumball or a toy or something? Well, a gacha is pretty much that, though the term is most often associated with the high-quality capsule toys of Japan, for which the term was originally coined.
Gatchas have become rather popular on Second Life – and why wouldn’t they? They’re fun, largely affordable (although I have seen some that go as high as L$1000 a go! Eep!), and the prizes are great to collect. There’s an element of fun and surprise, not to mention that they make excellent gifts when you get more than one of the same kind.
Anyhow, you can get these great items and many more at the Albero Gatcha Festival from June 28th though to August 14th. Go! Quick! Check it out!
So here is a quick panda I drew for a friend of mine, Andel Rhiadra! I asked her what I should draw today; I am not surprised that ‘panda’ was the answer. She is obsessed. I think if she could have a pet panda, it wouldn’t take long until she stole one from the zoo and set it up with some bamboo in the guest room, with much fawning and petting. I’m not even sure if a panda would let its kidnapper pet it… but… I’m sure she’d try!
Today, alas, is more studio/house cleaning, along with much-needed work on my site. I know that nothing can be seen of it yet, but things are a’changin’! So far though, it has been upgrading and updating all the back-end stuff before getting to the fun things. No point in painting a house all pretty if it is going to fall down in the next gust of wind, right? Right.
One of the things that I’ve updated which will have an immediate effect on those visiting the site is that I have installed a captcha device on comments. I know it is a pain, but my spam filters are getting hundreds of comments trapped in them per day… and it is just way too much effort to try and go through them all to sort out if any are legitimate comments. I know it is an extra half-step, but I hope it doesn’t bother you too much.
If someone could post a legitimate comment to test it out, that would be awesome. If it continues to deter spam postings, perhaps I can turn off the need to manually approve comments altogether! Yay!
It was so hard waiting off on releasing these until the weekend. They totally made me laugh with barely contained glee when they were all done and finished. Here’s why:
It almost feels like something has been made whole – a cycle has somehow been completed and come back to the start again. Funny that I should say something so monumental about cute little hearts that people can gift to each other, but it is true!
You see, as a child, I used to draw. I drew a lot. And one of the things that I drew a lot of, was love-heart people. They weren’t all that complicated really – their main shape was a heart, and they had eyes, a mouth and a pair of legs. They were sometimes pudgy, sometimes skinny; sometimes they were smiling and sometimes they wore expressions of anger. It all came down to who the heart was, what their personality was like and how they interacted with the other heart people. Occasionally they had arms, but not often… eyes, mouth and legs were the only necessary elements.
Anyhow, when I completed this little chibi-heart pet, I thought, ‘Wow.’
As a six year old kid, happily drawing on the back of scrap paper and inventing entire societies of love-heart people, I could never have imagined where that would lead. I always wanted to be an artist, but to even think that one day I might be creating a derivative of those first simple characters to sell in an online virtual user-led environment to people all over the world would just have been unfathomable. Kinda makes me wonder where things will be in another twenty year’s time… and whether I will still be creating love-heart characters to make myself smile.
You can pick up your own chibi-heart pet in Second Life now at the mainstore! Go ahead… give someone a heart and brighten up their day.
Oh, and please ignore any errors with the site right now – I’m just doing a bit of an update, and a few things have gone a little wonky. I promise I will get them sorted as soon as I can!
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