Fangirlin' It

Guys, I am so excited.  For the first time in forever, I feel creative again.  As some of you may remember, I used to make wallpapers and icons fairly often, among other creative pursuits.  Then, even though I've felt a lot better recently, I just didn't have that creative drive.  Which, okay, is a good trade for not being depressed/anxious/whatever, but kind of sad.  Well, yesterday I was flipping through the wallpapers on a sci-fi website that has a lot of (really, really fantastic) SGA and SG-1 papers.  There was a place where you could submit your own papers by email to the site admin, and if he thinks they're good enough, he might put them on the site.

Some of the things there blew my mind how much layering had to go into them, but some of them were easily on par with things I've created in the past.  So I thought, why not give it a go?  I found a screencap from Hot Zone that I'd been working on before, and finished it up, then sent it in.  But I thought I should do one completely from scratch.  So I spent no less than four hours on it this evening, and I really like it.  The base image is a cap from The Tower, and then I've used stuff from other caps.  I'm not sure whether to send it in though.  What do you think, internet?  I've scaled it down here; it's 1024x768, which is the size the site wanted as a minimum.

So, that fic idea I had, the non-crack wing!fic?  Yeah, I've already got 8 pages of notes/story.  Single-space, 12-pt. font pages.  It's the most writing I've done in possibly a year or more.  And I'm still enjoying it.  Yay!  It may not ever see the light of day except on my hard drive, but at least I know I can write it.

It's going in a vaguely linear manner so far, and I've got bits of conversation in with the narrative/note style so far--mostly, it's just stream-of-consciousness, so I'm not even bothering to fix tenses or put most of it in a form other than 'I think this is what would happen' or 'I want to deal with this idea for these reasons'.  I'm trying to make myself actually name the OCs and plot out some of the narration/conversations in story style, but mostly I just want the ideas on the screen.  And I'm having fun making shit up when canon doesn't provide (or I'm too lazy to search five seasons of transcripts for something that might be mentioned in passing once).  Especially since I just sort of decided to use canon more as a guide than a set of rules ;)

Back to writing!

Ah, more artwork I feel the need to share, since I spent not inconsiderable time on it.

Happy Christmas to all who celebrate! We've had a nice (if very wet) day so far, and I've made (hopefully) good use of one of my gifts already. It's a book called The Artist's Guide to GIMP Effects, and it's a really nice tutorial/refresher for all skill levels. I played around with a few layering/colouring/patterning effects, and here are the results (original art by people who aren't me):



Photobucket won't let me upload .xcf images, so I can't show the variations that are still in layers, but these are two that I finished. I spent about an hour on the elf, and about 2-2.5 hours on the face. It had about six layers, and almost as many layer masks. The hair was frustrating, and I'm not totally satisfied with it, but I wanted to finish it up. The originals looked like this:

Ok, so I don't think I've actually written anything since Parker's class last spring. However, this one image/phrase squished and rolled around in my head all morning, and several edits later, this is the product. Beta work will be rewarded with either real or virtual chocolate and hugs.

It's short, so no cut.

Leaving

I have never been able to leave when it
matters--
--not you; not you, not this place.

I stood dying in place my whole life,
and I sprinted after you for all these years
thinking I was leading in this race of
circular logic.

Now here you are, falling
away from me again:
I falter, stand staring at your finely-
chiseled name,
And I want to ask you for the years
back, but I don't know how.


I envision this as a performance piece, so it's less of my usual tone and emphasis.