This is my first ATC girl who is much larger than actual size. She has no arms yet and her shoes aren’t painted, but when they are, she’ll be going on one of the black & gold ATCs. I have 3 other girls in this state of being finished but I didn’t take pictures of them because their dresses look stupid the way they are now and won’t look proper until I cut them out. To explain, they’re in the same style as “Sparkle“, so the tissue paper is kind of everywhere until I cut out the shape of their skirts.

Tonight I’m going to work on the other 4 who are on the same piece of watercolour paper and are ready for their dresses. Two of them will be going on purple & gold ATCs and the other two are for the gold & black.

While I’ve definitely been procrastinatey with the ATCs (I’m also working on a canvas for the background tutorial), I am absolutely loving doing them. I like doing very small, detailed work and always have, especially when I’m in pain and I’ve always liked “cut & paste”. When I was little, like in kindergarten and grade 1, we would have art class and I would always get excited when the activity was “cut & paste”, whether it was cutting up magazines or construction paper. That’s why I like doing these girls so much (and the bigger ones, of course), the painting of them is actually very minimal, it’s the cutting & pasting of their dresses that I find fulfilling. It’s the mixing of media and little details. The backgrounds, of course, is all painting, but I see that as a separate thing from doing the girls themselves. All of my paintings are done in 4 stages: the background (which is like, 5 stages in and of itself), the girl(s), the varnishing and the addition of details, like jewels or fibers or thread.  I take pleasure in each step, but I have to admit that it’s the cutting & pasting of each girl’s ensemble that I like the best.

With the little ATC girls, I haven’t decided yet if they’re going to have thread (for the ones with corsets) or jeweled details. I’m kind of thinking “no”, because people will want the cards to be totally flat to put with a collection or whatnot and with the threads for the corsets, half of the thread would be on the back of the card where my information is supposed to be. (I realize I could do the sewing before I put the girls on the cards but I’ve found that when I do that, they don’t adhere properly because the thread is so bumpy and it makes their busts slightly curve.)

Making these little girls is definitely a lot harder than making the full-sized ones. Just to draw the first 8 took me about 3 days and shading them took another 2. Then another day to paint their faces and another to paint their eyes, lips and eyeshadow, which had to dry overnight. Making the backgrounds, the cards, was so easy, but these little girls are gonna be the death of me, I have no idea how I’m going to all 60 of them when 8 is taking me forever. But I figure I have all winter and have nothing better to do, so I might as well just keep plugging away. I’m out of canvases and have no money, so it’s not like I’m going to be painting anything else for a while.  I do have a pile of wood that Blake cut for me at Jesse’s house a while ago, like a dozen or so of them in varying sizes, but I don’t like working with wood because I can’t sew into it and I don’t like adhering watercolour paper to it because it just doesn’t seem right. I guess if I get really desperate, I’ll use it, but for now I’m pretending it doesn’t exist and just keeping my head down getting these girls finished.

Today Blake downloaded and burned the movie Julie & Julia for me and he has another 2 or 3 on the go so my plan is to just watch movies tonight and work on my girls. I got up this morning around 11am, but got tired again around 1pm and ended up sleeping for the rest of the afternoon, so I’m guessing I’m going to be up late.

Blake had half of Thursday off, plus Friday, then this weekend and then he has Monday & Tuesday off too because his boss made him take the rest of this year’s vacation days before the end of the year. That means that on Monday he’s going to help me take some pictures for the background tutorial because I can’t splatter paint and take pictures at the same time and then on Tuesday morning I have to finally go in for the bloodwork my shrink ordered 4 months ago which I’ve been putting off because nothing is worse to me than having your blood drawn. (Okay maybe getting an IV is worse. Veins and blood are just gross.) Hopefully my shrink will get the results before my appointment with her on Friday.

Anyway, my dinner just materialized in front of me, so I guess I’ll stop babbling, hit “post” and go eat. I hope you’re all having a lovely weekend and the snow isn’t keepin’ ya down.