Rat Creature's Journal

After seeing the earlier iguana caia asked for "kangaroos in space" which made me think of the Muppets' Pigs in Space, so I sort of borrowed from that only with kangaroos.

( 'Kangaroos in Space' for Caia )

hsavinien requested an iguana in a spacesuit.

( a bewildered iguana behind the cut )

( Terminator + gardening for ilyena-sylph )

( Snape vs. Deathstroke for katarik )

( SGA + steampunk for telesilla )

Also, are people getting shyer when it comes to prompting?

My drawing activity this year so far has been largely non-existent. This is depressing me in a somewhat self-reinforcing, vicious cycle. And not even the added pressure of public commitment helped any. (Yeah, I have not forgotten that poll, I just suck.)

However, I have yet to fail a drawble meme. So as I'm obviously not achieving what I want to wrt actual fanart, I'm lowering the target from "produce a drawing" to "produce a doodle". (Kind of like shifting definitions around to get better looking statistics.) And I have decided to offer sketches based on comment prompts. I'll do my best for any fandom I'm familiar with, or random stuff (monsters, steampunk machines, animals...) or I can just pick prompts from your interests. I don't draw porn though, and I'm not good at portrait likeness.

Considering that I now crosspost to three places, it isn't really workable to promise things like "the first X prompts will get a drawble", so just comment with something, and I'll try my best. (In the past I've usually managed to draw something for everyone who prompted me for these non-demanding, open drawble offers, but with the way my creativity and motivation seems to have shriveled and died recently, who knows.)

If you want to see the quality (or lack thereof) you can expect, look at the drawble tag.

Also, I currently have five Dreamwidth invites in case anyone should still want one. (My flist was rather flooded with offers, so I'm not sure whether there's even still demand for them.) Anyway, if you want an invite you can comment, and I'll give those I have to the first five people in order of the comment notifications I get. I'll edit this post if/when I got five requests.

BTW, of course you can ask for both an invite and a sketch or one or the other, the two are not connected, I just didn't want to make separate posts.

P.S.: Why is the Dreamwidth spell check broken? Does anyone else get a "Spell checker not set up properly." response when they click the spell check button?

A couple of days ago I offered to do sketches based on prompts as thank you for a generous, anonymous gift of paid LJ time. I thought I'd collect the results in a post.

( a Travolta!furry for cathexys (she prompted me with 'rats in funky poses') )
( cofax asked for dragons and water balloons )
( iamza wanted a Steampunk!Batmobile )
( Livia asked me to pick something from her interests. I choose 'cowlicks' and 'cold unfeeling robot arm' and ended up with SGA fanart. Sorta )
( shidoikarji26 wanted 'cheese eats mouse' -- warning for animal harm )

BTW, if anyone still wants a sketch, the offer is still open.

( 'Guinea Pigs and Rats having a "I am cuter than you" contest' for droolfangrrl )
( Ironman rescuing a kitten from a tree for marinarusalka )
( a space-dragon for brownbetty )

Here's the drawbles I did yesterday evening:

( coffee + evil overlords for iamza )
( rat cuddles for astridv )
( dragons + necromancer for flykat )
( Pirate!Snape for penknife )
( SPN + sleeping + travel for sealie )

BTW, the previous drawble post is still open for requests.

I've noticed that I haven't offered drawbles in a long time, so:

Comment to prompt me, and you'll get a quick drawing in return. If you don't like to prompt but have interests listed, I can base the drawble on those (actually that works quite well if you have a couple, better than detailed prompts, but I know many, myself included, don't list LJ interests anymore).

Don't expect to get great quality art, it'll just be a quick doodle (you can see the kind of drawings you'll get under my drawble tag on LJ), and keep in mind that I have real trouble with character likeness in live action fandoms, so if you prompt me to draw characters from those, you are quite likely to get something that follows the strategy of the elephant drawing from The Little Prince, not a gorgeous (or even a quick but recognizable) character portrait. *G*

If you choose a prompt rather than pointing me to your interests, just keep in mind that the prompt is supposed to be something that works for a doodle, not the thing you've always wanted to see realized in real fanart.

Since I am now crossposting on three sites, and have already backed my old entries up to GJ and intend to do the same to IJ eventually, it is a real hassle to update the SGA thematic list I maintain (the one listing stories with alien Pegasus cultures and new non-human aliens) directly as journal post, so the thematic list itself is now on a separate webpage. It's very bare bones, because it was annoying enough already to reformat it and to convert all the lj-shortcuts. I didn't even bother to replace them with "proper" author names if the pseuds differ, because there's well over a hundred stories on that list by now. But it should be serviceable enough, and I'll have to add stories in one place only instead of two or eventually three. Of course the original LJ entry is still there and now links to the webpage, so if you have for some reason linked my thematic list, your link won't be broken, though people have to follow an extra click.

On a slightly more fun note, I've posted another, slightly belated monster for amarin_rose, who asked for a "Purple People Eater":
( beware of the monster lurking behind this cut )

So here's a post of all the monsters I've done for people giving me prompts in the previous entry, plus five more random monsters I've drawn.

( 13 monsters )

So in an attempt to start relying less on LJ's ScrapBook gallery functions I just spent the last few hours uploading all my drawble artwork (over 60 images) to my webspace, created thumbnails (thankfully I found a shell command automating that step), coded them to display on my page for assorted sketches, complete with the annotations that used to be gallery labels showing as mouseover, i.e. for whom I did it and what the prompts were.

Then I changed at least the posts for the most recent drawbles to link to these images instead of the LJ hosted ones, that in *three* places, what with the crossposting. I do not look forward to do that for the rest of the drawbles, let alone all the entries showing rat pictures, and scans, and what not. Gah. It's not that I'd be that thrilled to pay them again as if nothing had happened, but I could have read another SGA Big Bang novel in this time, you know? And at least this part led to some vague improvement in that more of my art shows on my site, editing to relink most other other content won't do anything of the sort. *feels conflicted* Maybe I should consider letting posts just break...

Anyway, I feel like drawing monsters, which I haven't done in a while, so if anyone's interested and maybe wants a monster drawing, you could prompt me with a description or some features. I do somewhat cute monsters better than truly scary ones, but I can try to be scary.

marinarusalka asked for "items accidentally left in the back seat of the Metallicar" after I already posted the other drawbles.

My rat Ben celebrated his second birthday today, which is a respectable age for a rat. His health isn't the best anymore -- he's gotten thinner and also he has a mycoplasma lung infection that is antibiotics resistant by now (last time the vet tried to push it back only one antibiotic of several even worked, and still his breathing sounds didn't get that much better, while on the downside at the end of over three weeks of daily injections he had skin lesions from reactions to the antibiotic solution, and he lost weight, I guess because the long progression of antibiotics wasn't great for the friendly digestive tract bacteria). So he makes ugly breathing sounds sometimes, but he isn't gasping for air or anything for now, and he still likes to come outside to run around a bit and snuggle with me. He also still hisses at Krümel when they see each other through their cage sections, so for now he's doing okay despite the mycoplasma, and I hope he'll be with me for a while longer still. Anyway, he is very sweet with humans, recently decided that likes to sleep inside my t-shirt while I'm sitting somewhere with my laptop, and would probably like me more if I cooked him his favorite foods (a tie between scrambled eggs and cooked rice) every day, rather that to expect him to eat rat food.

Here's a list of the drawbles I've completed based on the prompts you gave me:

• purelyironic asked for "John+Rodney kissing in a puddlejumper"


• _inbetween_ asked for "something having at least John Sheppard in it"


• thete1 asked for "a suggestive pile of discarded weaponry/accessories"


• lcsbanana asked for "a furry-creature-type Doctor"


• buggery asked for "J'onn wearing his 'John Jones' trenchcoat (but with at least some of his aaalien showing, either shape-wise, or with his skin being green, or the eyes -- or all three) caught mid-conversation with Officer Dick Grayson"


• imadra_blue asked for "Anakin and Obi-Wan art"


• pho999 asked for "a leprechaun squidbaby"

I'm vaguely dissatisfied that I haven't drawn in ages, but whenever I think about doing the actual fanart stuff I have ideas for I go "eeep!", hide and turn into a lazy sloth (more so than usual even). So I thought I could maybe do some much less intimidating quick drawbles and practice drawing with my tablet besides.

The last times I offered drawbles it was based on interests, but seeing that many (myself included) have deleted theirs since, I thought I could offer to draw from prompts instead (though I'll stop short on actually promising delivery, though I'll try).

Don't expect to get great quality art -- I mean if I was in the frame of mind to have the concentration and attention span for proper drawings I hope I'd work on some actual fanart -- more like doodles. To give an example, say you had prompted me with "teddy bear + tentacle rape" you might get something like this:

( possibly not worksafe, depending on your work place's policies on squids with teddy bears, but well, there's no naked *people* and no genitals, so make of it what you will, it's less explicit than Marvel's cover images anyway )