Illustration Friday: Smoke

I created the above this morning for Illustration Friday. This week's topic: Smoke. For this illustration, I experimented more with the Chalk brush tool in Corel Painter. I used Digital Watercolour for colouring in the girl as well as shadow textures. I may work this into a polished piece in the future; I want to experiment more with the lighting as well as adding background details (stars in the sky, etc.)

I find Illustration Friday great in that it's a way to keep me illustrating for the pure fun of it rather than just to someone's spec.

Hey, I've been invited to the National Cartoonists' Society annual Toronto Christmas party this year again! I had fun at last year's party, so am very much looking forward to this one.



Yesterday, these roses arrived for Urban Tapestry along with a very touching note. Many thanks to our friend (who prefers to remain anonymous) for this lovely gift! Allison and Jodi will see the flowers when they're here this weekend for a GAfilk prep practice.

Below: Gary and Sheryl at OVFF.



The fabulous Lady Mondegreen (Batya, Seanan, Amy, Merav):



Hearing this group was one of my con highlights...wonderful harmonies and great energy here! They will be giving a concert at Concertino and are International Guests of Honour at D'Zenove Convention in the UK.

I heard them once or twice ages ago and enjoyed listening, but they're so much more confident now and are obviously having fun. If you get the opportunity, do go hear them perform!



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Orkut scrapbook wars revisited

Above: Mary Bertke and her band, Aisling, perform at Liberty Bookstore in Upper Arlington, Ohio. Some great music, and I loved how all the band members seemed to be having so much fun.

There's an article about NaNoWriMo in this week's Book Standard, if anyone's interested. Apparently more than 62,000 participants have already signed up. And yay, Chris has added a link to Inkygirl on my Nanocomic page. :-)

Finished my J.K. Rowling song last night. I sent two files to Jodi and Allison: one with the full arrangement, one with their parts highlighted. We're getting together this weekend for an Urban Tapestry practice in prep for GAfilk.

The Book Standard has a still from the New Line Cinema production of The Golden Compass. I really, really hope they do a good job with this movie. I loved the trilogy so much that I can't help but be more than a tad nervous.

A couple years ago, Jeff Bohnhoff and I engaged in sort of Photoshop battle on Orkut which we now refer to as the "Orkut Scrapbook Wars." I'm no longer on Orkut, but still have the pics. Here are a few, for your amusement and horror:

JeffB's infamous debut concert at FKO (posted by me):



Me and my pal Kirk (posted by JeffB):




Jeff's secret movie career (posted by me):



JeffB and me in Grade 2. I had a crush on him despite how high he buckled his trousers. He tricked me into eating Silly Putty. (posted by me):



My stint as a Star Trek actor (posted by JeffB):



JeffB as an unborn infant (posted by me):




JeffB and Pamela (posted by me):




Me with cleavage (posted by JeffB):



Jeff was always a cuter baby than me (posted by me):



In the end, we decided to call it even. :-)

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Songfrenzy

Will Write For Chocolate has been updated. And it looks like my comics have started appearing on the NaNoWriMo site, though the site itself is getting so much traffic right now that everything is WAY slow. Hopefully things will pick up once participants start focusing on writing their novels. :-)


And HEY (!), I just noticed at this very moment that I'm the featured NaNoWriMo Daily Q&A. It will only be up for today.

I was catching up yesterday on some friends' blogs and found the coolest Hallowe'en costume ever, made from scratch by Laura and Peter for their son Jon, to fit over both Jon AND his wheelchair. You can see how they constructed the costume in their earlier entries. You can find out more about Peter and Laura at their Doodletronics Web site.

I finished the lyrics to my J.K. Rowling song last night, just need to finish the tune for a second bridge. This song has a limited shelf life; you'll understand when you hear it. Urban Tapestry is only going to be able to perform this at GAfilk (in concert) and FilKONtario (possibly in open filk). At present, those two conventions are the only ones that all three Urban Tapestry members are scheduled to attend next year. Scheduling and finances make it likely that 2007 will be low-key for us otherwise. I'll be going to Consonance with Jeff, but in mainly listener mode.

Anyway, Allison, Jodi and I be debuting our new J.K. Rowling song, the Chocolate song (to be performed with Summer and Fall, hopefully), and our new filk community song at GAfilk in January. Hey, and I've started to co-write a song with Jeff Bohnhoff. :-)

Mary B. has some great OVFF pics up on her Flickr account, for those who haven't seen them yet. These include:

-- A fun and goofy shot of Allison, Jodi and me performing the Paul Stanley Kwinn song in an open filk circle.

-- People waving my baby bunny signs around during the Paul Stanley Kwinn song. HA HA, including Paul himself! Just noticed that now.

Below: Tom Jeffers and Urban Tapestry in Ohio.



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My husband, the cell phone

Above: Jeff tries on a niece's Halloween costume last night.

Jeff and I went out trick-or-treating with our nieces last night. The youngest wasn't feeling well but had been given doctor's permission to go to five houses. Out of sisterly loyalty, the oldest only went to five as well. Here's how much candy they each came back with:



This is SO wrong -- kids should come back groaning beneath the weight of all the Halloween goodies in their bags! Apparently my sister agrees...when everyone's healthy, she's taking them both out to get some extra chocolate, yay! Happily, several of my niece's classmates also came by last night near the end of the evening, loaded down with gifts of candy because they knew she was sick.

I helped hand out candy at my sister's place last night. Some of those little Trick-or-Treaters are darned cute, toddling up to the front door with wide eyes, holding out their goody bags. One was dressed up as a Texas Chain Massacre character, complete with a toy chainsaw that came with sound effects. I didn't find that costume quite so cute.

My nieces' pumpkins:



Speaking of pumpkins, check out the pumpkins carved this year by my friends Lissa and Annie, both in the UK.


Thanks to those who offered help re: trying to get a big sound file to Jeff Bohnhoff. I was able to give him the file via iChat, go figure. Jeff also very generously (I know he's crazybusy right now) gave me some helpful suggestions re: adjusting my recording set-up to get a better sound through pre-amp gain adjustments and microphone placement, complete with a waveform graph to better illustrate his points. Yay for audio technonerdboy friends! It's been years since JeffB visited and did a Guest Blathering.

I'm looking forward to seeing him and Maya again next year at Consonance, where they are GoHs along with their son, Alex. Other guests at the convention - Dave Rood (Interfilk guest), Kathy Mar (Toastperson) and Gwen Knighton (International guest). You can find out more about Jeff, Maya and Mystic Fig Studios at their Web site, and hear soundclips from their CDs at CDbaby. Maya and Jeff won the Pegasus Award for Best Performer last year.



Hm...when I checked this morning, the NaNoWriMo site didn't have my comic uploaded yet despite an e-mail from Chris Baty yesterday saying it would go up at midnight. I guess they're still working out technical glitches. I'm curious to see which comic they choose post first; I had a last-minute suggestion, but it might have been too late.

A few days ago, I posted the new "Paul Stanley Kwinn" song that Urban Tapestry performed at OVFF in honour of the Toastmaster. Apparently Paul has been asked about veracity of some of the statements in the song, so he replied in his blog (*chortle*) along with a feeble threat to get back at me.

Here is my response, my dear BunnyBoy:



Hee hee. And so the gauntlet is thrown...

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Creative frenzy, chocolate, and Pegasus Awards

Above: A photo that Beckett Gladney took of the Sunday night folk-rock jam at OVFF. I'm in the lower left part of the photo beside Allison & Jodi, sitting on the floor with Michelle, Taunya, Batya, Eloise, Carol, Judi and Jordan (A note to other con report authors: Jordan prefers her full name over "Jordi" these days, I believe). I love Beckett's comment on Flickr about this photo: "Very cool to be in a room with so many people who are all singing along and really just enjoying the music and the companionship. And that's really what filk is all about." You can see more of Beckett's photos in her Flickr account.



My cheque for the Writer's Digest webzine article came yesterday. Yay for cheques! Yesterday I did some novel writing and finished the comics for the NaNoWriMo Web site. I also finished recording two flute tracks for Seanan McGuire to use on a track for her CD; I figure she can pick and choose the bits she wants to keep. I may send more if this first part seems to go smoothly, which it isn't. My problem is getting them to Jeff Bohnhoff in California, who has kindly offered to extract the instrumental bits from the Garageband file.

I've tried YouSendIt.com and DropLoad.com but both services seemed to hang on me when I tried uploading. The file is about 37 MB. I'll try again today. I may have to send a CD with the file by (*gasp) snailmail.

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, the student newspaper at Concordia University is going to be reprinting one of my Will Write For Chocolate NaNoWriMo-themed comics in this week's issue; they've promised to mail me a copy. My Inkygirl cartoons are being used in several writing courses, including Kaplan University. I keep forgetting to mention stuff like this; if I was more organized, I'd be adding these to my work portfolio site.

In theory, my comics should start appearing on the NaNoWriMo Web site every weekday starting tomorrow, until the end of November.



After dinner, I finally finished the Chocolate Song, yay! It's a fairly short song, but with five vocal parts; even when compressed to an MP3, the file was 7.4 MB. Now the challenge is to communicate it properly. I think it'll be easiest if Allison and Jodi learn it first, record their parts, then I send that file to Eva & Crystal (who are in Germany) along with the soundfiles containing just their parts, lyrics/chords & and musical score of their parts.

We won't have a chance to actually rehearse together until next January at GAfilk, of course. You ARE all going to GAfilk, aren't you?!?

Hey, this is the third song I've written in a few weeks. Now I just need to get my J.K. Rowling song finished before this week's practice.



This new home recording studio set-up is making it SO much easier for me to write songs. Not having a real piano (the electronic keyboard is a pain to lug around each time I want to hook it up; I have to figure out a better layout) and not being able to play the guitar for more than a few minutes at a time made songwriting a frustrating process for the past two years. I used to always do my songwriting with guitar in hand, or at the piano.

Now, I can at least use the built-in MIDI instruments and the computer keyboard to play a simple bass line on which to build a melody. I supply the chords to Allison and leave it up to her to come up with an appropriate guitar part.




But back to another OVFF highlight: the Pegasus Awards concert. This is a performance of all the songs that were nominated for an award. You can find a list of this year's nominees here.




I've always found the Pegasus Awards concert to be an excellent chance to get an overview of different types of songs being performed in filk as well as a variety of performers. Sometimes, in cases where the regular performer of particular song isn't able to attend the convention, a different performer is chosen...this is always interesting because it's often a performer who doesn't normally cover the song.

Many thanks to the Pegasus Committee for administering and coordinating the Pegasus Awards: Daniel & Melissa Glasser, Trace Hagemann, Steve Macdonald, Seanan McGuire and Erica Neely.

And congrats to this year's winners:

Best Filk Song:
The Girl That's Never Been by Michelle Dockrey
Best Classic Filk Song:
I Want To Be Peter Lorre by Tom Smith
Best Performer:
Judi Miller
Best Writer/Composer:
Cynthia McQuillin
Best Battle Song:
March of Cambreadth by Heather Alexander
Best Torch Song:
X-Libris by Talis Kimberley

For more info about the Pegasus Awards, please visit the official site.