Art by MeddygonThere is a fine line \ Between genius and madness. \ It is called timing.

Just when I was getting in the art groove again, photoshop craps out on me and I have to wait for it to reinstall again. There’s not even a guarantee it’ll even work right. Time to acquire other image manipulation tools. Capital SIGH.

Plans today:

1. Possibly sleep before having to leave, or maybe just sleep in the car.

2. Pack up and go go go

3. Lunch at Jorenko’s side

4. Dinner at my side

5. Return home and locate the stealthmaster daggercat and hope he didn’t hide in some barely reachable place again

This is Dagwood, our newly adopted cat. He’s a neutered adult male with a sweet, passive disposition. The couple we got him from adopted him recently, and found that the dog and Dag didn’t get along, and male side of the betrothed couple was allergic. They told us Dag came from a house of six cats that was in foreclosure and the owner could no longer care for the pets. Here are the craigslist pictures since I don’t have any of mine up yet.

Roomba may have mastered the skill of not-falling-down-stairs, but it is still easily defeated by chairs.

Disco Kitty

Today’s update is a new theme.
Also, I’m not doing anything wacky for the day. Laaaaame day.

En, better known as Stinky, more recently known as Cancer Cat, did not make it. Her lymphoma was in complete remission: she did not have any sign of cancer in her when we brought her into the vet last week. After her last chemo treatment, she was the best she’d been in a while. Then she stopped eating. She was limp, and didn’t have any balance when jumping off things. She got some IV therapy for dehydration and a bunch more tests. They said she had an infection, but they didn’t know where. They suggested some expensive exploratory surgery, but even then that would guarantee recovery. There wasn’t hope anymore.

I shouldn’t have looked in her eyes as they injected her. The sedatives made her eyes go wide and she stared blankly ahead until it was over. I can’t get it out of my head yet. I shouldn’t have watched.

Like most of my work from near a decade ago, I’m embarrassed of “Chicago Schroe” now. And like most of my recent posts, I’m still going to share it with the Internet.

The art was simple, but inconsistent. The plot was based around my interests and acquaintances. It was terrible. When I got around to attempting a consistent art style, my hard drive failed. All data was lost, including the original flash files. I didn’t care, I just gave up.

Not every time we sleep do we reach a deep enough state to dream. For weeks my rest has been frequently interrupted and it seemed I’d never dream. After roaming around the house for some time in a half-coherent stupor (a state in which I seem to be able to do little more than care for Jonas and eat), I managed to sleep well in my short rests. It’s as if my body has me sleepwalking consciously during the day so that I may dream when I do sleep.

I dreamt that I was at a convention center for the purposes of an audition. It was for the part of some background character, only a few lines, from a comic or something equally nerdy that was being made into a movie. At the time the dream started, or at least what I recall, I had already finished my audition and was waiting for James to pick me up.

Characters for some failed RPG given up on by some irc network starring the opers as npcs or something. The only thing I really remember about it was I was a sniper chick. Oh, and the reason I quit the project was because everyone designing it had a raging hard-on for Square and refused to make the game battle system not be based on a Final Fantasy game or Chronotrigger. And they wanted materia and summons. And they were going to summon characters from Square games.

Edit: Added more sketches related to this. All from late 2000, early 2001.

Early 2002, done for a Color Theory assignment. We had to recreate an image using marker and dots and stuff. I once found this being hotlinked to as an example of “Magritte’s early work.” It’s actually pretty terrible and lacks any artistic skill.

A couple of our old characters on WoW, Schoolbus and Underground. UG (along with Ba’s counterpart, Mo) were stolen a long while back after Jorenko and I quit WoW. We didn’t find out until a year or more after the fact when we tried to reactivate our accounts. Mine was fine, his was locked. For 6 months, Blizzard did nothing but tell us to send in some forms, including a notarized declaration of ownership of the account (to that I say, “W. T. F.” After buying new accounts and playing for a few months, we realized why we quit in the first place: it’s not that fun. We can grind in other games for free. Also the social aspect of the game sucks. Anyway, doodles.

Ba, the troll shaman. Fwump. Drawn in December 2004 because I hadn’t drawn much in a while then. Used WoW character as reference. This was somewhere around level 30.

Another image often stolen by tortured suburban teenagers finding random images on the internet and applying meaning where there is none, or applying their own meaning over the artist’s intent. This image shows another god character that was displaced battling internally; her original, non-god soul seeks to remind the new amalgam in charge that she was the first and she will not be brushed aside. This lady was intended to be a bit of a god killer, though born a mortal. Being mortal, she couldn’t properly destroy the souls of gods and they lived in her.

Way back in high school, after making a watercolor painting of the original ice angel (variations of which was posted previously on SDO), I started making up a universe where various gods controlled planets and fought for dominance and such. One god lost her planet (pictured on the right, the zora ripoff), and came to Boe’s (also pictured previously, the white-haired individual) planet to steal it from her. This god’s name is Azula. Imagine my dismay when Avatar had a character many years later with the same name and the same personality I would role play her as.
Previously posted Azula art

As I sit in this gliding rocker at 3 am, having just fed my son a bottle of milk, I’ve come to realise that I’ve done some impossible things.

Years ago, when some of my online friends first met me, I hated people. I couldn’t stand most social contact; I even despised others trying to strike up idle conversation in vain attempts to win friendship. The concept of dating horrified me as well. Spending so much time and money in hopes of finding someone to share your life, or at least the night, with. The whole world seemed to value the quantity of people known rather than the value. I felt stuck; I sought to gain a few good friends rather than an abundance of acquaintances. I wanted more than anything to have a best friend that would never leave my side.

So at some point, when I was making art and didn’t have a job to get in the way of spending 13 hours straight on it, I did commissions. This is Azrael Dregnus, Paladin of Slaughter, done up for an online buddy. This was his D&D 3.5e character for an evil campaign. (The idea was to be running two games, where the players played both the good guys and the bad guys, and eventually they’d meet up.) The outline was done in Illustrator and the coloring and shading in Photoshop.

Progress shots, taken every hour or so: 1 2 3 3.2 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Originally created 1 August 2006

Since I haven’t posted much since Jonas’s birth, and no art at all in that time, here’s a piece that I still actually like. It’s half-scribble, half detail because I just didn’t want to work on it more than one day. One of the forum members of the Cork Board made a thread in which he said he’d write about any noun or whatever someone posted. “Ashtray” was suggested, and I decided that I was going to draw something based on that after the story was written. The story had nothing to do with the picture, and the picture had nothing to do with the story. Originally done 15 April 2004.

In baby news, babies are babies. True story. This baby o’ mine is so baby-like. Yup. He’s above his birth weight, finally, and eating like a pig. He’s got a habit of pooting up a diaper, and, five minutes after you change it, he poots up another (usually a big poot followed by a little fart of dirtiness). This by itself doesn’t bother me. He’s a baby, he stinks up his pants: that’s what babies do. No, what bothers me about it is that he’ll fart while I’m holding him and just look up at me, directly at my face. If he could talk, I’m sure he’d be asking for praise. He usually gets it, though. This kid has some killer farts. Loud, stinky farts that any beer-gutted NASCAR fan, or sane new parents, would be proud of.

Today’s update is all thirteen episodes of Hatt.
I make no claims of quality, coherence, or … whatever.
No mind-altering drugs were consumed in the making of these comics (my pothead roommates hadn’t moved in yet).
Baby news coming tomorrow afternoon.

I had a dream last night that they made yet another X-Files movie. Having not seen the previous movies, nor ever really watching the show once it developed a continuous plot (I much prefered monster-of-the-day type stuff from that show), this dream was rather odd.

It started with Mulder and Scully as a married couple seated at dinner. Scully was serving various foods with a one-ounce ice cream scoop to Mulder by placing them on a music stand while he read the newspaper. Suddenly, there’s a rumble. They panic and the camera immediately goes to the window to show a T-Rex is walking by. There’s another rumble and another until the T-Rex has gone away. “What terrible visuals,” I dream-think as I notice the choppy, unrealistic movement of the T-Rex, “The writers must want this to be a dream sequence.” No one wakes up, though, and the weirdness continues.

Two images, related (contain one same character). Originally posted on LJ May 20, 2002 @ 0:41. Secret AGENT Schroe, secret AGENT Schroe . . . Arg, more contractions. Woke up a bunch of times with painless ones, but they still woke me up. I didn’t bother timing them at all last night. Now I’m tweeting them to timestamp them. Gosh, this current one hurts a big more than the others.
BELOW, A CITY NAME THAT AMUSES ME.

Same images, different medium, different text.
My breech baby (who has hair already, I’m told. Yay ultrasounds!) is facing the the wrong way in both ways. It’s like he’s hugging my spine.
I had an extremely painful dream wherein my husband was tickling me so I was too busy gasping and giggling to be able to tell him that he was actually causing me a great deal of pain. When I woke up from it, shortly before the alarm went off, my back was still hurting just as bad.
Breech baby facing the wrong way means every contraction is BACK LABOR.

Alright kids, I made these. A year ago. They are vector traces of the shoulder patches on the TF2 classes.

I’ve had people ask for the AI file of these. You can have one when you put the effort into making them.

I’ve had people ask for the larger versions I posted TF2chan a while back. Those are here for the time being.

I’ve seen people claim that the Scout and Spy patches are “beta” or other assumptions even though it says in the original post’s description that I MADE THEM UP. There exist, created by Valve, the REAL Spy and Scout patches. I do not have tracings of those nor do I have any interest in tracing them on request. Spy one can be found on the Spy t-shirt Valve sells. Scout one can be seen on the Scout update page.

I MADE THIS SET. There may be people who have traced their own. There may be other people out there who are using this set without crediting me. They are not stealing my ideas, they are just cheapening my effort. I am not so attached to these things that I’ll deny anyone use of them, but that goes for THESE ONLY. My other tf2 stuff should not be used by other people without asking or crediting me, ESPECIALLY the non-traced stuff.

It’s strange how something I put a lot of effort into when I was a teenager is so much more embarrassing to me than a quick MSPaint that ended up in an SA Comedy Goldmine in August of 2005. Go look at the whole thing. My one image is just a small portion of the greatness of SA Goons with MS Paint. If you forgot anything unimportant from 2005, there’s some pop culture references in there. And some memes. Just like any other goon-made thing. I had some other drawings that didn’t make the cut for the gold mine, and I apparently didn’t save them . . . but there was an orc DOUBLE-DIPPING! AT A PARTY!

Hey guys, I got a doctor’s appointment right at 7:30 AM to get some more testing done to see if this baby is killing me or not (so far it’s not). Last night, eating dinner around 6:30, I suddenly and unexpectedly got a migraine that lasted well into the night. After watching House, I took a painkiller and went to bed. Woke up an hour later when Jorenko came to bed. Couldn’t fall back asleep because the painkiller stopped working. Around 1 AM I gave up and took another painkiller, and sat around reading the internet for an hour or so waiting for it to work. It didn’t, so I just went to bed. MIGRAINE IS STILL HERE!
Image is titled Bad Hair Day. Black ink and some metallic “psychedelic” ink.
Update @ 11:54 — I still have a baby in me.