Stay out of the shadows

Some old mixed media favourites. 🦄

Some of you might be aware of the fact that I’m working on my next artbook – I hope to complete it later this year, although I’m currently finding it difficult to focus on this book because of numerous other work projects and duties that are keeping me busy on a daily basis. But I hope I’ll get back on track at some point during the following months. 🤞

The book will include a thematic collection of my mixed media (digitally coloured) drawings from the past five years, such as the ones in this post, and also some never before seen work I’m creating exclusively for the book.

THE WITCHER APPRECIATION WEEK ▽ day three: favorite relationship

“Enjoying a sunset on some rollerblades with your dog and horse.”

ROMANCE IN FILM gif meme: favorite pairings/couples [1/X]

Ten Major Artists:

Wong Wong & Lulu

Pepper examining himself before commencing a self-portrait

Pepper’s self-portrait

Tiger the spontaneous reductionist

Misty goes off the wall

Minnie, the abstract expressionist

Minnie’s Reindeer in Provence, 1992.

Smokey painting after an hour in the catnip patch

Smokey at work

Ginger’s Stripped Bare Birds, 1992.

Princess, the elemental fragmentist

Amelia Pond “was like a name from a fairy tale”, but Amy tries to shed fairy tale fantasies as she chases after real world adventures. For all that her story is a “bit fairy tale”, Amy Pond was one of the most relatable characters that I and others had seen in so long.

When we first see her, she’s a little girl praying to Santa about a mysterious crack in her wall that whispers to her as she sleeps. It is a scene of strangeness and invokes many a magical theme, but there is also a sense of reality to it. Children’s worlds are strange and magical but it’s not always just because they have the imagination and creativity to create them. Sometimes it’s comes with a touch of necessity. Plenty of children believe in Santa but very few of them pray to him. Little Amelia Pond’s prayer to Santa might not be just a quirk of childhood but also possibly a little girl making up her own belief system when there isn’t an adult in her life who takes the time to show her one. Or at least an adult to listen to her problems so she doesn’t have sit up all alone in her house praying to some mysterious being of incredible powers and kindness in the hopes of solving her problems.

It’s a strange and almost magical story we’re told of little Amelia Pond in a strange house with doors hidden out in the corner of her eyes. But it’s also the story of a young girl left to fend for herself in a strange new country, in a mostly empty house with only a mostly absent aunt and her own thoughts to keep her company. She’s “the Scottish girl in the English village” and the Doctor claims to understand how that feels, but in the real world out here, there are far more people to whom that feeling is just as familiar.

The door only seen through the corner of your eye is scary. And monsters that steal your form while you sleep are terrifying. But so is being a seven year old girl, all alone in a house in a strange new place in the middle of the night. And that is an all too real kind of fear. When we (and the Doctor) meet her, she’s all alone well into the night, and everything in Amelia’s behaviour suggests this is nothing out of the ordinary. The Doctor remarks that Amelia is “not scared of anything”, but maybe fear becomes different when there are people to listen to it and the only person to tell is some strange figure from myth, whether it be Santa (who might not exist) or the Doctor (who she never knew existed).

She is given the moniker of the girl who waited. For all it’s whimsical tone, it’s also something real that grounds Amy. It’s not just the Doctor she waits for. When the Doctor says he’d be “right back”.  Amelia’s response is that “people always say that”. How many times had she heard it before she stopped believing it? Despite all the Doctor’s insistence that he’s not people (“Do I even look like people?”), he leaves her waiting for far too long just as she had suspected. Despite all the times he’s said the words  “Trust me. I’m the Doctor.” and delivered his promise, he lets Amelia down exactly like she had become used to. And she waits exactly as she’s used to.

Amy runs away the night before her wedding with an almost magical figure who flits in and out of time in a time machine. The Doctor belongs to myths and legends that she’s never heard of. However, Amy herself and her desire to put her life on pause even for a little while is not alien. She’s not running away because she doesn’t want to get married but because tomorrow is just too soon. That feeling is a familiar one. To want to run away from your life not forever but just until you’re ready to face it. To want to leave and come back and find your life waiting just as you left it.

a true act of goodwill always sparks another.