Looks like I'll be doing more and more photography, including, hopefully, a fair amount of wildlife-type photography.

We shall see soon. Daylight will be returning soon....

So, a while back, a friend linked me to the Moon Moon meme. Lo and Behold, Pyro Muddypaw comes out to.... Moon Moon. Imagine my chagrin.

I made the mistake of telling a couple of friends about this. Since then, they've been calling me Moon Moon. Even the ones who have no idea what it means.

A little over a week ago, I started my first batch of homebrew cider. I went to get racking equipment today, and as I was loading it into my vehicle, the term 'moonshine' crossed my mind. Then labels for my brew crossed my mind (because bare bottles are boring, and it's good to keep track of batch data, anyway). Then Moon Moon occurred to me. And then....

Booze labels, with a derpy wolf and big bold letters reading "MOON MOON 'SHINE." I told one friend, then another, then another, then another, and... there was a lot of things like "YES. THAT. DO IT!" and LMAOing and "OMG Awesome Love it" and so forth.

So, okay. I'm going to have to come up with a few labels to photocopy and paste on my bottles of brew.

Warning: Not for sale under any circumstances. (In fact, you might want to rethink drinking this.)
ATTENTION: This is hard liquor. (7% ABV (because booze is hard))
Bottle of Hard Liquor? (Yep, Moon Moon got his tongue stuck in here.)

I dunno. Stuff.

So, I got around to scanning some stuff from my sketchbooks over the last two years or so. From four books, I scanned around forty things that I particularly liked for one reason or another. I'll be uploading them as time permits.

My apologies for the flooding; I'll keep it down a bit henceforth.

I've a picture I'm working on at the suggestion of a friend on FM, and I finished the sketch today. I've been planning to paint it with watercolor--I've already got it cleaned up and transferred to watercolor paper pending addition of details--but I decided to whip out a scrap of paper and try a few things with paint and decide whether I'm going to ink it before I continue. Or perhaps do it in colored pencil instead, which is still a possibility.

Anyway, I tried some stuff with the pens, then on a whim, tried a brush in this little bottle of Speedball ink I've had sitting around for a couple of years.

I'm hooked. I absolutely -love- the way the ink goes on with a brush. Even more, I like how it works with watercolor... going on before or after the paint. This is definitely something I'm going to keep working with.

I'll probably post the cleaned-up sketch in scraps in a couple of days. I rather like how it came out, even if it's not quite exactly what I was aiming for.

Education is a process.

It appears that I've been assigned something of a reputation as an artist.

I say 'assigned' rather than 'earned' because, in my opinion at least, it's the correct term. Our regular waitress at the local diner asked me to draw her a wolf, and I did, and it came out rather well. It's in my gallery here. She certainly wowed over it, and that's cool, I'm glad she liked it. It feels great to have something I pored over and worked hard on appreciated by total strangers (you know how family and friends always say 'Oh, that's nice!'). However, it's one drawing, and if you could see the majority of my sketches and even serious attempts, you'd most likely agree that it's something of a fluke. I don't consistently draw well, though I am getting better; and until I do, this reputation makes me a bit uncomfortable. Reputations breed expectations, and it's not an expectation I can currently live up to.

Anyway, at least three people, and I think maybe four, stopped by the table to chat, opening with things like, "Are you the one who draws wolves?" and "So, I hear you're an artist. I'm an artist, too." People I don't know, have never seen before. It's neat to meet people, and they were all nice enough--and like I said, it's nice to be appreciated. But....

It's just... kinda weird.