After posting that last little picture, I had a rethink… I know that my husband reads this blog (or he’d better, if he knows what’s good for him), and I just wanted to get something out of the way quick. I am not a frog, nor do I require a gift of flies, no matter how much I have been drawing them over the past few days. I’ll take other gifties please. Like frogs. Made of chocolate!
I was sitting there, looking at one of the fly pictures this morning… and just went ‘that looks like a love-heart to me’. Flies definitely aren’t generally seen in the context of love, but perhaps if the recipient of a card with this on the front was, say, a frog? Then it might be romantic? Perhaps it could have a little note inside saying ‘Happy Anniversary. How About Dinner?’
These flies really are just far too cute for their own good… I think I’ve worked out the connection too, as to why I’ve been drawing them, perhaps. My husband had to go away for a few days. Not something he does often, mind you. Perhaps because he had to ‘fly’ to his destination, this is really just all about him? Then again, perhaps not. He got back today, and suddenly flies turn into little love-hearts. I’m not sure if that is just my odd little way of showing him I care, or it really is just that when I look at a fly upside-down, it looks that way, so I have to draw it. Minimally digitally coloured in photoshop.
I rather like the feel of the flies in this sort of a context, aligning them with a feminine, crafty feel, as if they were used on the front of a card, a motif in scrapbooking, as a pattern on gift-wrap or the basis of a quilt. They are likeable, sweet, nice… whilst simultaniously keeping their same meaning as flies, with the various associations we generally bring to them… pests, disease, death… but all wrapped up in a pretty little bow and painted pink, as it were. Well, anyway, that’s just what I wanted to play with here.
On a side-note, I just discovered a very interesting and cute little site. Perhaps you might want to check it out too. Who can resist a Flying Pizza Kitty?
A quick update of ‘My Darling Marie’, with a few extra features… such as hair…. and just the barest little touch of colour. I’m having fun with my pencils. I guess I haven’t touched them in so long, they feel all new and novel again *laughs*.
To understand this post, you might want to consider reading the one before it.
The rules are simple: He won’t tell the parents if she won’t. On one of Das’s escapades, he wasn’t exactly expecting to see his own sister skipping out in the middle of the night and hanging out too. Unfortunately, they spotted each other at the same time. Truce time.
Vanessa is what people would politely term the ‘black sheep’ of the family. Unlike Das, she doesn’t take off the make-up to come home to Mother and Father. Although she is still their ‘little Nessy’, Mother does despair that she is ‘not like the other children’. Das is the golden child. Whilst shattering that illusion might seem appealing to her, she’s more interested in what ‘the brat’ can do for her to keep her quiet. Golden-boy is good for some things, at least. That, and if she revealed his secret, there’s nothing stopping him from telling how she knows it in the first place…
Although she puts on a tough ‘nothing can scathe me’ front, she’s not quite as secure as she makes out. Constantly being reminded of how she isn’t living up to her parent’s expectations by not being like everyone else does tend to wear her out a bit, and question herself. The fact that everyone else seems to think the same thing and compare her to goody-two-shoes Das all the time doesn’t exactly help. That said, she’d rather be true to herself than try to put up a front for everyone else’s benefit. Her two best friends, Chance and Holly certainly help too. They keep her grounded.
She’s pretty sure that Das looks down on her a bit, but that isn’t exactly true. He’s impressed that she has the courage to stand up to their parents; they can be intimidating at times. And where he goes out of his way to please them, Vanessa seems to him to be secure enough to tell them that she is who she is and to tell them to accept it. He also seems to think that she looks down on him, but that isn’t entirely true either… whilst she does tend to resent the fact that she keeps getting put up against him and constantly compared, she’s proud of the brat and how smart he is… how talented he is. Neither would tell the other though, naturally… well, unless it came down to torture, anyway!
On a side note and entirely unrelated to the above blurb… Let me share with you a word to the wise, imparted to me by a friend this weekend. Never tear open a stink bomb with your teeth: the smell (and taste for that matter), tends to linger and you’re the one that gets hit with it first.
This is Dennis Abercrombie Snizzlewig. Catholic schoolboy at one of the most exclusive boarding houses by day, he likes to put on thick eye-liner, spike his hair and write angsty poetry by night; maybe even sneak out and stay up to the wee hours of the morn at some extreme rave, if he’s feeling up to it.
You’d think these things wouldn’t exactly work all that well together, but for Das, he’s a master at this double life-style. Mother and Father wanted him well trained in all the gentlemanly sports, so he uses these skills to pole-vault over the campus wall, dodge bouncers asking for ID and to sneak in his window when the night is through like some secret spy assassin agent type guy. Being able to smooth talk his way out of practically any situation doesn’t hurt either, though that isn’t to say that is hasn’t come close now and then – especially when his two lives, the ‘class president, honors student, goody-two-shoes’ side and his ‘sneak out to raves, social nuisance’ sides start to collide. No-one’s caught him out yet, but perhaps it is only a matter of time… Megan’s onto him. She’s going to find out what he’s up to no matter what, even if she doesn’t know quite exactly what’s going on. Nobody can be that perfect and not have something to hide!