Sprout's been more clingy and whiny than usual over the past couple days... and in the middle of the night last night I figured out why. D: He woke screaming and sniffling, and when I got to his bedside, he sobbed, "My NHOZE is STUHFFEE!"

I groggily set up a humidifier, tried to comfort him as best as I could -- eventually I had to sit in the recliner with him and rock him to sleep -- whereupon I put him back to bed and went back to bed myself, but by that time, it was too late (early?) for anything resembling a restful night.

Besides, he woke more than once...

When we all got up this morning, it became clear that Sprout's not the only one with the post-nasal drip. Current count is three, including myself. D: So today will be restful, with lots of fluids and maybe a movie.

I've been learning how to apply tones in Manga Studio:



I'm really trying not to go overboard with them... The last thing I want to do is be the person who doesn't know when to stop when she gets a cool new tool. D:

Bonus: The first page is almost finished. :) I have to finish applying tones, then sound effects, and then speech balloons and text. Getting close! On the first page, at least! :)

Cool stuff this week! :D

Carrots, squash, chard... and PEAS! and and and! CHERRIES!!!

(You should have heard us squeal, both of us... we were like kids at Christmas.)

Today is library day. Now that brozinski is done with the musical, he can come with us. :) So we'll go when he comes home from work. Other chores are done, including Bean's swimming lesson with a neighbor. (We're working on Bean's phobia of getting his face and ears wet.)

Now I'm tired, after walking home in the Hot. I'm ready for some rest; I'm still tired from the weekend!

Exercise
I'm trying to get more of it. I have never been very good at it... I like reading/sketching in my spare time, not exercising. Up until I had kids, I had an active enough metabolism that it didn't matter. (And in college, boy howdy... I walked EVERYWHERE. And I took a few aerobics classes. I was in Really Good Shape.) Now, after nearly ten years of an office job and two kids (ESPECIALLY the kids), I have 50 lbs on my college self. It's not that much... but I can tell I'm a lot softer in some places than I used to be. Yardwork, housework and chasing after kids give me a lot of activity during the day, but it's not enough.

I don't expect to get back to my college weight. I'm not unhealthy, and I'm not obese. Yet. But with obesity, diabetes, heart conditions and cancer in my family, anything I do to improve my fitness would be good for me in the long run. (I also want to instill good habits in my kids, who get double-whammies of diabetes and cancer on both sides.)

I have bad knees, so I need to find something low-impact that will help me tone and also give me some cardio-vascular training as well. I love yoga, so I may start with that. My husband picked up the EA Games fitness program for the Wii, and I tried it last night... but running in place made my knee hurt, so I'm not sure I'll be able to maintain that through its 30-day challenge. We'll see how it goes.

Nameless
Last night I taught myself how to apply tones to my graphic novel pages. :) It looks really awesome! There's a few more tricks I need to figure out before I'm happy with it, but progress is being made.

Garden
More nasturtium flowers today. :) I may have a salad with lunch...

My email is changing providers/servers at the moment... I may have some hiccups in receiving email during the switchover -- which started, unexpectedly, today! D: So you may have a better time contacting me through LJ, twitter, or deviantArt than through email...

Yet again, it is laundry day. It never goes away. But it is very meditative, which I welcome this morning. :)

Garden Status
We go out of town for a weekend, and our garden explodes. D: The sunflowers look like they're getting ready to bloom. The pumpkin is sprouting blossoms. The zucchini is flowering this morning. Even the honeydew melon has a flower on it.

Speaking of flowers, the nasturtium has blossomed. I told my sons that nasturtium flowers are edible -- and now Bean wants to eat one for lunch. Bean! The son that hates vegetables! Wants to eat a flower! "Okay!" I said. So he will be eating a nasturtium flower with his lunch. :) More power to him! (I'm not expecting him to like it, but the fact that he wants to try it is gratifying.)

The four tomato plants have probably twenty green tomatoes between them all. I can't wait until they ripen so I can start eating them. :) The trouble? They'll probably ripen about the same time as we start getting tomatoes from the CSA. :) I think we'll have to be ready to do some canning. :)

Working
I'm in the concept stage of a website design for a local nonprofit. I think I've discovered that while I can design websites, it's not my first love. I spend the whole time I'm working wishing I was working on my graphic novel project. D: While I'm working on this project, I'll have to figure out how to divide my time so I can spend some on my own projects as well. :)

Crafts
I'm working and re-working a hardanger embroidery project my late grandma gave me. She hadn't gotten very far, but she'd made counting mistakes (she figured out that she had mistakes, but couldn't figure out where they were -- the Alzheimer's was just starting -- and after this, she stopped doing embroidery altogether) so I am unpicking to correct the mistakes, and then I will re-embroider based on what she'd already done. After that... I'll have to design the rest of the pattern. It will be both mine and hers, and i'm pleased. :)

We picked up our box yesterday, and it had a big bunch of carrots, another of beets, two zucchini, two crook-necked yellow squash, a bag of spinach and a bag of lettuce. Excellent. :) No picture today, because I'm running around like crazy getting ready for a road trip... but I had some of the carrots with my lunch today, and they were tasty. I LOVE fresh carrots. Nothing from the store compares; even the bunches you can buy with the tops still on. The fact is, they weren't picked yesterday, no matter how fresh they look. :)

I just realized that, as of Sunday, June 28, it has been two years since I quit my full-time job to be a stay-at-home mom/freelance artist/designer/what-have-you. I am so glad that circumstances have allowed me to be home with my kids. I'm also glad brozinski and I have found opportunities that allow me to be home.

We're still far from comfortable, and I have a lot of room to grow -- both artistically and in other ways. But the journey has certainly been worth it.

Last night Bean made a sign with a big green dinosaur, with a red circle around it and a slash through it. Then he was distressed when I couldn't find something to hang it outside his bedroom door. "I have to put it there so my pet dinosaur doesn't come in at night! He's not supposed to be in there when I'm asleep!"

His consternation was so endearing. I was able to find something after he went to sleep, and hung it up for him.

This morning, when I woke him up:

puffbird: Did any dinosaurs come in last night?
Bean: **angry face** YES! Because the sign--
puffbird: **pulls picture off door frame and shows it to him; smiles**
Bean: **face lights up** You found tape!! **hugs mom**
puffbird, to self: My work here is done. :)

This afternoon he made another "No Dinosaurs" sign for the kitchen.

Our garden is going gangbusters this year. Despite my planting the sugar peas far too late, we had weeks of cool weather in June, so they grew vigorously and started blossoming like mad. I have had to harvest peas every two days for a week. Just now I brought in another two cups-worth. So far, we've harvested about a quart's-worth of peas. They have been a nice addition to salads with our greens from the CSA. :)

Our four tomato plants are covered with both blossoms and small (getting bigger!) tomatoes.

Two of our pepper plants are blossoming, but four (the four bell peppers) are still too small. They were planted late. We'll see how that goes...

The beans are starting to blossom, too. They prefer summer, so just as the peas finish they should start producing. Fresh beans are yummy!

The pumpkin is getting HUGE. No blossoms yet, though, and I don't expect any for three weeks or so.

I planted nasturtium around the periphery of the plot, and they are starting to get big. It's a nice change from our last attempt at nasturtium. (I think I chose a bad location last time and they scalded in the dry heat.) My mother-in-law also bought daliah bulbs, which I planted at the corners.

Our sunflower plants (two of them) are taller than both the kids now. Sunflowers grow inches a day, I swear! I've never grown them before, and they are a dramatic addition.

To fill in a couple bare spots in the garden, I bought a zucchini, a lemon cucumber, and a honeydew melon. They're still pretty small -- though the zucchini appears to be the most vigorous of the bunch. :) They won't be producing for a while yet. I don't hold out much hope for the honeydew, though... it's looking rather worse for wear, and the last time we tried growing honeydew, it did not go well. I also question the wisdom of growing a zucchini when we've joined a CSA farm... our last CSA box had two zucchini, and I anticipate having more this week. D: It'll be flowing out our ears! (Zucchini bread time...)

Harvest To-Date:
~a quart of peas

Today will be another full day... Sprout turns three today! :)

Today's box has a bag of spinach, a small bag of lettuce greens, a bag of chard... and this:



I have it on excellent authority that the carrots are very sweet and tasty. :)

I can also say that we still have a bag of lettuce from last week, and I have not done anything with the beets yet. They're still attached to their greens, so they're in okay shape -- and I can soak them to revive them, if I need to. But this week, the beets will be my big challenge. I have three bunches of them now, and I MUST figure out what to do with them.

This has been a full week! We have company, I have a website design job and a requested website maintenance job, and EMG-Zine to post for July, and a Jane Austen Club meeting tonight (I have to remember to pick up beverages this afternoon!)

In five minutes, the kids and I are going with a group to tour a salt water taffy factory (must remember to pick up two pounds of taffy for my parents, as requested...) and this afternoon between buying beverages, arranging for a sitter and getting to my meeting, I need to remember to pick up this week's CSA share.

D:

Yet it is all good stuff.

To followup on my notes about tools... I love my light box. :)

With my light box, I can take this, from my sketchbook:



and turn it into this, in my penciled page:

In my previous post I mentioned that tools make all the difference. In my case, I am a slave to my tools. If I find I need (or even will need) a particular tool to finish my project, I hit a mental and creative block that tends to last until the tool is acquired.

This is not a good thing.

In point of fact, it's a struggle! I don't recommend acquiring this habit, at all! There are plenty of things I could be doing in the meantime to finish my projects, but no... I obsess about the thing I need, and how the heck am I going to do my project without it? Then I proceed to dwell on process and fret about completion and nothing gets accomplished. The only nice thing about it is the sense of utter relief when I finally do find that niggling little tool that I need.

Ahhh...

With my graphic novel project, I've finally hit that point. :) It took a long time to get here.

The first tool I needed was know-how. How the heck do you approach a sequential art story, anyway? I read a lot of books and investigated a lot of sequential art stories in the form of both print and online comics. Finally I felt I had a decent foundation to start (at the very least... I doubt I'll ever feel I know more than a fraction of what I need to be successful).

I had a story. But to visualize it, I needed paper. Then a straight edge. Then graphic white (for corrections, of course)... then a set of french curves. Then a light box. Then some kind of computer program to handle screen tones and text. Now I have all that, and I look back and think, "Now, what was my problem all those weeks, that I couldn't at least have finished penciling?"

That said, when it comes to the act of creation in general, having the tools you need when you need them makes the whole process of creation that much easier. That goes for watercolor, oils, colored pencils... you name it.

Laundry as usual. :) The boys are playing Candyland together on the floor; they've gotten past the "He's not following the rules!" stage, and are making their own game up -- mostly having to do with making messes with the cards. I'm going to have to check the clothes for cards before they go in the washer...

Nameless
I'm scanning inked pages and importing them into Manga Studio Debut this morning, while I wait for laundry and listen to the boys play. Tonight I hope to finish pencils on another page so I can get that one inked. I feel like I'm making real progress at last. :) Having the right tools makes a world of difference! (I may write more about that later!)

CSA Food
I am enjoying lots of greens. I washed up all the salad and lettuce, and it's all in the fridge in plastic baggies, ready to be eaten whenever the urge strikes. It's nice. :) However, I'm having to be creative, to get it all eaten... and I still need to figure out what to do with the beets. I've never eaten them, other than pickled. (Pickled sounds pretty good, though...)

Miscelany
Regular readers, what would you like to see here? Is there anything you'd like to see more often? Less often? :)

Tonight I'm taking some time to learn how to use Manga Studio Debut. I've figured out how to set up a story, add pages, import images, and apply tones...

Unfortunately, I discovered that the function that would allow me to create a two-page spread page is only available in the $299 professional version of the software... *muse* If I use Manga Studio Debut to create it, I'll just have to split my title page up, but it doesn't make me happy. Perhaps I'll have to tone my title page in Photoshop instead...

It's pick-up time again for the CSA farm produce! This week our box contained two bags of chard, two of spinach, two kinds of lettuce (again), two bunches of beets (in addition to the one from last week, which we hadn't used yet), and two bunches of radishes.

Here is half the spinach, soaking, and the radishes, waiting for me to prep them for eating.



We still had some of the lettuce from last week (and it's still looking good) so I sent two bags of lettuce home with my sister-in-law (about half of the lettuce we got in today's box). I think getting half a share was just right for four adults and three children.

Last night as I started work on "Nameless" I started by reviewing the script to make sure the panels I was drawing matched the nuances of the story. (That seems like a "no duh!" type of thing, but still... sometimes I get so caught up in the art that I forget what the story is trying to tell.) In the process I realized something rather crucial. I had an entire chapter's worth of writing, but in no part of it did my characters ever refer to each other by name.

'Hmm,' I thought to myself, 'it doesn't do my readers any good if I keep the name to myself... that Must Change!' Then came the challenge of introducing the names into the script without egregious info-dumping. But it was accomplished, and I'm feeling a little sheepish for not having realized it before.

It's all in the Name
One of the conceits of the story is that Pau, my little teenage Maned character, is stripped of his name by his clan. This prelude chapter I'm working on now tells the story of how that happens. The rest of my story -- the part that will become the graphic novel -- is the story of what Pau does after he loses his name, and his search for the Songs of the seven Civilized Races.

I may keep "Nameless" as a working title, but the final title is going to have to change... because the "Nameless" part isn't really what the story is about. The story is about the search for the Songs.

Here's a working sketch from last night's session. I like how the posture turned out here:



And here's another thing I found in my sketchbook. I'm not sure what it is, but it likes cookies...