A sequence of events that happened in the last two weeks: 

1. Zyl posted character art with pastels. It was quite nice. I gave her inspiration for the next session. 
2. I remembered the last time I used pastels (well). It was in seventh grade, and we were all doing Georgia O'Keefe homages. Somehow I picked one of her paintings that didn't look like genitals. Thinking backwards gave me a warm fuzzy feeling. I decided that I missed drawing. However, I didn't have any pastels. What I did have were a bunch of decent fountain pens. 
3. Michiichan said she was doing one a drawing a day to improve. It seemed like a good idea, so I decided to do the same. 
4. I broke the feed of my red Lamy Safari while trying to swap nibs for drawing, which ended up unnecessary anyways.
5. I ordered a strawberry red Lamy Safari to replace it. And also a 2B pencil for my underdrawings.
6. While looking at safaris, I wondered what was even the difference between a $40 pen and a $100 pen. 
7. I started looking at $100 pens. I realize I wanted something with a hefty ink capacity, dumb ergonomic curves, and a slip lid rather than a threaded lid. Face it, I'd probably forget it was threaded and damage the pen trying to pull it off. 
8. I fancied that maybe I wanted a cool nib on my pen too. 
9. I absolutely lost my mind and ordered a Franklin-Christoph Model 20 with a custom fine cursive italic nib. It's a very nice pen. The fine cursive italic nib puts down some very crisp lines with an impressive amount of line variation, but without causing my writing to fatten up like with a 1.1mm stub.
10. Both new pens arrived. But now I had two ink colours (Diamine Teal and Diamine Sunset, that I'd owned for some time) and three pens. Obviously Diamine Teal, my primary journal ink, goes in the journalling pen - the Franklin-Christoph Model 20. And obviously the bright red ink, Diamine Sunset, goes in the red Lamy Safari. But now there was a charcoal Lamy Safari, which has served me faithfully since 2015, with no corresponding ink. 
11. I went down the rabbit hole trying to find a nice ink that didn't clash overly with Teal or Sunset, but was a nice colour in its own right, that would be suitable for applying light shadows to drawings. I settled on Ferris Wheel Press Lady Rose. It's a desaturated pinkish-brown, neither cool nor warm, that reminds me of vagina. Maybe that's why I picked it. 
12. To get free shipping I also ordered a bunch of cookbooks, and a white marker thing that can be used to make highlights (and fix mistakes). 

Anyways, that has been an expensive few weeks. But I have been keeping up with doing one drawing per day, and they're turning out pretty nicely. Of course there are some duds, but I'm learning. Currently, I'm using Diamine Teal for the blacklines and hatching, and Lady Rose for extra shading (via washes) and texture. Mostly I'm drawing flowers because those have interesting shapes and shadows, generally clean lines, and it's easy to figure out what kind of hatching to use. And chess pieces, because those are symmetrical and good for practicing cross-hatching. 

I think eventually I'll run out of flowers I know that names of. Then I can move on to the following things: 

• Hands
• Stuff made out of glass
• My cats 
• People, maybe

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Top 5 ice cream flavours

5. Cookies & cream
4. Stracciatella
3. Love potion 31
2. Strawberry cheesecake
1. Orange creamsicle 

I gotta call a mulligan because I already used a Taylor Swift song on day 4, so I can't use it on day 26 again. (Disregarding that I used a Vienna Teng song for day 9 AND day 15. 

MUNA - Winterbreak

I said previously that I believe love is always a choice. And sometimes it's the wrong choice, but one that's made gladly regardless, to leap off a  a precipice for that brief moment of soaring - 



"Winterbreak" is about the wrong choices that are worth making.