Holiday Pink

To celebrate the holidays and provide some family merriment since everyone was coming over to my place for Christmas dinner, I enjoyed telling my hair dresser (beautician?), Tracy, to go ahead and color my hair all pink just before Christmas. :) It was something I have wanted to try at least once. Like getting a tattoo. Anyways, my hair looked like sweet pink spun taffy when she was drying it. Lovely! I'm sad that it's fading so fast and my blonde hair is peeping through so quickly. I particularly enjoyed how unnatural the color looked, heh. Left my bangs blonde, too, for a nice contrast.

Next time, tho, I think I want to try more of a pink bundt cake with white frosting instead of the cotton candy look. ha!


Last few days to finish planning my goals and strategies for next year, both personal and for work. Lots of stuff I want to do, including setting a regular exercise routine (again...darn those shrinking jeans!), painting (can't live without it), managing the interns at work (always an intriguing challenge), developing new strategies to improve how the creative team delivers product concepts and how we can all build our creative skills (blah, blah, blah), traveling to Austria and Germany this summer (so exciting!!), getting that more relevant creative role (i.e. better role/job in the industry I want to be a part of), reading my new books...and yes, finally getting my own lot to the publishers for editing/fine-tuning. Some excellent books I got for Christmas - lovely stack for sure! About a mix of 25 fiction and 5 non-fiction books that I will get to read and study at leisure. Mmmm...yummy. Probably will have them all read by March if not sooner.

sigh.

Almost Christmas!

I finally finished putting up the last Christmas decorations today and expect my mom to be here sometime tomorrow afternoon. The tree was put up first a couple of weeks ago on the weekend I finally started really getting over that horrible cold. Of course, it's not a real tree in my wee apartment, although I do prefer real over artifical - something special and so Christmas-y about the smell of a lovely decorated Douglas or Frasier Fir. Another something I'd like to do once I finally have my own house....and without four flights up to get to my place. The cats, however, are very happy with their new blanket, er, the tree skirt. Usually there's a cat each left and right resting under the tree - like two little gifts on the red material. I'm sure I'll have pictures of that to post later. Unfortunately, my cat Mina likes to eat the ribbon and bows that make Christmas presents so pretty...so it will only be the cats resting under the tree - the presents will have to stay in the closet till Christmas morning. :)

Wounded Beggar

A quick sketch for one of those weekly challenges that forces me to come up with some character(s) and scenes that aren't for some holiday or other - so, definitely a nice change of pace from the daily grind. :) Spent about 45 minutes drawing while I was watching the evening news before bedtime yesterday (the deadline was midnight Tuesday evening).

Yup, as usual with my "rapid" sketches, I already see some rather obvious things that need to be fixed - like the right arm - eek! I was exploring positioning for a somewhat forced perspective layout. That's what I say, and I'll stand by that. For now. We'll see what else I come up with over the weekend...once I finally get my Christmas cards sent out - d'oh!

Got Cold...

Had a rather bad cold that I'm still slowly recovering from this past week. Don't want it to turn into that horrible "walking pneumonia" or worse. I still think it's pretty darn close to what those Antarctic Scientists call "The Crud" that I read about yesterday. ha! Oddly enough, I probably caught it at some point during my trip over to sunny California to visit with Disney Consumer Products.

Lots of randomness going on in the past few weeks which I'll post about later...maybe. :)