Elephants and Overnighters

Elephant Fact # 19: If taught, elephants can paint identifiable pictures such as other elephants or people.

Today, I woke up at 11:45 a.m. It was good.

Yesterday, I slept at 8:32 p.m. That was good also.

The reason for my 15+ hour beauty nap was a pretty weird one, even for me—so let’s start from the beginning.

We had our school Art Showcase yesterday (Friday). I wanted to do something for it, but I also had my Undergraduate Medical Admissions and Blah test on Wednesday and guilt, like the cat I never wanted, kept on sitting on my face every time I did something other than practise for it.

So that left Wednesday and Thursday night to do something. Unfortunately, I spent my Wednesday—

--well, my Wednesday was pretty uneventful, let’s just leave it at that. So it was just Thursday then.

I’ve always wanted to do a series of pictures to show my ‘progress’ on a project, so let’s start with 5:12 p.m., when I started my piece for the Showcase, and go from there.

Sausage fingers! And look at all those rubber shavings
 littering the
 floor at the bottom
of the canvas, tsk tsk. Disgraceful.
I was never good with doing things neatly.

Split the canvas into four parts because I wanted to do
something different with color
 schemes.
  And then drew the basic features over it, but they
 kept on coming out strangely.
What's with the lip, man?

For me, this was the hardest part-- outlining where the different levels of shadows were.
I've never actually done something like this before, so this was kind of guess-and-check at this point.

Beginning coloring! I chose purple for the first section because...it's my school House color and I was feeling the love, man. Also, I like my hat.

Had to number each of the sections so I wouldn't get confused as to which shade was which.

Yellow! Because YOLO?

There was something about complementary colors that I was supposed to mention, but I forgot.
The color wheel and I don't get along so great.

Hat & shirt = dad's
Pants = mom's
My color palette was a paper plate. :(

Neeeeeeearly done!

Sooooooooo cloooooooose!

And then, the final thing, at 6:00 am in the morning:

*fapfapfapfapfapfapfap*

It’s called ‘Overnight’ because, well, go figure. I think overall…the whole thing took me around thirteen hours. 

My mom found me in the morning with this haggard, demented look on my face—

--whereupon she ushered me into the bathroom to get ready for school.

Things were interesting that day.

Thankfully, I sobered up long enough to watch the rest of the Showcase—holy cow, people are fantastic at my school. I think my personal favorites were the Bring it On dance troupe’s performance, an a cappella song where they did some pretty fantastic stuff with boxes to make a beat—literally beatboxing—and a Liszt piece on piano.

 The host was pretty amazing as well—but it was crazy awkward when he went to the audience and unknowingly started to interrogate my dad about whether he liked any of the female performers, though.

Mmph, I think I might take a nap again.

See you in a few,

The Unlucky Elephant

Elephants and Marshmallows

Elephant Fact # 18: The oldest known elephant was 82 years old. 

         

It’s only two weeks into school and I can feel the heat already. Oh, man.

We all submitted our EE (Extended Essay) and TOK (Theory of Knowledge) essays yesterday, which felt very strange. Letting go of my EE was like—like having an unexpected kid that you really, really hate at first and want to give away for adoption because it does nothing but scream and cry and puke all over your laptop and demand constant attention—and then watching it leave, fully grown and beautiful, for college and thinking, ‘You know, I might have loved this kid after all’.

It’s like that.

On the other hand, I have a lot more time on my hands. Time to really strap on my working boots and get down to the meaty grind of my Chemistry classes—

…or not.

Marshmallows are delicious.

I’ve lately been on this site called Doodle or Die—it’s so fantastically amusing. Basically, someone starts a drawing prompt like perhaps, “A green bunny” and someone else connected to the site draws it. Then someone else writes a description about that person’s drawing without  seeing the original description and the someone else draws that, and so on. It’s like a game of Chinese whispers but 300x the awesomeness.

Here are a few of mine:

Anyway, that’s all I gotta say for today. Catch up some other time!

The Unlucky Elephant


Ohright: Last Friday night I danced with a boy! OMGOMGOMG-- I'm kidding, he's just a friend (weird to even look at it that way, seriously) but I just had a lot of fun, seeing as the school dance and my karaoke plans were cancelled that same day. 


(And yes, it was my embarrassing bootay-shakin'. Goddammit.)

Elephants and Monsters

Elephant Fact # 17: Elephants are symbols of wisdom in Asian cultures.

Still in a rotten mood.

Drew this.

Most people are often surprised when they chance upon my past sketchbooks and find it filled with monsters—it’s just something I like to do when I can’t think of anything else to draw. There’s no set anatomy with them except for what you decide to give them—which is probably I like drawing them so much.

A Little Background I Thought Up

This one was born of a dream of a French coal miner’s daughter (before they closed down all the coal mines in France, of course), stemming from her fear of the darkness of the mines. The eyes resemble the lights at the top of the miner’s protective helmets. It was born from her nightmares but did not remain there; its presence gradually infected the dreams of the other children in her village before it finally clawed its way into conscious thought.

They called it the ‘J’imagine’ (I imagine) but it is also known as ‘the Thought’. It was given its name because it will appear every time one imagines that it is there, which is why its main haunts are in places that are often feared by children—the basement, under the bed, behind the door, etc.

It normally attacks kids, as they are more susceptible to their own imagination than adults. Furthermore, because it feeds on fears that are set in the fantastical (rather than the rational worries of an adult), as it was of these that it was born from.

The Physical Side

The Thought consists of a tough, white exoskeleton that resembles a distorted human skeleton and is wrapped with tattered sinew and muscle. Its back legs extend over its head and act as its front legs on which the majority of its weight is distributed.

It uses these legs to attack and defend itself as it is made of a considerably stronger material than the rest of its body, save for its head, and because its ‘claws’ are located here.

 Its front legs (technically the back) are the Thought’s weakest part of its body as they are quite brittle. This is why it is covered by the back legs as a defence. Its fingers are grotesquely elongated as it uses this to pin down/grab its food (children).
Its spine can rotate a full 360 degrees for each vertebrae; in the drawing above it's in mid rotation.

Its eyes resemble lanterns. It does not blink.

How to Kill

You can kill it by not thinking about it. Tricky, huh?

The Unlucky Elephant

Elephants and Cursing

Elephant Fact # 16: The word ‘elephant’ comes from the Greek “ἐλέφας” which means ivory.

Excessive swearing in this one guys, I do apologize.

I’ve found that lately I’ve been in a hideous mood. Goddamn toast falling on the buttered side.

Normally in the past, when I wanted to rage I’d turn to writing as an outlet for my frustrations. But now, I think it’s pretty safe to say that I’ve found a much more satisfying way to express myself—

(Urgh, the anatomy's all off. Sorry.)

What a word, man, what a word.

Which reminds me—I gotta stop cursing. Really. It’s not nice.

Yesterday I was talking to my mother and she told me something that surprised me. My first reaction was to say:

--whoops, I mean--

--um—

And in the end I just settled for a (rather boring in my opinion) "Oh, really?"

...

Aw, jeez.

The Unlucky Elephant

Elephants and Cards

Elephant Fact # 15: Healthy adult elephants have no natural predators except for humans.

Just a quick one today, as I’ve been feeling a little guilty for not updating for so long.

It was my mom’s birthday yesterday! I tested out my new poster pens on her card—they are amazing; they blend together so well. I think I used at least three colors on a single petal, I love it!

Happy Birthday! <3
Also visited a friend’s house a few days ago and it was pretty fun—she asked me to draw her, so I did:

Completely true to life, swear to Gawd.

And then later I got bored so I started drawing dicks smiley faces on her fingernails.

I’ve been playing this ridiculously old, ridiculously funny flash game called Façade lately—its main plot is that you’ve been invited over by an arguing couple. It’s not supposed to be funny, really—the main point of the game is to either make or break their relationship—but the AIs are so smart here that I just can’t help myself.

Look at their faces!

And then this is me getting kicked out after I offended them by asking strange questions regarding their undergarments.

Mmph,

The Unlucky Elephant

Elephants and Formals (Again)

Elephant Fact # 15: Elephants can be ‘left-tusked’ or ‘right-tusked’, similar to how humans can be left or right-handed.

The following photo is of all the super duper sexy gals wearin’ red at the school formal. I thought it was a pretty cute photo, but I don’t really feel comfortable posting pictures of other people on such a public space without their consent—so I did my Unephant version of censoring it.  Sorry to those I herped derped!

Still pretty hawt, though. 

                

At the moment, I’m seriously struggling to type this up; it’s mainly because of the acrylic nails I still have on from the school formal. I keep on missing all the buttons I want to press on the keyboard so sentences like ’Look at those twenty girls in that hot tub’ come out something like ‘Pokeswy rhows twenty girlsw in te hot rub’.

Which basically gives up the same intended picture, but still.

I haven’t blogged properly for a while so here’s a basic rundown of what happened during the last week of school:

Wednesday- Athletics Carnival

Thursday- Ridiculously-important-exam-related-stuff-which-I-won’t-touch-for-the-purposes-of-my-sanity-and-the-entertainment-factor-of-my-blog

Friday- School formal

I’ll just pick out the highlights of what happened.

The theme for my House on Athletics Day was ‘Agnesi Fantasy’. Although I thought it was rather vague, I’m still quite glad that it got picked. I mean, the requirements were basically ‘purple’ (our House color) and ‘not reality’…and guess what I had lying around?

Literally just lying around. As in, ‘oh, let’s see what’s under my bed today—oh dear Lord, would you look at that?’ , it was just there.

Towards the end of the day, we had our traditional school trivia competition between Instep groups. Unfortunately, our Instep scored full marks for one of the categories—and thing is, so did a lot of other groups. And in a style true to form, that meant a mass dance off to determine the winner. One person per group had to get up on stage and…

No. No. No, why me? Why is it always me?
So I ended up onstage.

I hate doing these things. I had to do the same thing for the last trivia competition. And it’s not because I’m too embarrassed or anything, or stage shy—it’s because I always win.

And the reason why I always win is…

Oh God, I feel so dirty. Oh Lawd.

I mean, when I’m doing all my hip thrusting and whatnot it’s like I know I should stop but at the same time I just—I just, I can’t. Not even when I was feeling up that nice young lad who (dared to) step in front of me while I was frantically shaking my ‘boot-eh’ at the crowd, not even when I jumped off stage to air-hump the space in front of the teachers’ panel, not even when that little voice was muttering in my head, “shame and dishonor, shame and dishonor”—nothing. The whole school could be on fire and there I’d be, just…

Well, yeah.

I’m pretty sure there’s a video somewhere, but bollocks if I post the link here.

Conversely, we had our school formal on Friday.

I don’t normally post pictures of myself on my blog, but 1) I love the exasperated look on my face as I tried to “descend gracefully” from the limo (we had a limo! <3) and 2) I wanted to put up a few photos of my dress.

It’s so pretty! It looks like a cupcake.

My mother’s cousin made it—I sent her a thank you letter because I felt guilty about being so choosy about the design.

Thing is though, because my dress was so poofy, my movement was rather restricted. Walking through a crowd was like parting the Red Sea, but with less religious awe and much more irritated muttering and exasperation, on both ends.

Oy.

The Unlucky Elephant