» Design

New card: Bloom

Elli — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 07:33:11 +0000

Slowly (ever so slowly) but surely, I’ll be selling my illustrations on cards and sometimes as wall art over at RedBubble. If you’ve been visiting this blog for a few years then the image may seem somewhat familiar since it’s from an old Illustration Friday challenge. The new version has been updated with more flowers and color, and ah, a fresh breeze. Love spring.

The factory is open

Elli — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:15:19 +0000

~~I’m a tiny step closer to realizing world domination.~~ JM and I have opened a shop at cafepress! We’ve been batting ideas back and forth along the course of our travels over the past few years. Once hitting solid ground last month (meaning no longer living on the road and now having reliable internet) we decided it was high time to do something about it. Over the next few months I hope to share more and more of our on-line endeavors. For now I submit to you:

The world is being overrun with fine print and we’ve taken the barrage even further adding a little tongue in cheek. I think I know what I’m wearing to the next family reunion…
There’s also a happy link added to the sidebar. And here’s wishing a happy birthday to my love tomorrow!

Needs editing

Elli — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:30:22 +0000

Up at 5:30, thoughts racing through my brain with no particular destination, just visiting the same old subjects of what I should do, what have I read recently, how I wish I was still sleeping. The mini-bar fridge drones on, sucking energy from every life force around it. The fan in the bathroom competes for noisy dominance while JM watches podcasts in there so as not to wake me up. Too late. JM abandons me for the hotel cafe with faster wireless speeds. Instead of staying buried under the covers I decide to write, slow the pace down.
We’re back early from our two week safari. Long story short (meaning I’m not yet allowed to write about it), we turned around after the first day and came back to Alice.
My writing needs to be edited, but that’s the story of my life. Needs editing.

Earlier I was thinking about that girl I was so long ago. Who slept on her back, one knee raised and the other leg balanced perfectly across it, arms tossed above her head. She wore a cotton night gown made by her great-aunt Glady, always had a squirrel’s nest for hair when she woke up, and just a few years earlier would stick band-aids on door frames until her mother told her to stop wasting them. What did she want to do when she grew up? What did she like to do? Was she entirely dependent on others for direction? When did she start living only in her head?
My dreams of late have held a glimpse of feeling truly ALIVE again. In the one from yesterday I was at a college full of geologists who were all applying and being accepted for graduate school and they kept hounding me to follow suit. I finally yelled at them from my dorm room, “I don’t care about rocks! I just want to paint!” and slammed the door on them, feeling cruel and yet they were all cheering for me. In that dream was a hint of passion for something that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Not passion for painting, but for slamming doors. Perhaps I should go back into acting where that might be seen as a worthy skill.
This feels good. I should do this every morning, perhaps eventually being happy to be awake at (what was considered before) an ungodly hour. You don’t know how many times I’ve started writing something in my head only to lose it later. Instead I’ll sit at the keyboard and space out, giving up eventually and reading other people’s blogs. There are so many creative, funny, artistic, wonderful people out there. You’re probably one of them. Enough about you though…
Oh crap, my eye is bugging on me again. It seems I wake up every few months and discover that a layer of my eyeball has been peeled off by the lid (not really, but you get the idea). It’s so miserably painful, tearing up, blinking rapidly, but not fully. It eventually fixes itself when I go back to sleep, but I haven’t gone back to sleep now have I? Ouch.
About 13 years ago when going through a what-do-I-want-to-do-with-my-life phase I remembered I wanted to be a nurse when I was little, hence the band-aids. I had drawn several pictures of myself with my pink-striped shirt and a nurses’ hat. I was jealous of the kids with the fake plastic doctor’s bags. Barbie always had a cast on her leg or arm. During this retrospective I realized, wait a minute, I was drawing pictures, making art, I must really be an artist. Nice leap, eh? Don’t all kids make art? If I do just want to paint, well then, why not houses?
I’m going to shower now and see if I don’t feel a bit more human. I’ll debate posting this, maybe delete the part about fairies*, and kick myself the rest of the day for leaving it as is and hitting the publish button.
*I did, it was just crazy talk. 5:00-me is off her rocker.

Double vision

Elli — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 01:35:10 +0000

I’ve decided to start wearing an eye patch, let me tell you why. It all started a month ago when I went to wash my glasses after seeing the layer of filth that had built up in the edges. Something in the water or air or the beast of Alice Springs itself* caused the protective coating on my lenses to crackle resulting in a pinkish crazed hue. Because I like my colors unadulterated, I made an appointment with the eye doctor for a check up (as my last glasses were cut down from the previous pair to fit the new frames). During the exam we discussed my double vision of 20 years and need for a prism to correct it. It’s not something extreme — for instance when I’m reading I’ll see a ghosted image of the words, but if the text is particularly entertaining who’s going to focus on the double hovering there? I decided, however, it was time for a uniting of eyeballs (also in spite of an “insufficient convergence” when a lead pencil comes looming at my nose.)
Lo and behold the new prescription arrived a week ago Monday and I eagerly picked them up and began the odyssey of singular vision only to run into headaches, strained eyes and a general feeling of irreality. I told myself I should give it a week, seeing that this was a period of adjustment. Yesterday I gave in and asked to speak with the eye doctor. In between patients he looked at my file and said, “oh, here’s the problem, it was put in upside down. We’ll get that fixed.” Later that day I got a call from the office asking me to come back in today just to double check everything. The doctor took my glasses and double checked the prescription and also redid the eye test — which one is better? Tell me when you see double. Already? That’s interesting — to make sure the new prescription was accurate. It was. What’s been happening is my right eye is fighting the left for dominance. The left eye has come to the party in a pretty new frock and is all, hey, wanna be friends, and right eye is all, screw you, I’m the boss here while sending distress signals to the brain, the result being right eye wins and the prism goes. My glasses are now being re-made for the old double-sighted me. I’ve decided to give the right eyeball a time-out in the corner for not being cooperative and will don an eye patch when the new glasses arrive. Yar.
*”Beast of Alice” is my new book, look for it in stores in 2024. I’ve heard once you have a title the battle is half over.