Smol Monsters

The Gods Of Weather And Technology Are Being Petulant

/ Melissa

In a shocking turn of events this summer, it’s raining again. /sarcasm. Apparently the Northeast is getting the rain for the entire country and we’ve gone from a really nasty drought into flooding. It’s not quite as bad here as some areas of New York, but it’s bad enough that I’m grateful for the fact that the stream that runs along one border of the property is cut really deep and that we’re on the side of the hollow, not at the bottom. I suspect that the bottom corner of the yard is underwater, but I can’t tell through the wall of feral vegetation.

I got the new printer set up in the studio last night (finally), but discovered that the wi-fi in the house, which barely makes it all the way to the studio, is not strong enough for it. Figured that this is likely also going to be the case for the Cricut, so today I go out to Best Buy to pick up the booster, to be installed in the office.

Art-wise, I’ve been sketching some new monsters this week, and grinding the rust off my drawing skills. I don’t know about anyone else, but I think they’re cute, in a “Muppets meet Hieronymous Bosch” sort of way.

With Adobe leaning hard into AI theft, I deleted my account with them and re-started Clip Studio (who briefly flirted with AI, got yelled at by pretty much their entire user base, and walked it back within a day or so of announcing they were thinking about it). The extra nice thing about Clip Studio is that it has the option of one-time purchase or subscription model, and the subscription model has an option to let me use it both on my laptop with the Wacom or on my phone. Weirdly, I’m having an easier time with it on my phone than I am on the Wacom. Not sure what that’s about, but whatever. Practice is practice. Still have to work out all the other bells and whistles, but getting there.

Definitely happy to be getting back to work and back on track again.

Now if it will stop raining long enough to be able to take my travel kit and go work outside somewhere for a bit. There’s some lovely spots around the area that I’ve been itching to go set up for a couple of hours at.

A Small Grotesquery and Helpful Kitties

/ Melissa

The best part about autumn really is being able to cook the things I love to cook again. Last night I made a pot of sausage and kale soup for dinner, with enough left over for lunch for the next couple of days. Tonight I’m planning to bake a pear crisp, using the rest of the pears a friend gave me from her pear tree. The household cooking is generally divided by season around here, so Himself does most of the cooking in the warm months on the grill, and I do most of the cooking in the cold months, and it works pretty well. The cats do their best to help us both year-round, which is to say that Púca nearly made a successful attempt to jump into the soup kettle last night while I was stirring it.

Slowly but surely figuring out a new household pattern that lets me get some serious work done, and as a result I’ve got a new painting finished! Turns out that some of my monsters make excellent grotesques when combined with medieval illuminated manuscript techniques and stylizing. Planning to see if I can find a frame for it this afternoon so I can get it formally listed in the shop, and then get another one started later on.

I spent some time earlier in the week reconfiguring my Ko-fi membership tiers, so now monthly subscribers will have exclusive sneak peeks at whatever I’m working on that I won’t be posting elsewhere online, as well as the ever-popular cat pictures (since subscription donations go toward helping keep them fed and housed by providing a steady source of income), in addition to the discounts that the two high tiers already get. With shifting away from Patreon, it’s so much easier to manage perks, which frees up a lot of mental bandwidth to make sure I can reliably follow through on them. I’m hoping to add more as I go, but for right now, it’s a good start.

Now, though, I’m off to the store to see about a small frame for the newest Smol Monster and maybe a couple of extra to have on hand for it’s upcoming siblings.