oh, mama raised me well

lots of cat pics this month

i've been meaning to make a post for, like, the last two weeks lol

random things happening

the shitty feral neighbors moved!!!!!!!!!!!!! the handyman told me that they paid their rent up thru june and would be moving by july but it turns out they broke the lease and bailed last week b/c tony reported people whose voices he didn't recognize in the house over there complaining loudly about how awful it was.

turns out, it was their UPSTAIRS neighbors (i was under the assumption that, kind of, everyone i saw over there was part of the whole house and the shitty neighbors had somehow rented the whole place) who are cleaning the lower place out and moving in there? idk if the landlord is renting them the whole place or what exactly is going on, but they're chiller and SO much quieter than the ferals, so that's already a huge improvement

not making it to anthrocon this year, which is a real bummer. my mom can't watch the house (for a couple reasons) and the cats and i can't pay anyone fairly to have to feed beans so frequently lol. if it were just finn and oryx, i could ask someone to stop by and make sure their dishes are full and scoop the box, but beans needs extra care AND he's prone to pooping in the kitchen/outside the litter box and i can't afford to pay someone to deal with that

tony and i got out for a walk the other day, stopped at the little metaphysical shop down the road from us that i've NEVER gone in since moving here lol - very nice little place, chill owners, and they have a cute black catten named chance!! we also stopped at circle k and got taquitos and walked over to the cemetery to eat them where a HAWK landed on a tombstone near us before flying off real low




beginning of the month was, apparently, the 100 year anniversary of the first goodyear blimp flight, so they had all three blimps out taking loops around the city. i got some good photos of them above my workplace and it was pretty cool to see them out together in formation

in the first pic, there's a tiny speck off to the left of the blimp on the left-hand side - that's the helicopter that was doing the route with them to get photo/video and stuff. so tiny in comparison!




i biked up out to merriman falls at the end of last month and the ride OUT there was so nice, it didn't even feel like i was exerting myself, but the ride back felt ROUGH lol it also doesn't help the very end of it before i get to the house, i have to basically walk the bike up the hills in the neighborhood back there so i get home and i'm just D-E-D dead

but on the way out i stopped at each of the trailheads (which is, like, 3 + big bend b/c there's a nice little wooden deck to chill out on and it's about the halfway point)

while in merriman valley, stopped at the happy tails thrift and got a cute scarf, two card decks, some nice embroidery thread, and some wool balls for oryx (she keeps stealing the dryer balls)




after dealing with some shipping bullshit, tony's birthday presents for me finally showed up lol - he'd originally ordered a richard siken zine from someone on etsy and it never showed up, he contacted the seller and they re-sent one and IT never showed up, so eventually he had to request a refund and the seller got real shitty/guilt-trippy about it. like, sorry!!! i would've loved to have had the zine, but idk why nothing you've sent has gotten here, soooooo....

the keychain, postcard, and spooky stickers are from Enthralledyet and the opossum stickers are by niipon! he said he ALMOST bought me one of these shirt, both of which i lost my mind at



i have also acquired a bunch more chickensmoothie uma stuff lol













finally, here's some unfinished sketches from this year so far

saw the crane wives with sam, got the bike out and went to the thrift, got some art done, met a cat, cleaned up the porch a bit

draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man
you did some bad things, but i'm the worst of them
sometimes I wonder which one will be your last lie
they say looks can kill and i might try
🎶

this won't get any easier now
that your heart is beating in my head
and i've tried not to destroy you baby
although we both know i can
🎶

[ click thru for larger ]

did this BEFORE i ended up drawing some stuff at the end of december, so that's why december is blank lol. could i have gone back and added something before posting here? sure. did i? absolutely not

it was a pretty slow year for art, especially with everything going on in my life all fuckin' year long, but i'm quite happy with what i did do, so that counts for something

upstairs toilet must have gotten fixed, but the upstairs neighbor also moved out which is eeeh, good and bad. their kids were kinda loud, but they were overall mostly quiet - just music noodled frequently, but they could at least play decently. the downside is that: we're gonna get a new neighbor and it's a gamble on what that might end up being. the majority of individuals have been okay, or at least tolerable, except for that one woman and her children that had to be evicted and then weren't even out of the house when the landlord and the sheriff came down. i wish he wouldn't rent the place out at all, but what can you do

also dreading the inevitable $50/mo rent hike when i need to renew my lease ://// every year i get a meager raise and every year it's eaten up by my rent going up

---

been trying to draw more - or at least keep busy a little creatively



working on a ref for ancyn (base is by garoline) b/c i saw this base and it has SUCH ancyn vibes, so that was a big bit of inspiration to play around with it. i'm liking how it's coming out so far, at least. gonna add some more stuff to it, i think, as well, and make it more of a full ref sheet like my ally one is



also working on a commission thing~



also also realized i never posted these here?????? glimmer for mitsene (from her webcomic glimmer), cassiopeia for suzanami, and a kailani for me (her anthro destiny version - just straight opossum lol)

got a fit of inspiration at the end of december - AFTER i'd done my 2024 art summary, NATURALLY (which i also realize i haven't posted here lol - there's probably gonna be a bunch of individual art posts after this)

a pretty quiet month and then a burst of art right at the end and then ALSO the upstairs neighbor got a leak in their bathroom ON NEW YEAR'S EVE

there sure is a lot of baby kitten pics in this one

[click thru for larger]

after i committed to the thyroidectomy, i realized i'd be getting a cool throat scar and i wanted to incorporate that into my fursona's design. so i figured, why not punish myself and make her a proper reference sheet (i hate doing reference sheets lol). so i did and i actually finished it!!! which is honestly the most shocking part

i'd really just never bothered with a ref sheet outside of a base one b/c she does have a really simple design and i'm flexible with 99% of it anyhow, but this was a fun challenge for myself and i quite like how it turned out!

just keep your mouth shut
keep your guard up
i swear i'll make it right
🎶


( symbolism )

may feels like it flew by, too, but looking back at the pics from last month, some of these seem a much longer time ago. especially seeing the aurora and going to the punk rock flea market. also started going to the coffee shop to work on art, and finally went to pick out new glasses (that we need to pick up lol)

i completely forgot about posting this around the first of the month!

in knife_lounge's discord server the other week, the showcase topic/theme was 'before and after! How have your OCs changed over time?' and i was thinking about how my fursona, ally, has changed AND split over the years



ally started out as 'alien' - green haired brown fox. she was pretty short-lived - up until 2002. i was using either faith originally in some satAM rp chats, and the phe as, like, my 'main' charas online

i was into men in black and the x-files and aliens at the time, which is where the green hair came from, i'm pretty sure. i redrew her in 2020!



fursona got a fresh new design in 2002 and renamed 'angel'. bonus big and/or chibi angel wings as part of the design now!



around 2006-2007 i was doing more vampire-based rp stuff on tapestries muck and revived a bit her older incarnation that was based off the self-insert character i played in a vampire the masquerade chronicle (like, this had always been there, i just wasn't utilizing it lol). so there was a lot more of her with 'darker' art next to the pretty cutesy/brightly colored stuff i drew of her (the wavy/curly vs. straight hair was usually the visual difference between the two)




in 2010, i gave her another overhaul b/c possum just felt right to add. i'd also been playing freckles/pepper the previous year and had made her a possum, so...



i think that first sketch was the only time i EVER drew the tattoos i wanted her to have lkhglkhgd - i ended up basically giving the tatts to kailani

in 2018/2019, there were more liminal/horror themes coming out in my art and i started pivoting back to playing with ally/angel/vampire stuff



i leaned back into that pretty heavily and it's been the consistent them of her for a couple years now



what, then, about the left side of that image? who is ancyn? and what does she have to do with angel???

so, i kind of yoinked V:tM angel and shook the dust off of her and decided to kind of re-work her origin story. ultimately, it's pretty much the same, but i wanted to actually re-work her sire (who was originally a jr/hs bf of mine lol) and make him his own creation instead of mostly based off someone else who isn't even someone i think about anymore lol

(now, mind you, there's overlap with ally/angel/ancyn's stories across the board - fursona ally is really just me, but offshoot of fursona ally has the V:tM history mess, and angel got rolled over into a fresh new form with ancyn and a slightly different version of the V:tM history mess lol)



so ancyn got reworked for my D2 hunter slot - her and her partner left the last city early on in the city age to scout north america and report back. this went on for a good while, but eventually they went off grid. something happened to them and she was forced to kill her partner (not final death). she returned to the city to seek out an old friend some time after that. she's a solar main hunter and it's been fun to do a lot of those colors in her pieces!

(i realized i put one of her d&d pics in here, but it's actually kind of both D2 and d&d lol so i'm not going back to fix it)

i also rolled her to play in the d&d campaign chris is running - her story is much more vague, but roughly something happened to her partner and she's going to have to figure out how to fix/remedy it. she's a swiftstride shifter rogue and the party doesn't know her real name or that she IS a shifter at all ICly lol - it's also fun to draw her with the overlay of ears/tails to represent that

beneath my breasts
there burns a fire
of blood and flesh
of sound and wire
it won't be quenched
🎶

spent the better part of the week over engineering a matchbook zine (inspired by rachel bard and pam wishbow) before i finally figured out that it's easier to just fold as needed as i go x_x

initial mockup - design done in canva, utilizing a matchbook template from a custom matchbook manufacturer. i was unsure what i was putting inside of it at this point


mockup with b&w pages - decided to format that little drabble i wrote about ancyn killing her partner and use it, plus some other little things. 20~ pages altogether. i was struggling a bit with the dimensions of each - the spots i had marked for scoring weren't correct with the page sizes and it was frustrating me. ended up spending some time measuring and re-measuring and tweaking and adjusting and reformatting everything in canva


reprinted with new (slightly larger) measurements and, instead of scoring everything from the get-go, i just scored what i needed as i went and then trimmed anything excess (the flap that goes under the stapled part, basically). these came together MUCHHHH quicker than the others and with less paper waste, as well. used one of the craft paper cutters and the whole process was easy and relaxing lol - plus i got some nice textured edges b/c the blade on the cutter wasn't super sharp, which works really well for these


complete!!! twenty-four little matchbook zines~ i made a reel on instagram showing me putting one together and you can see the little burnt matches pattern on the inside! the only thing i FORGOT was to put my @ somewhere dfkjghdklfghldfk so i ended using some label paper and printing a weathered paper texture on it and then my @ and sticking them into the back behind the pages lol

despite the frustration (and seemingly having to work backwards to solve it lol), this was a nice little project! i'll probably print a more here and there for assembling during downtime at work. they're slightly more labor intensive than the other zines i've done, so idk what to price them, b/c they are so small lol. for now i may just keep them for trades maybe

it is the end of the fuckin' year

come morning we awaken to a garnet colored sky
the mirror cracked and broken making ✗'es of my eyes
🎶

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done on hensa's new portrait base!!

a weird one to tag - 90% not my art lol, but i did mod the hair and some other little things, as well as add stuff (jewelry, top)

was doing my little end of year summary things and remembered this beast and how i hadn't updated it in a long time. didn't have the psd file anymore, but thankfully it was full size, so i could pull up the original template and adapt