Sketchy Saturday

I'm planning to draw the poster for this year's Craft'za. To motivate myself I'm going to try to post a few new drawings here each weekend. It's like when I was logging exercises, except this time I'm warming up my art muscles!

 

To kick things off, here is a quick sketch of Natalie and Paisley.

Gym Leader Sabrina, from Natalie's Pokemon manga

 

A cardinal.

Cherry blossoms in bloom

Natalie's tree started flowering today.

2013 Flashback

Got some catching up to do on here. I've been logging my thrift shop adventures on Tumblr if you're into that kind of thing. This is the first year of my life I feel really confident about clothes, know what I'm looking for, and actually believe I look good in what I'm wearing. Speaking of shopping, I've purchased half the things I drew during Buy Nothing Month.

Natalie was on TV for the second time to promote Craftstravaganza. The first time was four years ago when she was just a little bitty baby! Paisley is talking up a storm and we really hope she'll transition to walking soon. She can do it, she's just been scooting so long that she doesn't want to. I took both kids to Free Comic Book Day. We grabbed a big of kid's books for Natalie and bought a gift for her first friend birthday party.

Meanwhile my second semester at St. Thomas is wrapping up. I took just one class this time, Financial Accounting. My paper was on EA which was fun because they just fired their CEO and got voted worst company in America for the second year running. Anyway, now I get a little break and soon we'll start planning for Craft'za #2 and fall semester.

That's a wrap: Craftstravaganza 2013

We had a good day at the Craftstravaganza. A nice lady bought my Pokemon triptych while I was buying Natalie a bun for lunch from People's Organic. And one of our vendors traded me a couple of his posters for the Pikachu portrait, to give to his daughter. So Natalie's not the only little girl obsessed with pocket monsters!

Jenna vetoed the purchase of a John Baizley print by Burlesque of North America, but I commissioned a painting from Taylor Lindgren. I bought some Mother's Day gifts too, of course. My favorite acquisition is a cigar box guitar from Soup Hunter.

I'd talked myself out of buying one, but Jenna convinced me, and I'm glad she did. I had a secondhand bass in college but quickly gave up learning to play and sold it back. Then years ago I bought a couple of cigar boxes from the local stogie shop to make my own guitar and also abandoned that project. So now I finally have one, and I swear this time I'm gonna learn to play!

Pug Dance

We are the Champions

I took a personality assessment two and a half years ago because Penelope Trunk told me to. The results were interesting but I'm skeptical about this kind of thing. Well, I just took it again and my personality type is exactly the same: ENFP (Keirsey Temperament: Idealist, symbolic name: Champion).

I'm a dead ringer for the descriptions of this personality type. Just ask my wife if this sound like me:

Because ENFPs live in the world of exciting possibilities, the details of everyday life are seen as trivial drudgery. They place no importance on detailed, maintenance-type tasks, and will frequently remain oblivious to these types of concerns. This is a challenging area of life for most ENFPs, and can be frustrating for ENFP's family members.

You can take the assessment free if you want to compare results.

B-Day Arcade

I met my brother at Zap Arcade for our joint birthday celebration. They have changed some things since my last visit with Natalie. To her disappointment, they no longer had the game where you shoot deers, but they replaced it with one where you shoot bears.

Most importantly, they now have a working TMNT machine! Which means that I finally fulfilled my lifelong goal of beating Shredder at the Technodrome... an accomplishment made even sweeter by the awareness of how many quarters it would have cost to complete back when this was pay-per-play.