The Botched Photoshoot and the Gallery of "Ugly Sits"...

Happy Leap Day!! I hope you remembered to wear your blue and yellow :) I just bought some brand new index cards and thought it would be fun to scribble a story.

It was a lazy weekend morning, and Christmastime was near. I had recently decorated my place for the holidays with a small tree, some lights, and even fake snow on some of the furniture..

 I had my favorite coffee cup...

 And was ready for some quality spacing-out time in front of the TV.

 

I barely took my very first sip of coffee...

 When Chaos appeared on the TV stand.

He was perched on the soft pile of fake snow, beaming at me angelically.

 "It's a Christmas miracle!" I exclaimed, overwhelmed by this uncharacteristic display of cuteness.

 

 

 Chaos responded with a wave of adorableness, the levels of which have never been matched to this day.

 Just believe me, it was ridiculous...

 

I was pretty new to this business of cat-caretaking and it felt like we were sharing a genuine moment.

 Naturally I wanted to snap a photo for Chris:

 

 But when I returned with my camera...

 I found nothing but a cat imprint in the snow.

 I was deeply disappointed.

 

 Chaos had relocated himself to the shag carpet and had assumed his typical sitting posture (which gives him the appearance of a dumpling with back problems).

 

At that moment, I resolved to only collect photos of him demonstrating his poor posture (or "ugly sits" as Carrie and I call them).

So I'm sharing a small sampling of photos I've taken of Chaos. Please enjoy the Gallery of Ugly-Sits:

 the lotus position?

 urrgh!

 Typical couch potato-ing

EDIT: Carrie reminded me to inform the general public that the bald, pink patch on his belly is his one of his bare, hairless, prominently nippled moobs. Chaos. What a creature of grace and beauty.

Do any of your dogs or cats have posture as poor as this?? And more importantly do any of you have documentation of your dogs or cats doing 'ugly sits' of their own?

Monday Girl

Weekend Sketchbooking

One of my New Year's resolutions was to do more traditional drawing. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been trying to force myself to start drawing in my sketchbooks more frequently. Initially, a part of me was resistant (as I felt incredibly rusty), but gradually sketchbook-keeping has begun to feel fun again. I guess I've stopped fretting so much about what my doodles look like.

Here are some pages from this weekend.

On Saturday, I briefly stopped by some friends' sketch outing to the zoo. Here is a page of humans:

And a page of rock wallabies: 

Coffee shop people:

And tonight I caught part of the Oscars with Chaos (who found my purse to be quite the comfy headrest):

 

And here is a little pen and watercolor doodle of a Squirtle with OCD for last week's drawn by chance challenge (obsessive pokemon):

Le and I decided to start a separate blog for said challenge (which will be updated by us on a weekly basis). Please take a look at everyone's awesome Pokemon entries here! And please join us for this week's challenge, "Hideous Sheep Shearing."

The Drawn by Chance Challenge! (and a recap of my sickday)

A few of you have inquired about the drawing challenge that the talented Mr. Le Tang and I have started recently. I apologize for how disorganized I've been. This thing is still in its infancy and we're still trying to figure out the best way to run it. First of all, this is a weekly challenge that is open to absolutely anyone who wants to participate. Its original intent was to encourage some of us in the DW story department to work out our storytelling muscles since the awesome bi-weekly drawing challenges ended some time ago. We'd love to see any sort of entries (character designs, illustration, animation, etc.).

Each week, we choose our prompts at random by drawing words from cups. We have one cup of adjectives, a cup of nouns, and a recently added cup of verbs. We select two words...one of these words will always be an adjective, and we will alternate between nouns and verbs for the other.

Tomorrow's challenge is Obsessive Pokemon, for those of you who still want to participate. We're still debating whether or not to start a separate blog for what we are now calling the Drawn by Chance Challenge, but for now, I will be posting entries to my blog (so let me know if you've posted anything up!)

 
Sorry for not getting this up sooner. Yesterday I was home sick with a fever and most of my time was spent like this:

Some of it was spent like this:

 And some of it was spent witnessing this:

HARRGHARRBBLEWRRFALFFF!!

Chaos needs to learn to chew his food.

Zoo Sketches

Went sketching at the zoo this weekend with Carrie Liao, Alice Herring, and Le Tang. Here are a few pages of doodles (again I touched some of these up with digital color).

Gerenuks are some of my favorite animals to draw:

The sleeping lioness and the creeper gerenuk. One of the gerenuks was spying on its pen mates from behind some rocks:

Normal giraffes, chubby giraffes...:

And a page of zebras:

Some of you guys have asked what pens I like to use for sketching. My current fave is the Pentel Sign Pen with a Brush Tip:

 

I also like using Sakura gel pens, and the Pentel Pocket Brush for looser sketching/adding black fills, etc.:

 And last but not least, this week's drawing challenge topic is Obsessive Pokémon!