Sunday, December 16, 2018

Christmas Works

Anyone else getting those winter muscle aches and dozing nods (those in the Northern Hemisphere anyways)?  Been getting those a lot lately so sleeping in or having multiple cups of coffee isn't doing it.  According to health articles online, I need to stay warm with extra layers while drinking lots of fluids/water.  Not overstraining your muscles with workouts too is good but with my current job, that's a might bit difficult.

Well, I've been drawing a bit in-between chores and clearing-off DIYs. One of them being my nightgown project. I wanted to make a complementary gown to go with a pink night coat I had for years; figured it would make for a quick project (like my summer dress project went 😁).

1st and 2nd Concepts

The colour scheme is mostly pink/hot pink with a starred pattern and lace.  So about 6 concepts I drew.  I think I'm liking the 3rd & 5th concepts the most.  I'll draw and cut out pattern pieces for the one I'll go with soon enough.

3rd → 4th ↙ 5th → 6th Concepts
I've also got onto my Christmas Card sketches done.  It was hard for me to think up some diverse ideas. Seemed to be tired each time I've work on it, mostly after work or a lot of chores. Maybe too is that I have a hard time thinking of creative ideas when I'm in a time crunch (Should work on that after the holidays). I kept on wanting to draw minimalistic reindeers so I figured to just do that.


This is the finished look of my Christmas Card.  A little bit simple and it was fun to illustrate it.  I've already sent out several printed cards of it to family and friends (or just anyone that I had mailing addresses from).  This is the most Christmas themed thing I did this holiday; I haven't started decorating the house yet with our tree or other decor.  The Holidays for retailers are very customer heavy and can demand extra work hours from their employees.


It'll definitely feel different here for Christmas this year without Dad.  I remember how he would love to see our Christmas Tree all lit up with decorations in the living room.  The most presents we had on it nowadays was small gift cards and some small parcels.  There isn't much for what Mom and I could do for the holidays.  Maybe we could prepare and eat Christmas Dinner.  Maybe I can persuade Mom to drive out to see some of our relatives (if she can get over her worries with highway driving and we can both get the time off together).

Speaking of the Holidays, this post will be the last one of this year.  I'll be posting again in January when there's more available time for artwork.  I suspect that I'll be called on a lot at my job to fill extra shifts and it'll be takin a lot out of me to do that much bagging work for hundreds of customers.  

So, I hope that everyone does have a great and safe Christmas, New Year's and Happy Holidays. As one year comes to a close to a close, another one gears up for new possibilities and new growth.  I definitely hope to see myself in a better position with my life in the next few months.

Sunday, December 2, 2018

It's the most stressful time of the year...

If you had a job in the service/retail industry, you would know what I mean.  For it being this time of the year that you would expect others (or just the public) to show the better virtues of society like gratitude, charity, consideration and just being respectful towards others, we, the helpers, unfortunately don't get it back as much.  Getting more than usual heavier foot-traffic of people along with the expectation of you being able to keep up the work pace like a machine; you can't expect the public to remember that we're still human beside those actual machines and that they're guests in the stores that have to show good manners just as much.

This is the only issue that I have during the Holidays. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way with holiday crowds. I do love everything else about the Holidays but it isn't easy to endure all the stress and fatigue of running a cash register for hours with near nil assistance and with an endless lineup with heavily packed cartfuls of goods to bag up and hair-triggered egos to deal with. Well, I don't want to rant on and on over it; this is a seasonal trend that'll never change no matter what.

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On a more positive note, I've finally got around to purchasing new Adobe Programs.  It isn't the subscription one that the company now does; it's an older copy of their Adobe Master Collection CS6 for the Mac platform, never opened or used.  With my older Adobes being on an even older Windows XP platform that I need Parallels to have access to them, it causes a lot of slowdown time / memory usage on my Mac Mini.  Plus I like to see about getting not only faster performance on my art programs but also more compatibility between them and my Wacom Tablet.  Just hopefully I didn't get scammed on it for the lower price compared to past listings; this was over on eBay with only 3 available at the time. I should expect it in about 2 - 6 weeks approximately.

For a lot of this week, it's been doing several DIYs between work shifts (when I'm not overly exhausted that is). Small odds and ends to help streamlining my chores or clear up more things on my To-Do List.  While I didn't do much artwork, I should have an easier set of shifts this week to invest for this week.  In the meantime, here's a sketch I did while dealing with updates for my tablet. More Christmas-y theme works for next week, hopefully.
Still got Halloween on the brain, apparently.