Here I am with my weekly update. I want to make a difference in my drawing this month and therefore will set myself a challenge which I am more sure I can achieve this time. This will hopefully get me excited in drawing more regularly again and help me make some progress in my skills as an Artist.

I’m talking about: JUNICORN - This means, for every day of this month I will aim to draw or paint a Unicorn. - With each drawing l also try to focus on one of the areas I want to improve on in general. - For ease I will update my progress here whenever I have the time (or on my regular update days, aka Saturdays) - why don’t you join with the tags #lycanda-art and #junicorn2018 ? I would love to see what everyone comes up with

Whenever I am stuck for ideas, I usually find something to do on either one of these online resources. They are great practice tools and usually help when I am struggling to make decisions of what to do or what colours to use of what I want to practice this time around, which is almost always.

https://line-of-action.com/ Line of action describes itself as a practice tool for artists and is an AMAZING website. It has an intuitive layout (so is easily accessible), has a well structured forum in which a lot of skill related questions have been posed (and answered), as well as great practice function which lets you choose to do gesture drawings from photographs. You get 4 different categories (3 human related, 1 animal) and you can decide if you want the pictures to be shown with a set time interval or lecture style. You can also choose specifics to the models, which is great.

http://www.posemaniacs.com/ Posemaniacs is one of the more known pose tools out there. A bit creepy at first, as the poses don’t actually have skin on them, you can actually see how some of the muscles work in order to make that pose work the way it does. However, this tool was made digitally, specifically for mangaka and is therefore not anatomically accurate. A COOL feature is, once you open a window with the pose you are interested in drawing, you can actually use your mouse to rotate it from side to side and see other angles yet again. This site too comes with gesture drawing features, such as 30sec drawings, negative space and random pose viewer to mix things up a bit.

https://www.magatsu.net/generators/art/index.php A ‘simple’, easy to use generator for drawing or writing. Depending on the how creative you feel that day, you can choose 1-10 prompts which are either ‘simple’ or ‘complex’. And if you are not happy with the results, just generate new ones.

http://blog.sockenzombie.de/art-ideas-generator/ Another idea generator, although specifically geared towards artists. This time, you can choose your own categories in which you want to get prompted. It allows 0-5 promts per category and has a TON of different options in each. If you are prolific in German, you will find the rest of the website useful too, which has a lot of tips from general drawing advice, to how to fill a sketchbook, various challenges and the like :)

Well it is, what it is. Life is semi-shit at the moment. While, at my last post, I was still pretty excited to go to visit my near and extended family over Christmas (hooray. As luck would have it, of course it didn’t quite turn out the way it could potentially have. Or as I had imagined it.

One of the titles in the OST’s to the Christmas movie ‘Everybody’s Fine’ is titled pointedly: ‘Why have you all lied to me?’ And that is pretty much how I felt shortly after I touched down in Athens. While I was in the car on the way home, I was told my mom was still kept in hospital. You see, three days before departure, I had gotten a text stating she’d go in for tests. When I heard that, I got worried. Two things crossed my mind: 1. Three days for tests is unreasonable, unless they found something and something is wrong! AND 2. I remembered calling her in Summer and almost every time she had SOMETHING that just would not shift...  When I confronted my Uncle and my two Aunties at home with what I suspected, they cracked. Apparently my mom had known since AUGUST, my Aunts and Uncle since NOVEMBER, that my mom had Leukemia. Neither had bothered telling me. But the worst is: Neither bothered shoving her into hospital until... wait for it... Three days before I came over. And all under the guise of wanting to protect me, because I wasn’t there. UNBELIEVABLE. Family support? Right to know? Early treatment?

It turned out, I spent my Christmas and New Years back and forth between my Aunties and the hospital, visiting my mom as often and as long as I could (bear), considering I quickly ran out of things to say and do there, because I was not prepared for any that and I’m far from the most sociable type. In the meantime having a falling out with my brother, because I found out he knew a week before me as well, wasn’t there and had the audacity to ask why I only spent two hours on a particular day at moms, to get my arse to hospital and why I was even there, if I wasn’t helping at all... Matters not, we patched things up eventually (meaning I just brushed things under the rug, because mom is more important than that) and things moved on. Mom IS receiving treatment, but we are still not quite sure which type of CLL it is she has, as the treatment is still being adjusted, so here is hoping. It is now end of January, I am due back at work and my body has nothing better to do than throw a DVT at me. That is, a blood clot in the veins of my leg. Three weeks from the shop floor to the tills (boring, but at least I don’t loose any salary), blood thinners for three months, a delay in my sporting plans (and weight loss, yes I am on the chubby side) and follow up appointments with Heamatology. As if I don’t have enough on my plate just trying to manage my every day life as best as I can (depression, yay).

And then, my body decides to backstab me a second time. A tummy bug which is making the rounds. I didn’t even know what hit me and believe me I had my share of bugs...

I just hope 2018 gets it out of the way early, so it will be smooth sailing from here. That is what my head says. My general mood just hopes this disaster is over soon, because I am not sure how much more I can take of this. And it’s just the beginning of the year. If it wasn’t for my meagre performances that I do manage every once in a while (the odd drawing sessions here and there), and the amazing support I get (from friends and a very special loved one: yes, this is for you, you know you are meant :D), I would have crumbled ages ago.