rionaleonhart: final fantasy viii: found a draw point! no one can draw... (you're a terrible artist)
Thank you so much for your kind responses to my Christmas Eve post! They meant a lot to me. I had a very pleasant Christmas with my family. It was a much-needed break, I think.

We hired a catsitter to look after Mabel and Dipper over Christmas, and we left her a Christmas card. She sent a text to Rei to say, 'Thank you for the card and the chocolates.'

We had not bought her chocolates.

We had accidentally left the card on our own household box of Quality Street.

Our poor catsitter probably went 'oh, they bought me chocolates, how nice' and then opened it and went '...oh, they bought me chocolates and then... ate half of them and left the wrappers, not even making an effort to hide their crime.'


I received paints for Christmas, so I made a second effort to paint along with a Bob Ross video! (The video in question is here, if you want to have a go.) Somehow it managed to look even less like the original than my first, although I have at least now grasped that you can dilute acrylics and don't just have to use them neat.




Bob Ross's original, 'The Footbridge'.




You may have noticed I've somehow failed to include the footbridge, so I suppose this is just called 'The'.


I've also received, from my brother, the most frustrating jigsaw puzzle I've seen in my life.




I burst out laughing when I unwrapped it. I have not made a great deal of progress. It's even more annoying than it looks.

('But I thought you liked Frozen,' Fred said, all innocence, in response to my look.)
rionaleonhart: final fantasy viii: found a draw point! no one can draw... (you're a terrible artist)
I've been attempting some creative endeavours outside my comfort zone recently!

About a week ago, I met up with some friends for a Bob Ross painting party; we all watched a Bob Ross video and tried to paint along with him. I'd recommend it! It was a lot of fun, and it was really interesting to see how different the results were when we were all trying to reproduce the same painting. Bob Ross's technique is also simple enough for it to be possible to produce something okay-looking even if you don't know the first thing about painting, i.e. if you're me.

Here's the Bob Ross painting we were trying to recreate:




Ah, what a lovely autumnal sunset scene.


And here's my effort:




BLIGHTED APOCALYPTIC HELLSCAPE, NOTHING GREEN HAS GROWN ON THIS SOIL IN A DECADE.


I'm pleased with my apocalyptic hellscape, given my level of painting expertise when Bob Ross isn't holding my hand, but it's definitely more apocalyptic than I intended.

(One of my friends is really good at painting. It was very annoying. Without her, we'd have been able to go, 'Well, obviously this didn't turn out quite right because we're using acrylics instead of oils.' But no; she produced a beautiful masterpiece that left us with no excuses.)

I've also been creating some simple little piano melodies, but I don't have any good recording equipment - I just have my phone, which records in low quality and saves sound in weird, fiddly, difficult-to-share formats - so please just imagine an incredible musical masterpiece, and let's say I composed that.

I know some of you have been having a hard time recently, and playing music (not necessarily composing, but playing) is something I find really helps when I'm struggling psychologically. If you play an instrument but have been neglecting it for a while, it might be worth picking it up again; if you don't play an instrument but can obtain or have access to one, learning to play might be a good project. My ukulele languished untouched in my room for about five years, but I picked it up in a dark patch a few months ago, and it was a great decision!

(And then I took it along to a couple of gatherings of Linkin Park fans, and that decision was even better. Linkin Park songs are not, on the whole, designed for the ukulele, but that didn't keep me from screaming 'SO INSECUUUUUURE' with strangers to ukulele accompaniment. One of the gatherings was outside the US Embassy, next to the Eisenhower statue, so we probably looked like some sort of strange Eisenhower cult to passers-by.)