I’m going through my Wordpress drafts and either finishing the post or deleting them… finding a couple of memes.  This is one I started and never finished.

Stolen from celticgeekess:

Guess the song:
1: Put your iPod [or whatever - this is NOT an iPod nation, dammit] on random.
2: Post the first line from the first 15 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
3: Let everyone guess what song and artist the lines come from.
4: Bold the songs when someone guesses correctly.
5: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!

1. Some day mother will die and I’ll get the money
2. Here me now and don’t forget, I’m not the man my actions would suggest
3. I’ve acquired a predilection for attracting the attention of woman who won’t have me once she knows what I will do
4. Tell me do you think it’d be all right if I could just crash here tonight
5. Have you heard about the big strong man?
6. In this land of strangers, there are dangers
7. I’ve been stuffed in your pocket for the last hundred days
8. And you see, I kinda shivered to conformity
9. The morning alarm rings
10. Armies and ice and dirty green, Newspapers shovels sand on the breeze
11. I saw you slidin’ out the bar, I saw you slippin’ out the back door baby
12. Green plastic watering can for a fake Chinese rubber plant
13. How long how long will I slide, separate my sides
14. Words like violence break the silence, come crashing in
15. In my prison cell, I think these words “I was careless, I can see that now”

I’ve been seeing a “Fears” meme where you tick off the boxes to indicate which of the 50 items you’re afraid of. Most of them don’t apply to me because most of my fears are rather specific.

Normal fears include stuff like spiders, going insane, going blind…. My more intense, anxiety-inducing stuff is more specific:

• Childbirth
  The Miracle of Life is seriously like a horror movie to me. Whenever women around me start swapping pregnancy/childbirth stories (WHY DO WOMEN DO THIS??), I get very anxious. Over Christmas the year before last, my very pregnant step-sister was practically giving me anxiety attacks.
• Housefires
  I blame this on the firefighters who came to talk to us in second grade. They emphasized the importance of escape plans, and brought in charred plush animals (!) and a melted radio to show what things looked like after a fire. I wrote and rewrote escape plans for me, my dad, and my cat and dog for YEARS with maps. Before bed, I would lie awake, petrified that there was going to be a house fire. Whenever the fear seemed to die down, there was always some fire safety thing in school or in dorm safety.
• Driving over bridges over water
  I blame Rescue, 911 for this. I hate hate hate driving over bridges over water… which sucks because the Erie Canal loops and snakes its way through my hometown. The Mothman Prophecies did not help.
• Undertow
  Just really, really scary.
• Dead bodies under deep, undisturbed water
  I blame my mother for telling me a scary story when I was 10 or so about some guy who had murdered his wife and dismembered her, then put her pieces in different coolers and thrown them in the lake. Obvious, decomposition creased gases and the coolers came to the surface… in this case, the lake was one near where my mom was a park ranger, and not all the coolers were found. From this, I developed a weird fear of having my ankle grabbed by an undead hand… when I got older, it developed more into a fear of jumping into a body of water and coming into contact with a waterlogged decomposing something or someone. (No, the scene with the lights in the water in LotR TT didn’t bother me.)
• (Stupid) Falling while carrying something sharp and putting it through my palm
  Whenever I walk to the car when it’s icy out, I get a weird mental flash of slipping and putting my keys through my hand. Realistically, I don’t think they’re sharp enough, but… e_e;;
• (Stupid)The worm in the tequila bottle
  When I was little, Dad and I were driving to Iowa, and we were staying at a hotel somewhere on the way. I was supposed to be sleeping, and Dad was watching some movie. In it, some guy was drinking tequila and there was something really menacing about the worm at the bottom. Ever since, whenever I see a tequila worm, I have to repress the urge to flee.
• (Stupid) “Octopus” furnaces
  This is a new fear, through on by visiting that creepyass house in Palmyra when we were house shopping.  That house just gave me such a bad feeling… when we walked in, it felt like it wasn’t a real house, just a cardboard cutout of a house used as some sort of insidious trap in a horror movie.  Pretty much, we knew right away that it wasn’t a house we would ever in a million years purchase.  However, the listing had mentioned an “octopus” in the basement, and we wanted to see what it was.  Octopus furnaces are the most creepy, scary thing I’ve even seen as part of a house.  Even sitting in my livingroom now, a half hour away from that house, I feel crawly.

Your fears, in depth?

I think the mod Ryoya does Proof pretty well.   He’s very different from old Proof, but I think the character continuity is there… especially through the faceup, clothes, and wig.  It suits Proof to be a little bit less smiley, really.  He is playful, but he has seen a lot of hardship and does have a slightly melancholic look to him.  I think the mouth smiles enough, though.

I’m not positive, and I will think more on it tomorrow when I take some “real” pictures.  :)

And in case anyone is interested, here is a before and after shot.

I finished painting him, and I’m waiting for his gloss and glue to dry.  I’m hoping that his body came in the mail today, though I’m not sure if it was due to.  (I traded old Delf Proof for a SD13 boy body, body shipped on Tuesday via Priority… not sure when that means it’ll show up.)

Continuing in the theme of intensive “what I did and why” commentary… there were a few things I did with the faceup to try to further improve on some of the mods I did (and some of the unmodable things that I didn’t care for as much).  I made his lips darker than my usual with a darker center to try to draw some attention away from the shadows created by the deep corners of his mouth.  The lips are fully colored and glossed about as far as the sculpt would allow.  His eyes are smokier with more dark at the outside edge (and darker too) to try to mask some of the puffiness of his lower lid that made him look a bit older.  For the same reason, I did not apply much color to the inside corners of his eyes.  In general, the shape of the brows and the length of the lashes is also intended to make the middle of the face appear a bit broader (and the eyes slightly futher apart).  I also blushed his cheeks only on his cheekbones and the upper area under his eyes… when I did this to the LE “Secret Garden” Briar, it also downplayed her thin cheeks.  I think it worked here, but I didn’t blush as deeply, so I don’t know.

In retrospect, I think if I were to do it over again, I might have modded the eyes a little differently… probably, rather than subtracting only from the upper eyelid, I would have taken less off the top and also reshaped the bottom.  This might have made the placement a little bit more youthful. However, one of the reasons I did it this way was because moving the eyes and brows upward spread out the features a little bit more… making his features take up a larger portion of his face.  This makes him look better with my other dolls, most of whom are more “traditional” ABJD styled.  I might also have opened the inner corners less… but this is an eye shape that I tend to favor, for whatever reason.  Maybe it’s most similar to my own eye shape and I’m subconsciously narcissistic. ;)  Anyway, it’s only a “what if” though; I think that this is the best mod I could have done for what I wanted the final image to be.

Maybe the improvement is all in my head… but I can’t wait to see him with eyes in and on his body.  Looking at his painted head, I think he might be able to pull off Proof.  He’s more like the doll I envisioned when I looked at Ryoya’s promo pictures.   :)  Hopefully there will be pics forthcoming of him with all of his trappings.

(If I suit him up and he’s just not Proof, no idea what I’ll do with him.  I hope he works because the MP is glutted right now with Ryoya heads.)

Well, it would be more accurate to say “Modding completed.”  The mods to the Ryoya head are done…. he’s just been cleaned again and is doing to dry over night.

Do I love him?  I’m not sure yet.  I can see him as Proof, but at the same time I think I may be too shallow not to have a beautiful doll as that character.

However, I’ve gone as far as I think I can with modification, and now some parts will need to be done through faceup.

I hope to paint him tomorrow.  Maybe will have to wait till Saturday though.

Sometimes I’m jealous when I read friends’ LJs… because it seems like other people post more progress pics and finished commissions.  I don’t post pics before the owner is given the opportunity (it seems like stealing their thunder)… and by the time they’ve received the doll, I’ve mentally moved on and never post pics.  That’s not good, is it?

So anyway, I thought I’d document my Ryoya modding a little, and show a little bit of how I analyze things both before and during a project.  A lot of artists are really organic… and I really envy that.  I am really analytical, and tend to really think and plan before I start a project.

I forgot to take a pic of his blank head for reference…  I wish I had.  Here’s a pic from Y!J of the unmodded head with faceup as a starting point.

The faceup is not good.  The Oreo cookie mouth is highly distracting…. and really very unflattering.  The biggest problem for me is that the eyebrows are painted entirely below the brow ridge, making the eyes seem close-set… the angle and placement of the brows creates a snarky expression.  Though this coupled with the mouth’s forced smile makes him look… alternatingly menacing and dim-witted.  The geometric eye shape is accentuated by downward-pointing liner at the outer corners.  The face is blushed heavily in mauvey, vaguely bruise-like colors… the placement of color serves to sharpen his already impressive cheekbones.

From a technical standpoint, the faceup is gorgeous – the linework is fabulous, the artistry is so totally there.  It is just not really suited to this head.

With the paint off, the head retains much of the same character, but the lines of the face are much more apparent.  The corners of the mouth are very deep… and they do have a slightly upward quirk even without the heavy dots.  The eyes are as angular as they look with paint, and the slight crease at the outer corner is sculpted rather than just having been painted like I had thought.  The face is very detailed and somewhat “craggy”, especially the forehead.  The brow ridge is low and sharp, very close to the dop of the line.

The biggest issues I have with the head are all centered around the eye region.  My goals are to reshape the eyes and soften their edges… and to give him an eyelid crease.  The character isn’t Asian, so I would prefer he have an eyelid crease.  At the same time, I want to “lift” his brow ridge.  This will make him look less scowly and will also be rather necessary if I open the eye upward at all.  Other minor fixes are that I would like to work on the outer edges of the bottom lip a bit.  On people, the lower lip sort of tucks into the upper lip at the corner.  If you look in the faceupped picture, his don’t… and there are those odd places where the mouth catches the light at the corners.  Then there is also the furrowed brow – that needs to be sanded a bit.

In general, I want to “youthen” him.  The head is a bit too mature, verging on looking old.

Here is where he is now.

I think it’s coming along… I have done more work on the (viewer’s) right side, the other is still somewhat rough and uneven.

Putting in eyes shows me that I need to fix the inside corner of the (again, viewer’s) right upper eyelid.  It has a weird curve to it that doesn’t match the other.  And doesn’t really look good.  This pic also shows how unfinished the left is…

The things I can’t fix about the head are the hollow cheeks and the deep corners of the mouth.

I find Ryoya really compelling because he’s not beautiful… he looks like a beautiful man who has lost a lot of weight.  That suits Proof, due to his situation for the last few years (being on the wrong side of a revolution is rarely a good thing)… in an ideal world, I would have a Tsukasa for Proof.   To me, he looks a little like a Tsukasa who’s got some health issues.

Not sure, though.  Popped his wig on him, and from the front I can see it.

But in 3/4 view, I’m not so keen.

He does look good with Vanilla and Versai, though.. so that is in his favor.

I had strange dreams again, this time that I was living overseas.  I dreamt that I was in high school in Korea with a few people who I have been emailing a lot lately.  My uniform was very cute and my hair was long again.  (For some reason, I always have long hair in my dreams… unless I’m dreaming that I am a boy, which seems to happen a lot too.)  The teacher told me that I was overthinking Hangul, and you just read the syllables as whatever they look most like in English.  So would be “Lt” and  would be “oH.”   Then there was some thunder and someone told me that my umbrella had been stolen.  My alarm really startled me and I almost knocked Sebastian off my dresser when I turned it off.

I know that they say when you dream, it’s your deepest cycle of sleep.  But I always wake up exhausted when I dream.

Last night I finished painting 4 heads!  2 Yos, a Cristal, and a Yujin.  Lately if I have more than one head to paint, I work them all in stages.  I’d been working on these 4 in bits since Sunday night.

After having vanished from tracking for 4 days,I fought the post office to hand over my Ryoya.  YAY!  It’s the first time I’ve been in a Volks lottery split… and the wait is brutal.  Watching everyone else get their Ryoyas has been torture.  Still, my split partner has been nice to work with, and I got a much better price than the ones going in the MP now.
He is a really weird head.  Some parts of the sculpt are almost entirely unappealing.  However, just getting his faceup made him probably 100 times more attractive!  I meant to take a pic, but then forgot in my gusto to start modding him.  Do far I have reshaped the eyes… and I am in the process of giving him an eyelid crease and… for lack of a letter description, lifting his brow ridge.  He’ll also have some changes made to the corners of his lower lip.  He’s really starting to look more like what I pictured for him.  Is he Proof?  I don’t know yet.  But I think the potential is there.

I’ve been trading a lot lately… currently in process with trading Proof’s old body for an SD13 body.  I also just concluded a head trade (pics forthcoming, probably this weekend)… trading some eyes at current.  I’m digging trading.  I should see if people want to trades wigs….

I’m excited because I’m off Friday, Monday, and Tuesday.  Granted, it was time I’d asked off for Dolpa… but it still works out well because I have a metric fuckton of packing to do.  The goal is to get the back bedroom completely packed (everything off the bookshelves and into boxes) and to get all the dolls packed up in their boxes.  Well, most of the dolls anyway.

We got the mortgage commitment yesterday… so yay, looks like the house is still moving forward.  I can’t wait to move. :)  I’m so excited about my little granny house!

Question for New Dollshe owners…

What is the method of attachment of Dollshe feet?  I am thinking of seeing if I can swap out the SSDF feet to Hound feet.  I’m not sure of the fit, but I think it would help in terms of getting does forVanilla.  I’m also thinking of trying out the Dollshe hands on him because they’re better suited to his personality, I think.  That said, I like the magnetic attachment and the range of wrist mobility on the SSDF.

I really need to do a review on BJD Critik of the SSDF body.  Aside from clothing it, I think it’s one of my new favorite bodies.  The movement is so nice.

Okay… this weekend’s goals:

1.  Make outfit.  Seriously.  This needs to get done.

2.  Mod the forehead on Mandy’s Yujin

3.  Paint at least 2 heads.

4. Take pictures of Lacey in all of her finery.  (She’s been here… 3 weeks, I think?  Already has more outfits than… well, most of the other dolls.  She has…. 6 outfits.)

5.  Maybe try taking a group pictures of all of the dolls. O_O

My Ryoya head has been shipped, but Canada Post is taking their sweetass time.  The package was mailed at 6am 7/15, but as of 10pm 7/17, the tracking still reads “Origin Post is preparing shipment.” WTF, people.  This is EMS.  The “E” stands for “express.”  Which means quick.  Rapide. You know.