Before Opening

What does an artist do when they're in the hospital on a limited diet? Dream about going out to eat, then grab a scrap of paper and draw it out. Well, that's what I did for the past few days after my surgery to remove an organ. But luckily I did have the sense to bring my sketch book and pencils with me. This week's theme of Cafes actually got me to look forward to when I was released, as what type of images I wanted to do.
Today, we start with the black and white sketch of what I thought a cafe may look like. Of course, I featured desserts on the tables, since all that I could think about while drinking tea was "How nice it would be to have a treat with this cup of tea?" This picture was also a chance to do a room setting that I haven't done in black and white for some time. Look forward to tomorrow's project.

Yami Yugi

 This wasn't a hard costume to make. Most of it consisted of a few finds at Value Village that needed some modifications. I did have to make the wig, choker and the Millennium puzzle.
For the puzzle, I first craved a piece of building foam into the basic shape. Then I looked at several screenshots of the Yu-Gi-Oh! series in order to find all the details of the puzzle. Those details, I simply pressed in, using the end of a pencil. The 'Eye of Horus', I created by drawing it out with hot glue. Then I dug out a hole from the top of the puzzle in order to counter-sink a large ring, that was connected to a large chain. I hot glued the ring in place, then covered the connection with masking tape. Once the puzzle was assembled, I covered it with a few coats of gold paint.
The wig was just as tricky. I first sewed a cap and placed it on a styrofoam head. Then I took 5 chopsticks to create the structure for the spikes. Then I took strips of newspaper and glued them in place to fill out the form. Then I painted the form black, and hot glued black and red pieces of wool. For the yellow bangs, I hot glued yellow pieces of wool on a smooth piece of metal. This allowed me to form the wool into the shape that I wanted and easily detach the wool from the metal cleanly. Then it was just simply hot glue them in place.
For conventions, I also add on my duel disk toy and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards to complete the look. After not wearing this costume for a few years, I decided to bring it out for a one day event and I was swamped with people asking for pictures with the character. Always great to have a well known character costume once in a while.

Family Game Night

One favourite memory that I have connected to games is when my family would get together for a card game of Fustration. I wanted to create a black and white picture showcasing this memory, especially  when one of us would catch the rest of the family with full hands.

Yami no Game

This Photoshop project was inspired by episode 163 of the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime series. Some years back, my friend and I tried to recreate the duel of that episode, while at an anime convention, since she was dressed as Yugi and I was dressed as Yami. On their own, the pictures from that day were not that great, but add in drawings of the monsters, masking and special effects, I was able to finally create the kind of image that both my friend and I wanted. This project took about 6 images and about 6 hours to complete.

Game Box

The main things you'll need for this project is:

a metal box
48 small round magnets
decorative and/ or coloured duct tape
a print-out of a chess board
black and white/silver sharpies

*Majority of the items were purchased from Michaels craft store* www.michaels.com/

First thing that I did was make up a chess board using my drawing program, but can easily do a search on the internet. In either case, the image has to be scaled to fit the size of your lid for the metal box. The lid will become a playing surface for chess or checkers. I held the chess board on with 4 magnets as I cut pieces of tape to fit around the lid. I chose the duct tape for the lid since it was a plain red and act as a frame around the board. Then I used the decorative tape as a border around the box. You can used any pattern   that you want. I found a tape that had different typefaces of the letter 'L', which I thought worked well with my name. Next I laid out the magnets on the board and began painting the tops of half of them with the silver sharpie. These become your chess and checker pieces. Using the same sharpie I wrote the first and last letter on the 8 main black chess pieces. Then I did the same one the silver ones, only with the black sharpie. With that done, all I had to do was fill my new game box with a variety of game pieces; 2 packs of playing cards, dice, a puzzle book, note book and pen (for keeping score during complicated games), and scans of games that I found in the Yu-Gi-Oh manga series. I'll include a few in this post, but for the other games, it's best to check out the series for yourself.

Duel

Ah, a new week starts here on my blog and this week we're looking at games. For this coloured sketch, I decided to have two games of strategy as mirror images of each other. The upside-down one is a game that's been played for centuries, kind of looking down on a modern day game.  The reason for the red in a basically black and white picture, is because the term 'duel' was often refer to a match where the loser would lose their life. In history, there has been many games that had such bloody ends. The games mainly played today are much more tame in some aspects, where the only life lost is a virtual one.

Chiblossom, the Rose Elf

Chiblossom has been one of my more fanciful characters to design and actually construct. I first started by constructing the base dress, by making the skirt selection out of two shades of pink bed sheets attached to a halter top made out swim suit lining. Over the base dress, I sewed on a layer of pink organza that parted in the center and a fluffy pink scarf; both at the bust line. Then I made a detachable decoration for the center of the bust out of a Christmas snowflake and 3 pieces of red cord. At the other end of each cord, I attached a fake rose. I took couple more fluffy pink scarves and made a couple of bracelets and a choker necklace. Each of these got a fake rose and some red cord. The red cord of each bracelet was long enough to clip onto the elf ears; that I made out of craft foam and attached to a metal headband. I chose a white wig to top off costume, since it went with the gradation that was happening with the whole costume, and really made the red cord stand out as the accent colour and vertical lines that I wanted. For the chilly night festival I also wore a white shawl.  In the end, the actual costume turned out differently from my initial sketch. But I don't mind, it's still a nice costume to have.