🎄 Happy Holidays 2024
Merry Christmas and happy holidays. 🙂 I had a good Christmas, ours was low-key this year, so my mom just made some desserts and sloppy joes.
Some small updates first:
- I decided to upgrade my bear blog to paid. Mostly because the host I was using for images just seems... kind of sketchy. I think Malwarebytes is blocking them, and even after trying to tell it to calm down, the site itself has started acting weird. So I'll just re-upload all my images over here and not worry about it.
- I've had glasses since I was in third grade, but my current pair is the only one I've ever had where the rubber nose rests have fallen out. One fell out for the first time a couple months ago, but I managed to find it. Now they both have somehow fallen out and they're just gone. I fear they've been vacuumed at this point. I have an eye appointment next month, but in the meantime, I've ordered some replacements online - so I guess we'll see if they fit.
This year for Christmas, my family decided we'd make our gifts for each other rather than buying them. I decided to do acrylic paintings. Though we'd decided on doing this only two months before Christmas, which didn't give me a lot of time, and I only ended up getting three done. Next year if we do this again, I'd like to get more done - though I doubt I'll be painting canvas for the people I did for this year. So I'll have a lot of thinking to do for what I could even make for everyone.
Here's what I ended up painting, though I forgot to take final photos of the finished paintings, so these are all in-progress photos.
Mushroom house, "fairy village" sort of idea for my sister.
This one I'm pretty proud of. We have a company that comes to spray the house for bugs every couple months, and he happened to see it and offered $100 for it. But obviously it's a gift, so I couldn't do that, haha.Magneton, my brother's favorite pokemon, for him.
This came out cool! I did a mockup on my pc first to help lay out the colors. I wish I had a darker blue for the magnets, but I decided not to mix paints for this painting, so I had to go with what I had on-hand. I'd also gotten a varnish covering that's supposed to be reflective/multicolor that I'd wanted to use on this, but I couldn't get it to work during my test paint samples, so I had to just go with the regular matte cover. I'll have to try that reflective one on something else.Sea turtle macro for my mom. I'd asked her for an idea, and she said she'd like something that was brown, orange, and blue. There's a commercial they play during football (which I don't watch myself, but Dane has friends over on Sundays to watch) with a sea turtle and the blues/oranges/teals they show are just stunning, so I'd already wanted to paint something like this. This one I feel the most disappointed with, but I was running out of time and needed to finish it up.
Here's a few things of what my family gifted to me!
My sister's boyfriend has a lazer engraver and a 3D printer, so he's been nerding out with it for some time. He gifted me a stone coaster and this tumbler, both with this image on it.
He told me he'd wanted to do my comic logo on the cup, but they weren't able to find my comic's logo seperated (and they're not vector files.) So I need to double check my files to see if my logo was a vector file or not.
From my sister, she made these two sweet terrariums for me! One has a monstera and the other has some succulents.
My brother drew me a few things! The main thing was a picture of my comic character Terry, which he put in a framed photo. He told us his original plan was to get movie-poster sized drawings for all of us, but I am actually glad. I don't know where he thinks I'd hang a movie poster sized drawing, haha. This is much more managable.
The others were these buttons. Kecleon is my favorite pokemon, and terriermon isn't my favorite, but he's preeeeeetty dang close, so he effectively is, haha.
Overall, I think we all enjoyed making gifts. I wish I'd gotten a couple more done for a few more family members, but maybe next year I can. Even if we don't all collectively decided to do this again, there's nothing wrong with choosing to make something as a gift next year on my own, so I can start thinking of ideas now.