Fimo Beegu

I dream of many things: starting a successful business, travelling, having adventures with Solaris and our families, getting involved in charities, graduating college with a degree or certificate that matters to me, perhaps walking a stage at least once or twice, and... yeah, the list is rather longer than it is short.  But one that means a lot to both Solaris and myself is the chance to write and share our respective stories and characters with the world. We want to bring to other generations the joy that we were given when we were young and engrossed in things like The Muppets, The Dark Portal trilogy, Mysterious Cities of Gold, and Star Wars.

Needless to say, a lot of writing is reading. I grew up as a bookworm, so the hardest part for me is to stop reading long enough to write something.  I get so caught up in some stories, I just cannot put them down until I know what happens.  Hiromu Arakawa, Roald Dahl, and Michael Crichton are especially gifted in keeping me up late into the night.  Recently, however, I discovered a new shining star. His name is Alexis Deacon, and he makes me pine for the days when children's books were more like his.

Do you remember when you were little and you would sit down to a picture book and be transported  elsewhere?  I remember my mother and father wearing Hairy Maclary to pieces, they had to read it to me so often. I just loved the feeling of being completely immersed in such colorful characters and rich images.  We could forget where we were and be somewhere else without even leaving the room. It was magic to me and Alexis Deacon is bringing this back.

Below is the titular character of Mr Deacon's award-winning 'Beegu'. It is the story of a three-eyed alien/bunny who gets lost and ends up wandering around an earth cityscape.  She is looking for her mother and father, but along the way she experiences vignettes of human virtue and vices until ultimately she finds a way home. If you're a parent and you haven't read it with your kids, do! And if you're an adult without kids, read it anyway! We could all stand to get in better touch with our younger selves.

Made from translucent effect Fimo over the course of an afternoon. Then baked and painted. Overall, a day/weekend project. ^____^

Portal Pumpkin

Portal-Bob, 2011's Pumpkin Carving

In my family, we've had a tradition of carving Halloween pumpkins for at least a decade now. It began with the usual pre-drawn, pre-arranged designs one can purchase in book-form.  Then we started digging up less mass-produced designs on the internet. And then... when we tired of that, we started making up our own.  Madness and many pumpkins followed thereafter and (for reasons we have since forgotten) each has had the word 'Bob' somewhere in its name.

This is the second pumpkin Solaris and I have done together, this year in honor of Portal 2's release. We debated doing something more otaku-related, but as Solaris had only just recently gotten me addicted to Portal's two-player campaign at that point, it seemed appropriate to do a tribute.  It was a bit slap-dash since we hadn't any of the official pumpkin-carving knives, scrapers, or other implements of pumpkin mutilation, but I think we did just fine with Portal-Bob sitting between us, each of us at work with a different clay knife.

We really enjoyed the time spent with him (and each other), making Halloween something special to remember.  It has always made me sad when a holiday passed by without notice.

Solaris: So this was our first UK pumpkin, and the first that I felt I had a mite of confidence in undertaking. This is still fairly new to me, being as a) England doesn't go for Hallowe'en in the same way America does, and b) we never really made lanterns at our house anyway, for reasons too numerous and frustrating to go into right now. I remember one of our reenactment events was held at some old ruins in Midhurst, West Sussex, and we had about fifty pumpkins to carve, and I was involved in a lot of that, but not in such intricate detail. It was more akin to stabbing as many pumpkins as possible as quickly as possible until they resembled crude, polygonal faces. I liked my pirate one, though, although I never had him long enough to name him.

Portal-Bob brought to me two new and rather fascinating techniques for pumpkin-carving that I never knew existed: shaving and colouring in. I just... hadn't comprehended that you could do that with a pumpkin. I repeatedly asked Sparky if it was cheating, and she smiled, saying it was fine. I'd always assumed all shapes were carved out, but I'm always glad to learn new things, especially if it's skills I can apply to my imagination's freedom to express itself. Portal-Bob might not be as epic as other pumpkins, but there's a personal epicness to him, I feel. In the same way that one's own personal adventure might not be as huge or involved as other people's, it will be as epic to you as anything you've ever experienced. Portal's a single-player game (at least, the main campaign is), and I really enjoy the time taken in immersing yourself in that environment. I'd like to say P-Bob does that justice.