Hello, visitor!

My LJ is currently the place that holds most of my art, and the only one where all the recent art is stored. So, as it doesn't seem that I'll manage to make myself a website soon, here's a way to find what you're looking for.

Please note that there is some adult art down there. Look at the rating before clicking on a cut, and please be responsible! Thanks.



My art, sorted by:

rating

The smut's only in the HP fandom, it seems.

G-rated art

PG-rated art


NOTE THAT FROM THE PG13 RATING AND OVER, THE PICS MAY BE NOT WORKSAFE. THERE'S AN AGE LIMIT, SO PLEASE, BE RESPONSIBLE IF YOU'RE UNDERAGE

PG13-rated art

R-rated art

NC-17 rated art

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Medium


watercolour and watercolour inks. The technique I've been using the most regularly since the beginning of this LJ.



pastels. I had tried oil pastels long ago, but wasn't really convinced. You'll see a very occasional drawing done with this medium, though. But it's really cluegirl who got me started on pastel pencils and chalk pastels. I'll never thank her enough for this! Probably my favourite technique for indoor scenes and nuances of skin.



pen and ink. Been trying this very recently, and I'm still in the experiencing stage. A very interesting medium, but unforgiving! And time consuming if I want the pic to look neat.



CG art. Mouse-coloured pencil sketches, in fact. I still haven't got any tablet. Very rare, and to see if I could do it. ETA: I have a tablet now! Still discovering how it works, though. You can see some of the results here! And I still think I prefer the more physical sensations of natural media...

pencil sketches and other quick doodles. Quite a lot of them, not all have got any artistic quality, though.


And while we're into techniques,

the step by step stories of how I made some of these art pieces, with photos.

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by fandom, or not.


all kinds of original and non-fandom themed art



fantasy art



some discworld pics



And the brand new Brokeback art!

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And of course, the Harry Potter fandom gets several categories all by itself.

by character


Non character-centric pictures, magical creatures, etc.



Sirius. Still my favourite character, so you didn't think I wouldn't put him first?


   
Remus. A most beloved character, too.



Snape. Can't say that I love him, but oh how the man fascinates me!


Harry.

Hermione

Ron

Molly

Fred and George

Arthur

Tonks

Bill

Lucius

Draco

Remus in wolf form

Sirius in dog form

Lily

James

Krum

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Harry Potter fandom, by pairing

Heh, you'll find mostly Remus/Sirius! But quite a few others as well, usually made for friends.


Remus/Sirius. OTP :)

Snape/Lucius Because underlucius is convincing!

Percy/Tonks For thistlerose! I love the idea of Tonks with any Weasley, and I hope to make more of the kind.

Sirius/Hermione For satinvalkyrie. Liz, I miss you!

Lucius/Sirius My friendslist likes Sirius ;)

Remus/Harry, for cenori.

Sirius/Harry for waccawheels.

Arthur/Molly

Bill/Fleur. In the background, but here's the real love story :)

James/Lily

Sirius/Bill, for satinvalkyrie's condom challenge.

Threesomes, one of the trio, the other of the marauders minus Peter (poor Peter).




That's all for now, and I hope you'll enjoy the art!

* Am very tired

* but no OHSS (yet)

* Retrieval was last Friday, 9 eggs, 8 mature, 7 fecundated (huh? where were the others? probably a lot of small immature follicles)

* 6 normal embryos at day 2

* 1 (one) surviving blastocysts (= adequately grown embryo) transferred today, no remaining embryos to freeze.

* read Rowling's short story, gave me a big grin :D

* and did I mention I'm very tired? And also completely unproductive.

After daily ultrasounds and bloodwork for three days, the reproductive endocrinologists, all two of them, that I could go on with the ovarian stimulation for my usual nine days. I made my last injection yesterday, which brought my estradiol levels to 4200 or so (it was 2600 at the same time during the previous two attempts!). This is really high and means that there's a risk of ovarian hyperstimulation, but for now I'm feeling good enough, tired and a little bloated but no spectacular swelling or abdominal ache. It also means that there's a good chance of getting more mature eggs at the retrieval *touches wood*.

I'm doing the trigger injection for the final eggs maturation this evening and the retrieval is scheduled for Friday morning. Then the potential embryos will get a five days in-vitro culture and if some of them withstand the process, the embryo transfer will be next Wednesday.

For the moment, that bathing in my hormones thing makes me strangely emotional and does stranger things to my music tastes. I've found Bette Midler's The Rose on Youtube, am listening to it on repeat and it makes me cry. Heh.

Behold my icon that's totally in accordance with the clarification of LJ TOS :)

It's also from the sketch of the not-really-working-until-now Senegalese fertility goddess standing on my computer desk.

All of this to say that I'm once again sorry for not updating, and that the icon is relevant to what's happening right now, see below. I still sort of was on LJ this last month and even sketched semi-regularly and uploaded the result to sketching_daily (and oops, there are comments in need of answering there - and here). I'll upload those sketches here too, but I wanted to do it with an added comment, as most of them would work as a "one month in a life of nassima series, only with a few sketches instead of a truckload of photos. But I never found the energy to make those posts and the sketches are only piling up in my image account. Life outside of the computer has been somewhat hectic as my father had another operation (he's recovering now) and I tried to visit and take care of my mother a bit more. Also, I couldn't completely avoid research meetings at work, not that they weren't interesting (swamps! ten thousand years old! registering climate changes! being dried up for agriculture!) but they were, well, work.

Here's an aerial picture of the swamp we're working on - it looks like a heart, don't you think? The camembert-like things (brie-like? US people seem to know brie better than camembert), well the pie-like shape is caused by the agricultural draining. People in the 13th century actually dug a hole in the middle of the swamp and a subterranean gallery rejecting the water in the main valley some tens meters below.



And while we're at work-related pictures, why not using this entry to begin posting sketches?

Here's an archaeologist sketched precisely during the meeting we had about that swamp. You can see a small map of said swamp in the corner!



He might not look like Indiana Jones, but this doesn't mean his working activities aren't glamorous! During lunch, he told us about his field project for this summer : they're going to dig into a medieval cliff settlement. The path is so steep that even mules or donkeys won't be able to go through. Everything and everyone will have to be roped up and down...

( at another scale : my stereomicroscope and what I see in it, also a quickie of uni being swamped (swamps everywhere!) and other things from work )

As for the fertility goddess : I'm in the middle of my third IVF cycle (fourth if you count the frozen-thawed embryo transfer).

( more about IVF and its sordid details )

That's all for now! I'm off answering comments :)

And now for the sketch dump :)

Here's the one from today, a self-portrait in an ethnic mirror.





Done in pen and ink, with one big ink blotch on the eye/nose area that I tried to scratch out, no pencil preparatory outline.

I don't know what kind of ethnic it is, by the way - the mirror was a present. What do you think?
As for the portraying part, well, the ear is strange, the forehead is a bit low and the mouth too small, but my family visited and they recognised me! Yay. And this is my usual concentrated face when I draw/play music/cook/prune olive trees. Franck always think there's something wrong, but the truth is that I look evil when I don't remember to smile! Also, my aunt arrived when I was finishing and wanted to try.

( here she is drawing herself under the cut )

Drawing so close to such a small mirror isn't that easy, each eye sees a different angle. It makes for interesting perspective and proportions challenges!


Other sketches behind cuts

( first attempt ever at ink drawing without pencil outline: my kitchen scales )

( other pencil sketches )

Hope you liked :)

Franck and I took two days off to travel to Millau, which in the (smallish) mountains located in the middle of France. It's a great place for paragliding, so we did that! Only one day but it felt really good, since that's something else I had to stop doing for a time. The lifts were a tad weak and I guess that the flock of paragliders looked rather dense, but still, I flew for one hour and then decided to go to the landing - as opposed to had to go to the landing because of being too low - makes you feel like you won in the end!

Millau is a breathtaking place, a small town settled between dry, high limestone mesas and green lower hills. It's full of all sorts of birds, including vultures that were reintegrated twenty years ago. I remember going to watch them about that time, back when you had to go to the feeding place (an area where farmers were allowed to lay dead animals for the vultures to eat). Now they've reproduced and you can see them glide everywhere. I even flew with one for a short while. Magical! They're such big birds. I guess they're used to paragliders now and sort of pity us disabled flying people.

Sadly, I didn't take my camera with me while flying, but here are a few photos from before and after.

( first day, too much wind to fly, but not too much for exercises on the landing )

( Photos from our first day walk on the Causse )

Here's a panoramic view from the viaduct to the take-offs with the Tarn valley and Millau in the middle. I'm linking it because it's much too large for the post.

Panoramic without captions

The same with captions


( then we decided to go back through the back country roads )

( and in the beech forests were daffodils. Hello, Sara! )


And two photos from home to finish...

( one from before we left )

( and one from when we came back )

Sketches to come next, but not from our trip. Painting/drawing is an asocial activity when it lasts more than a few minutes, unless you're with other artists or you're willing to let people participate to the process. I think I'm still too shy and we were there to enjoy each other's company as well.

So between the olive trees and the horses, I did sketch a bit nonetheless.

This is the one I did today.



There are a lot of those little cabins in the countryside around here. They're called cabanons or maisons de vigne and were used to store agricultural tools or to sleep closer to the fields/vineyards during the harvest. Now, most of those are ruined or kept up because of their owner's nostalgia - or because they're big enough to be turned into regular houses. Actually, our own house was a larger maison de vigne before we bought it and restored it!

The one I painted is much smaller, maybe 15-20 ft large. It used to be covered in a whitewash + red earth coating but lost it on one side so that you can see the stonework. The owner is careful to keep the roof up, though.


I painted it between 6 and 7:30 pm, and while the sky looks close enough to the real thing at the beginning of the painting session, clouds crept back rapidly afterwards and I was absolutely frozen! Four hours later I'm still cold.

( here's a photo of the real cabin, so that you can compare! )

I painted the second sketch a few days ago : another cabin, but this one wasn't painted on location. I passed it while I was running, found it pretty and decided to try to sketch it from memory. The next day, I went back and took a photo, and well, there are discrepancies!

( memories of a ruined cabanon )

And lastly, a pencil sketch I did when I paid a visit to the nearby town. I was supposed to buy medicines and bread - I got the medicines, but when I finished sketching, the bakery was closed and I was overdue for cooking the supper.





This street penetrates into the oldest (medieval, mostly) part of the town, and as it's a small town, nearly a village, the houses look like country houses, high and narrow, without much architectural complications. Some of these houses were restored, such as the first one on the right, others are still decaying. A lot of doors look very low, I think because the level of the street rose with each new asphalt layer!



Hope you liked :)

Yay! My connexion is back up. Somewhere, our phone number/line/whatever had been changed with someone else's, so that the DSL didn't work any more and we kept getting phone calls for a mysterious unknown person. But the phone people repaired it all, and quicker than they had told me!

All in all, I hadn't really got time to get away from the computer. Well, only a bit! I thought I'd have more time for the current sketching frenzy, especially since I'm not working this week, and I sketched some, but not that much.

( Instead, I finished pruning the olive trees, look! photos )

( And then I got to know my sister's horse, and suffered because of it )

( And here are two gratuitous spring photos, just because :) )

Surfing the web with a dialup at 16.8 kbits/s is an exercise in zen.

Said zen attitude is required when DSL failure requires one to deal with tech support.

All in all, they tentatively suggested that my broadband connexion might be back up in a few days. Meanwhile, I might be slow in answering comments, I'll have a hard time looking at pictures and I can forget trying to upload any image. Let's hope this will make me draw more...


Heh. I didn't post for nearly one year, and now I'm having withdrawal symptoms because of a few days semi-hiatus!

Totally unrelated drawings

Firstly, today's tonight's attempt at watercolour for sketching_daily.

Franck and I are in the middle of trimming the olive trees, so I picked a few twigs, put them in a vase and painted. Oh boy, leaves are so long to paint! There's no short cut, you have to outline each of them. The vase, like the blue teapot you might have noticed in a recent photo, was done by a potter friend of mine (who happens to also be a colleague) using the raku technique.





( behind the cut, a photo of my working table at the end of the painting process )

And now for something completely different!

( yesterday's sketch, Franck watching TV in an interesting (but worksafe!) position )


I posted the next one in sketching daily yesterday as well, though I made in November when I was stuck at home and spending the time watching old American movies.

( 1970 Charles Bronson, heh, you already know I like him ;) )


And lastly, some 2007 postcard art I hadn't posted here. It was done on the occasion of the birth of our niece's twins.

( one of the very rare watercolours I did in 2007, I think )

That's all! I hope you found something you liked :)

The idea for this one was born from a comment I left yesterday to fools_trifle where I described the current state of my desk.

Today's sketch is just a very small part of the clutter! She's a Senegalese fertility goddess I was given looong ago and that I dug out of her hiding this year - I love my little pretty goddess-that-doesn't work and seeing her on my desk reminds me to take all of this lightly. Well, as light as I can anyway :)





( and so that you know what was really on my desk yesterday, here's a photo and a little list )

Anj,


Once you passed through my area and we met. We walked through the streets in the summer night and found a restaurant, we chatted and chatted and chatted and I was surprised how easy and different and warm it was to meet a lj-friend for real. I thought you were wonderful online, I found that you were incredible in person.

You had a great accent in French but felt shy using the language.

We found jazz musicians on one street with a crowd around them and you had a great time.

You had to leave for another city the next morning so there was not time for inviting you home and making this friendship grow.

It felt unachieved, and we felt we'd have time to meet again. You'd come to our house and you'd try flying, maybe, and we'd chat more and you'd use your French. Maybe we'd cross the ocean and meet you.

When I came back to lj these last months I was glad to see that you did good and enjoyed life.


Now all of this has stopped, and there won't be a next time.



Rest in peace, Anj.

I'm sure I won't post that often for long, but hey, it's fun while it lasts!

I'm reposting the watercolour (sort of) sketch I did for sketching_daily today. Another one of the view from our window, as the weather has again turned back to windy, if not that cold. Not that I'm complaining, it's the kind of wind that brings some rain and we need it.

Well, the weather was just perfect to try myself at cloud painting. I already did a few exercises in painting skies two years ago when I painted on location regularly, and it's really something I feel I need to improve. Not painting for a year didn't help either, and what I managed to achieve on the summer 2006 seems very far away.

When I begin to paint clouds, I imagine those wonderfully mastered wet watercolours where clouds melt into clouds and the texture of the paper or the brush strokes are used to convey cloud shapes. Of course, that's not really what I managed to do! I think I should exercise separately painting moving objects like clouds and perfecting wet techniques - maybe, for the latter, by painting from photographies.


Well, here's today's result.





I should also remember to leave some blank space around the edge... I was getting better at it, but hey, that's why it's a sketch! Trying myself at something, not really thinking of the rest :)



And so that I don't spam too much, I'm also reposting here an OLD HP painting that I did for a Christmas exchange, smutty_claus, I think... in December 2007. I didn't post much afterwards and forgot to repost it here, and well, I like to have all my art in the same place... There's another drawing I did for this exchange, but there's, OMG, a BREAST! in it, so it'll go in its own, gasp, adult post so that this one retains its G rating :D

characters: Severus Snape, Eileen Prince Snape
rating: G

Here's the teaser. Actually, it's an enlarged part of the painting... You've probably already seen it long ago!



( One day, I'll be a great potion master too )


You know, I'd have loved it if it had turned out that the great love Snape was supposed to have felt had been for his mother. After all, there are more than one kind of love. And Snape loving his mother deeply, maybe still doing so, would have felt better to me than some unrequited teenager crush. Poor Snape.

More sketches! Some are from this winter, but one is actually from today! sketching_daily is working, I'm drawing more :D

Here's Today's sketch :





Franck ploughed around the olive trees and with the recent warm temperatures, flowers are coming out! Those two managed to push aside a well-sized earth lump and they were so lovely. I don't know how they're called in English, I'm not even sure of their name in French. I think that they are what my mother called Dames de Onze Heures, Ladies of Eleven O'clock, because they open very late in the morning - and were already closing when I finished sketching. I love the name! Maybe because I don't know if I'm much of a lady myself, but the eleven o'clock definitely applies.

( two landscapey ones from this winter - and some photos )

Yeah, I'm back (again! with a vengeance!)

Once again, I've been an horrible lj-er and month-old comments aren't answered. Argh! Sorry. I've been alternatively ill again and desperately trying to do the things I should have done at work and at home while I was ill.

And so, I'm glad to tell you that on the work front ostr.acode determination is going well even if it makes me even more cross-eyed than usual (and yay! There are males of Limn.ocythere! Even though they have such a big penis than usually females feel it's better to not use them and just reproduce parthenogenetically! They're my first Limn.ocythere males!). Ahem. That's why I love doing seminars on ostrac.ode reproduction, yes, I do.

And on the home front, I've finally finished the painting my sister wanted to use for her wedding invitations. The deadline was only one month ago (and the marriage still six months from now, pheeew) so I'm proud :D


She wanted a map-like painting going from the city hall where they'll get married to the place where we'll celebrate. And as it looked somewhat empty on the preliminary sketch I decided to add the procession of people going from one place to the other.

Here it is!

With a preview :



( Marianne's wedding )


Also, I began posting in sketching_daily, that wonderful community. I made a cat sketches post! Here's an excerpt :






Level of detail depending on the willingness of the cat not to move!


More at the comm!

Sorry that I was even worse than usual at answering comments and just being here on LJ these last two weeks. I got something that began as bronchitis and took a turn to a laryngitis with a side of nosebleed but was believed to be the flu in the end. Yay! I think I'm out of it now but I'm not saying it too loud because last week I said so and had an interesting fever the next day

Anyway, I'm off to sleep but I'll get to these comments tomorrow!

Also, happy belated Valentine's day, flist! ♥

fools_trifle, I got your card! Thank you so much <3

Maybe you already know that I've got a musically inclined cat. Yes, the one in the icon, Marmite. She's a strange one, raised by humans in a house full of dogs and always gave us the impression that she didn't really know much about being a cat.

Through the years, she learned to hunt and jump without bumping in the funiture and play and sort of look the part, mostly by looking at our other cat. She never really got the hang of grooming herself, though, and we always wondered if she wasn't a bit, well, strange, retarded maybe?

But there's an area where she's not only good, she's positively brilliant. It's when it comes to music appreciation. When I played Led Zeppelin DVDs, she would invariably come by and sniff at the loudspeakers. We finally determined that she had a thing for music vaguely mewling-like. And this is where my accordion and me come into play. These last months, she's been particularly friendly, and particularly when I was playing the accordion! If I play, she'll come closer, and if it a walz in A and E minor, she'll rub against the accordion and will try to climb me.

He're what it looks like in pictures, under a cut because I'm still somewhat self-conscious. Franck took the pictures and he tends to frame his photos strangely and I don't think I had even combed my hair that day. Also, it was cold! And you can see the mess behind where my painting things are. Ouch.

( yeah, the cat's prettier than me here )

Sadly, the photographer, the camera noise and the flash made her behave, the second before she was pawing at the accordion...

I hope I'll get better pictures soon! After all, she comes nearly each time I play...

My first HP fanart since more than one year, and my second colour pic in one year! Yay me.

I'm not sure the original I copied is famous, but I like it very much, because I'd love to be bold enough to use such colours and good enough to manage to convey such peace with such a red! And also because, believe it or not, the original is by Charles Bronson, yes, this Charles Bronson. Surprising, isn't it?

That's one of the things I did while I wasn't checking LJ nor doing anything much. Quietly obsessing about Charles Bronson! And I'm not even ashamed of myself :D. All right, there are some of his films I don't even want to watch (most of the eighties stuff), but there are a lot of earlier ones that I really enjoy, and others that rise above average just because of Bronson in them. Also, the man was really, really interesting.

His art, for example, and what he did with it. He always drew or painted, even during his youth in the coalfields. He even used his GI bill to study art before turning to acting. It seems that most of his subjects were highly personal, portraits of his family and scenes from the coalfields, things he had to get out of himsef. He and his wife got a gallery in the sixties and he seems to have been appreciated enough to sell quite a lot of pieces. And then... he got famous enough, and rich enough, and couldn't stand the idea of all these paintings, so personal to him, hanging on strangers' walls. So he bought everything back, at a higher price!


( the original : Late Red Sky )


Er. I'm sorry I changed the mood for the HP version!

Here's the preview:


( and here's my version : Late Green Sky - rated G, nonetheless )

Also because I'm about to post art and I don't want to mix the (bad) news with fandom things.

IVF #2 didn't work. It's official since last Wednesday and I've known more or less since the previous Saturday. Happily, we celebrated Franck's birthday that day (I didn't tell him then) so I could make music and drink and think of something else! Now I'm feeling somewhat better and waiting for the appointment with the RE. I have to say it's good to know that there should be other attempts.

And now for the art post!

Hope it's a great one!

Thank you for being a great friend, and a great artist, and a great person.


Here are some flowers for you







And I hope you won't mind sharing those with Thistlerose because I've exhausted my stock of flower pics.