typewriter

a pen-and-ink drawing of my Remington 5 typewriter--

Hope that everyone had a great holiday, and happy almost-new year!

Katie

A painting I did for a magazine illustrating the story of a girl named Katie  in the 40s who wants to play on a baseball team--

Happy Holidays everyone, hope you're enjoying the beginning of winter so far

Soloist

experimenting with a pencil sketch I scanned into photoshop

(coloring it, using various filters, and clicking on random things)

it actually turned out fairly well, considering I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I have everything to learn about PS (so I can actually use it. as a tool)

US mail

Boy's Town

I  have covered the front of my nice new moleskine watercolor notebook (!) with these great old postage stamps from Boy's Town, Nebraska. My favorite is the one on the bottom row that says, "He ain't heavy, father, he's m' brother!" ^_^

g r e e n

inside designing dresses, waiting for Sandy to come....

lined paper sketch

Here is a pencil drawing I did on lined paper....sorry for the lack of posting lately. more Green Children writing to come.

green children #1

This is the first segment of my green-children project where I write their story from several different perspectives, each one illustrating a different theory about who they were and where they came from.

This one is from the perspective of the forest/mountain/mine shafts the children wandered into after leaving, in this theory, St. Martin's land, aka a magical faerie isle. It is definitely the most abstract of the theories. Of course, it would be hard for it not to be abstract, considering it's told by a mountain.

i’ve lived my life for a thousand years and i will for a thousand years to come. i watch the sky and the sun rising and falling and feel the earth changing and shifting around me: in my roots, in the stone walls of the caverns within me. bitter winters don’t shake me. i am more than what i seem. you can’t blow me down, can’t pull me up or knock me over.

the children were so young. a blink in my own eye, really, just beginning their already fleeting lives.

there was a girl, a boy, skin green as spring. i felt them, watched them, listened to them for so long—

they were within me. in the mine shafts, among the trees. and i came to know them as they walked, they came to be my own—

a part of me in a way, a way that’s hard to explain. i knew of their past, knew of the land they’d appeared from. remembered the forever-twilight and the river that churned, gushed green-black-blue all at once. now they were broken off from st. martins. lost in an unfamiliar place, that’s what they felt they were.

i wanted to tell them. i wanted to tell them i was here, i was all around them, i knew them. they were safe within me, i watched over them every moment until they went out the other side.

there were scattered bands of wolves throughout the woods. desperate creatures, bone-thin. their eyes always brought to mind the thick ice on the pond come winter: gleaming and dull at the same time, heavy. dark. cold.

i watched those wolves as much as i watched the two of them. not letting my guard down. i wasn’t going to let some ferocious part of me take them down. no.

pan and gelsey is what i called them. pan for the little boy and gelsey for the girl. named them like they were my children.

in a way, they really were.

i knew they wouldn’t stay forever.

how could they? i loved them but there was no way they could know that. i was not the place for them. i never could have been.

the last passage comes out on the fields where the reapers are. i knew they would be found. i pushed them along on that last leg of their journey, cleared their path of rocks and pitfalls, held myself steady so the rocky ceilings closing in the caves inside me wouldn’t fall down on their heads.

as soon as they took a step into the field they were gone.

there is a blindfold over my eyes forevermore. i can’t see them now that they are gone from me.

but still as much a part of me as before, always.

Mexico '68

if you look closely, you can see this piece of paper is quite old, it's a medal count for Italy from the 1968 Olympics, which I thought was really cool. the painting on top of it is fairly unrelated.

the Green Children

Has anyone heard of the Green Children of Woolpit before?

Sometime in the 12th century, two little kids appeared right outside the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England. Their skin was a very unusual color, they spoke a language that no one understood, and the only food they ate was green beans.

This was in the time when people believed in faerie-changelings and those types of stories.

The boy was unhealthy and died shortly after they arrived in the village and were baptized. The girl, however, survived, and eventually learned English. When she did, she said she and her brother were from a place called St. Martin's Land, where it was always twilight and all the people were green. She grew up healthy and eventually got married. The strangest thing is that after they had arrived and began to eat normal food (other than beans) their skin lost its green color.

People have different theories for what really did happen, one being that they were, actually, faerie children, but also that they may have had chlorosis (what turned them green) or arsenic poisoning (both are scary ideas.) Rather than having come from a magical unknown place, it is possible they were North Belgian refugees, as at the time Belgian people were trying  to immigrate to England and a large number of them killed.

I won't give all the details of the theories now, because I have a plan for a project where I tell their story from different perspectives, each one illustrating a different theory or idea of what could have happened.

I shall start posting them as soon as I can.

redesign!

as everyone's probably noticed....I've given my blog a redesign! I have a nice new font and new header and everything--I'm pretty happy with it! What do you think?

a good sandwich

+

 +

These are doodles of the ingredients of a sandwich I made myself--there should be some peanut butter there, too, but the drawing didn't turn out. 

It was honestly one of the yummiest sandwiches I've had, but also so rich that I couldn't actually finish it.......

A sewn backpack

Summer is coming to a close, and I'll miss it so very much...

But: Here I shall show you a project I have completed while being lazy and not posting ~ my lovely backpack!

This idea started out as sharpie-doodle type thing, I ended up really disliking how that looked and had the inspiration to sew it instead.

Hope everyone had a great summer and is enjoying the last bit of it!

Cheers, Ava

People at the farmer's market

A few characters based on people I saw at the farmer's market yesterday.

It is, by the way, my birthday today. ☺

Cheers!

Pinned

I don't know how old, exactly, this collection is.

The insects inside are very dried up--to the point that half of them are missing legs (which are lying at the bottom of the frame.) I think that the small dragonfly's wings were probably colorful at one time. Now everything's fading away.

Tape dispensers

The Lenox School for Boys

Non Ministrari, Sed Ministrare!

          In Lenox, Massachusetts, on the grounds of Shakespeare & Company are multiple old buildings that were once a part of the Lenox School for Boys. This is my drawing of St. Martin's Hall, which I would do anything to go inside of. The front door is padlocked, but when you look in the front windows you can see an ancient leather trunk just lying on the floor. A leather trunk. It's like nobody even fully cleaned out the building when the school closed. When you look into some of the other windows, though it looks like Shakespeare & Co. uses this big room to store their props, even though they say the building is condemned and unsafe to go in. That drives me crazy, because there is an open side door to the building and I am DYING to go open the leather trunk. DYING. When I opened the door, though, someone told me it was condemned. And it seemed like she cared.

      This is a picture from a school graduation in 1966! They are picnicking right by the front door, the one in my drawing. See the flowers on the paneling?
      Even the little part of the building you can see looks really different from how it does now.

      AAAAH. I want to open the leather trunk SO BAD and explore the rest of St. Martin's hall. I'm pretty sure it's not going to fall down on me.

-Ava


P.S. They don't say anything about the closing on the little plaque near the St. Martin's hall, so I was hoping for wikipedia to say something like "The Lenox school closed under mysterious circumstances in 1972--"
It did not. The Lenox school closed because of financial problems. What a let down.

P.P.S. Oh, look! It's the 100th post on my blog!

Kim Il-Sung

Trying to get better at painting famous people from photos.

Fairly recently I watched National Geographic's Inside North Korea, which was intriguing and really really sad at the same time. This is why I picked Kim Il-Sung to paint.

I recommend the video, it's about 40 minutes and you can watch it on YouTube here.

I'm going to make some excuses. Yay.

Hi.
I'm sorry I haven't posted in....over two weeks.
I've have been like, really busy, and I'm really busy for this weekend too. So I probably won't be putting anything up today or tomorrow, but.........soon.

Okay. Bye.

Samurai

I did this drawing in the Samurai exhibit at the National Geographic museum in DC.

I saw a poster in the hotel for a special exhibit on Titanic for the anniversary, and right away wanted to go. I didn't find out more about this particular exhibit or anything...which was a mistake, because it actually was significantly less cooler that I was expecting it to be. It was pretty sad. I was psyched about it and thinking there would be actual artifacts from the wreck, awesome things like that....

and I was wrong. They had one moderately cool thing (I guess...) which was one of the lifeboats they used in the movie (and it was a lot larger than they make it seem). So overall it was Not So Great.

But our tickets included the exhibit on samurai, and that was better.

I got to sit and draw some of the oldest known photos of Japan! Which is cool.

So remember, if you're a Titanic fan and in DC, skip the 100 Year Obsession "special exhibit" thing. Ok?

Helloooooo!

Hi everyone! I happen to be in Washington D.C. right now, I'll be going back home tomorrow.
I'll be posting drawings as soon as I get back to MA, where there is a scanner.
Ok! Just thought I'd share that...just to make sure nobody thought I was abandoning the blog. Or something.
Cheers!

Åv@

Flea market

Don't you love flea markets?
I am someone who loves flea markets.
There are people's scratched up videocassettes of The Little Mermaid and extensive collections of nail polish and stained stuffed animals and the boxes of "new" packaged stuff. Flyswatters! Socks! Knockoff brands of Sharpie markers! (They write the brand name in the weird cursive Sharpie font so you don't notice until you've payed your dollar fifty for them--you've actually just bought some Skerples or Shoupies instead! Surprise!)
It's not actually any of that stuff I really love about flea markets. The best part is the old stuff. The actual old stuff. It's once you've walked past the possibly-pirated DVDs  and broken Tiffany lamps and the weird stuff like underwear in giant packs and deodorant displayed on tables. (Why...?)
But once you have you can find the true interesting things. Old skeleton keys. Ancient crates of Coca-Cola bottles with sticky brown soda still inside. Written-on postcards.
And I was able to find, among some other very old things including someone's report card from 1936 (I will definitely be sharing that later), a color-in paper doll book--$2 instead of $10 because I wasn't a collector! Yesss!!

What I love so much about this paper doll book is they have these handwritten descriptions of what the dresses looked like in real life so you can color it in accurately. How could you not get excited about getting to paint "a white chiffon dress with cranberry, blue green, and lavender splashes of color"????

Princess Caroline definitely did have some snazzy outfits. Although I admit sometimes I was dying to change up the color scheme, particularly for the "brown blazer, ecru blouse, and tan skirt" which I hoped looked better in real life than my rendition of it.

 Fun, right?!

I hope everyone goes to a flea market and finds themselves some nice paper dolls to color in. Sometimes it's nice to have some instructions to follow. 

Although it would be pretty funny to have given the Princess a new stupid modern shirt. Like 

I ♥ 1D

or something with Angrybirds.

Untitled

COMING SOON

Hi people.
Gosh I feel pathetic. Please try and believe me that I'll be posting something I'm working on soon. For real this time. This is so sad, I keep having to do apologetic posts with nothing but words! Patheticness!!!

Here is a drawing of Paul McCartney to help drive away some of the general patheticness....I hope....?

  AM I HELPING?
/

...artist's block

Gah!!!!
I am having some real artist's block. Or something.
It is seriously driving me crazy and everything I try to do isn't really coming out how I want it to...it is awfully annoying.

I'll get something together and post it...soon.....!

I've been trying to do a lot more black-and-white watercolors off photographs....and I was doing this awesome photo of the Beatles, and it was all going great except for when I got to JOHN!
COME ON JOHN! WHY ARE YOU SO  FREAKING HARD TO PAINT?!?!?! AGGHHHHH.......



I'm fine, though. Soon I'll do a successful watercolor of some famous person. There are lots of possibilities and I can avoid John Lennon.

Mi Tierra sketch

A sketch I did with color added in with watercolor pencil. 

Oka-Loka

My watercolor of a box of Oka-loka candies. (These are really the same thing as Nerds, only from Costa Rica.)

Stages of the Strawberry

My chocolate-covered strawberry is consumed in four documented stages.

Japanese Treats

What a pathetic blogger I am!!
I don't even want to know how many day's it's been since Chapter Three cont'd.....
Well. I've been really busy, or something, and I just haven't gotten around to posting in a long loong time... (and every day I thought COME ON POST SOMETHING and then, always, some thing or another would distract me and then it would be the next day and I would think, COME ON POST SOMETHING! TODAY! And I didn't, and the cycle repeats itself. Also I have recently started to follow the blog of the artist Tommy Kane. Me: Wow! Tommy Kane posts something, like....every other day! And then.... Me: I used to do that..... :(

But I'm posting now!!! Yesss! Time to move on.

I have just received as a present (from Japan!)....a big box of weird Japanese treats!

I absolutely love the packaging. I think I might have to frame the yellow chick one. :)

Cheers!

-Ava

Chapter Three ~CONTINUED~

~     ~     ~     ~     ~

There was a little clock hanging on the wall, dark against the pink-rose wallpaper. It was a pretty thing. A thin, lacy metal design bloomed from the edges and there were flowers painted along the edges in only slightly faded yellow paint.

It was only the hands that caused Nolie to scowl and sigh and stare. She lay very still on the bed and stared at the minute hand; two tick-marks past the three. Then she closed her eyes and groaned, inwardly, because the clock still read 9:17 in the morning and she knew her glaring at it wasn’t moving it along any faster.

Nolie stayed in the same position with her eyes still shut for as long as she thought she could bear it. (I will lie here, pretending to be asleep, right up until ten thirty, she thought, and tried very hard to relax, which is something difficult to do intentionally.)

When Magnolia was sure she must have been sprawled there for about a half an hour, the clock proved her wrong. In fact, when she checked it showed she had been lying face down on her quilt for about eight minutes.

Nolie gave a very deep, drawn-out sight and plodded over to the window seat. Outside, the sun was shining. Sun! The weather had been nothing but grey clouds and rain for the past week. And of course on the one day the weather is BEARABLE—and in this case, it’s BEAUTIFUL, I’m being forced to stay inside and go mad. She slumped and shut her eyes, scowling out the window and remembering—‘Why don’t you girls go and make yourselves comfortable until half-past ten?’ She’d sat down at the little round table in the OTHER dining room they were in. The less-than-grand one. ‘I mean upstairs.’ Mrs. Caddigan spoke in a honey-sweet voice. There was an edge there, though, a tone that told them they had all better go up to their rooms, now. From that moment on she’d made up her mind to despise Mrs. Caddigan. Her white-blond helmet was scaring her, anyway…hair wasn’t meant to be that stiff. Ever. Opening her eyes, Nolie checked the clock. It was 9:36. THIRTY-FOUR MORE MINUTES. OH PLEASE, PLEASE HURRY…

She exhaled. ‘A deep, calming breath.’ That was what her and Cora’s private tutor, Mrs. Fortescue, was always telling them—“Take a deep, calming breath, girls—just let your mind relax.” It drove her insane, but Nolie had to admit, it would be nice if breathing like that actually calmed her down. The light filtering in felt so nice on her face…she sat back and let her eyes close once again. The window-seat cushion was very soft. Her mind was wandering: fluttering and landing on a thought, but briefly. Always moving. She thought about the cook, who she’d seen when they’d been in the little dining room with Mrs. Caddigan. She made her think of a clothespin doll; a very round face and red cheeks, but the rest of her as straight as a meter-stick and about as thin as well. A meter-stick wearing a black dress and frilly apron without any stains. Then she wrinkled her nose and thought of Mrs. Caddigan, with her blond helmet-bob and her dress that fit tightly and came down off both her shoulders in the most ridiculous way. It was black and purchased in Paris, along with her floaty silk scarf. (She wore this tied, ever so daintily, in a loose knot around her neck.) Her heels were strappy and aqua-blue, and “one thousand one hundred ninety-five dollars from Gucci” as Cora had informed her earlier. (How did she know this? Nolie had no idea.) Her last thought before she started drifting was how much, exactly, does this woman spend on clothes every year? After that, she napped peacefully: lying in the sun and dreaming of clothespin dolls.

This post has no title...

I AM SORRY TO EVERYONE
I KNOW I HAVE NOT POSTED IN MORE THAN A WEEK.
why isn't it letting me type a space while holding down shift
So sad! Just wait! Something's coming, today or tomorrow....
Hold On!

-Ava

Coffee Filter

Always fun finding new things to doodle on....

Cheers,

A

MUJI collage

This is my very minimalist collage-thing. I used pictures cut from a MUJI catalog.

Cheers! (And apologies for my lack of posting in the last....six days or so. Sorry about that!)

-a v a

Drawing snow

My view from the chair by the window...

Ahhhh yes!!

Right now we're having the first snowstorm (that has stuck) since the Great October Blizzard!

It is so pretty out...and I think I'm going to have to end this post and go outside and see it for real.

Cheers and Happy Wednesday!

-Ava

Chapter Three (beginning)

~Three~

Magnolia sat, with her feet tucked under her on the red cushion.

Cora was gone now; she sat on her previously occupied spot on the settee. There was a much more pleasant air to the room now, a silence that was peaceful rather than glaring. Marie was still on her same chair. Her hands were stretched towards the hearth and she stared absently at the pattern on the carpet.

“Nolie,” Marie began abruptly, after a few minutes. Magnolia glanced up in surprise.

“Nolie. Why are we here?” Her voice was soft, and it had a startlingly quivery edge, as if she was near tears.

“Well…I suppose, because Miss Bonifaz thought it would be good for us. To come. And, because of Cora.” She spoke uncertainly, but tried to sound vaguely comforting. It seemed as though Marie was more upset than she’d been letting on.

“But why? Why is it good for us?” Voice catching, she put her face in her hands. “I want to go home.”

Now she was sad too. “Three weeks, Marie.” Nolie slid off the settee and put her hand on her shoulder. “After that we’ll all leave.”

Her cousin’s eyes were damp. She stared up at her and tried to smile, weakly.

“Give it a chance. Try to enjoy being here. You know I didn’t want to come either.” Magnolia grasped her hand and hauled her out of the chair. “Come on, now.”

Together, they stepped across the cold floorboards. Marie closed her eyes for a second. Although possibly not her first choice in companions, she was thankful Magnolia was there.

They walked up the stairs still in step

Chapter Two

~Two~

It was late when the car finally pulled into the gravel drive. Marie was leaning on Cora’s shoulder, both fast asleep. Each time they hit a rut (which was a lot, obviously the driveway wasn’t well taken care of) they snorted and snored louder.

Magnolia sat still and listened to crunching of the rocks beneath the tires, the wind blowing in the trees on either side of them. She tried very hard not to listen to her companions, despite the fact that Marie was sagging against her and Cora’s elbow was digging into her back in a very uncomfortable way.

The sky outside was tar-black, and she thought the moon was unusually faint. Nevertheless, Nolie held up her watch and squinted—it was just past one in the morning. Then, the crunching gravel completely stopped, and Marie and Cora slumped suddenly forward. They had arrived.

~     ~     ~     ~     ~

It was hard to remember what happened, exactly, after everyone had piled out of the car. Cora didn’t even remember getting out. When she had finally woken up, it was in a four poster bed with morning sunlight pouring in through the windows, which was fine with her. She wasn’t someone who questioned, as long as she got her way. Especially if a servant happened to come in with a soft-boiled egg in an elaborate eggcup, toast, and fresh-squeezed juice on a silver tray.

So for Cora, the first morning at the Red House was a good one.

When Marie opened her eyes, the first thing she noticed was that her nose was completely stuffed up and she had a headache. There were no tissues to be seen. She stumbled up and down the hall in her rumpled dress from yesterday, only to be told by a passing servant with an empty tray there was a washroom right in the back of her own bedchamber. This made Marie feel distinctly foolish. Having her own breakfast served to her in her own bedroom was only a very slight comfort, so even as she ate, sitting up against two pillows, she had a creeping feeling that the day wasn’t going to improve. Marie sneezed loudly and dropped her toast.

Nolie woke up the most tired of the three, having not slept a wink on the way there. There was a huge window that looked out over the grounds and the main road right across the room from her bed, which delighted her. As soon as breakfast came, she changed into fresh clothes and ate her eggs sitting on the window seat. The sun shone brightly from behind the trees. The Red House had a very romantic, old feel to it—the feel of a majestically ancient place that wasn’t going anywhere. Magnolia smiled and set her plate on the floor. That feeling was always a good sign.

~     ~     ~     ~      ~

At eight thirty exactly, the three of them met in the sitting room. Cora seated herself immediately, directly in the middle of the settee that faced the fireplace. Nolie and Marie found themselves in matching armchairs opposite her.

“Cora. Please tell me again why we’re even here.” Marie’s voice sounded hoarse and she seemed paler than she should be.

“Are you okay? You look terrible.” Her face was concerned, but at the same time Cora played with the lacy collar on her dress, as if making it clear who looked terrible and who didn’t.

There was a brief silence, and when it seemed like Marie wasn’t going to reply, Nolie broke in.

“What are we doing, for real, at a mansion? Just tell us again the exact reason you dragged us here, because I can say for both of us that we’ve lost track.”

Her good mood was disappearing rapidly just being around her cousin. She crossed her arms over her chest and waited.

At the same time, Cora was scowling and remembering what Magnolia had done yesterday in her anger—“STOP it!” she had yelled, over what Cora couldn’t remember—and then forced both her neat gloved hands down into a mud puddle. She exhaled sharply and still did not reply.

Marie was thinking only of how she felt horrible and headachey, and how she wished—wished so badly---she never would have had to come here in the first place.

Bitter feelings were floating around the room. A draft crept in from under the door, chilling their bare toes. The fire popped and sputtered.

~Magnolia~Marie~Cora~

The first chapter of something I just began.

~One~

Cora, Marie, and Magnolia sat together, cramped into two small seats. All three of them had identical black trunks resting on their laps with initials stenciled in white paint—

C.C.A.

M.F.A.

M.G.D.

And all three had the same blank faces, made empty by six days of travel. They sat in silence and watched the road stretch in front of them and the sky stretch behind them. The air of the car felt still and heavy, like it was hanging around them in great folds, in the way of musty velvet curtains.

It was Magnolia who was making such comparisons in her head, thinking absently how the sky was billowing like sun-bleached cloth and how the road ahead was a single line on the map of her life: hand drawn, wavering, and all alone. It gave her a funny feeling, rendering her very existence as a piece of paper. It wasn’t a bad feeling, though. She closed her eyes in a meditative sort of way, to help along further analogies.

It was Marie who was worrying. She frowned involuntarily as she gazed out the window and thought of upsetting things. First of all, why was she even here? In a car with her two least favorite people, driving unprotected to the last place she wanted to be. It should be the opposite, Marie fretted. I should be on a majestic cruise ship, sailing OUT of England, not further into it. Headed towards…New York City with…with….she didn’t even know. Marie rested her head on the window glass.

It was Cora who was fussing. She squirmed and retied her hair-ribbons and pulled at her dress, grimacing as she thought of what she might look like at this moment. In her world, six cramped hours in a car without so much as a reflective window, let alone a mirror, did things to you. And furthermore, Cora couldn’t even bring herself to look down at her gloves. She clenched her fists. Magnolia. She directed hateful, hateful thoughts at her companion but refused to look at her companion (who was inconveniently squashed next to her.) Angrily she produced her wire brush from her handbag and began to groom her suede boots to further perfection, just to keep her mind off things.

The car sped along under the immense grey sky, and each girl’s thoughts floated out and up, up to join the clouds above them.

♥

Happy Valentine's day to everyone!
And apologies for my lack of posting for the past week.

Happy February-
A

Watercoloring.....

This is the first time I have really tried black-and-white  watercolor, and it was tricky!

I'm going to keep experimenting with it, though....

Cheers,

Ava

Yes

Dovecote

Here is a small bit of a writing piece I've just started....

          Channary was a city made from towers.

          Copper, mostly—ancient metal blooming with pale green as it oxidized in the sea air.

It was a famous landscape, depicted in countless paintings that decorated the palaces of the capital. The shining domes and spires poking at Kir’s ever-blue sky was an image like no other. Unmistakable.

But it was only the true people of the city who knew the truth, which was that the paradise of Channary was only an illusion, a veil of beauty hiding a place, which was, in fact, filled with bird droppings and corruption.

         It was the real Channary that Nolie had been raised to know.

         Nolie’s life, from infancy to her current age, thirteen, had been a story of loss, poverty, and grey doves—a story she shared with the wider population of the city, for they all led the same lives. The very same hard, fight-for-your-place-in-the-world lives.

          But Magnolia Harper had one thing that not a single other person had, and that was a very small grain of something unknown to the city, inside her.

         That something was called hope, and she thought of it as the same thing as a cloud of doves billowing out of a tower window, in the morning. Or as a purple and orange streaked sky, glorious backdrop for Channary’s skyline.

         It was her hope and her appreciation of beauty that had kept her from falling completely into hard, colorless reality. That was what separated her from all the others, made her, in truth, a very interesting person.

        It was a sad thing, though, because nobody really thought of Nolie like that. The fact that she was different had placed her immediately in a certain category, the category where all the people who were eccentric, or just plain crazy, or simply didn’t have anything in common with the others went in the Oddball category.

      Magnolia Harper being in this group meant that she was not someone to associate with. And that was a pity.

       So, for most of her life, she was somewhat of an outcast. Someone who no one knew well and no one wanted to know at all. And it stayed like that. Just like that, right up to the morning of October first. And that was when things started to change.

Cheers, and happy almost-Friday!

-A

Jelly Tots

Jelly Tots are probably the yummiest gummy (ooh, accidental rhyming!) candy. Especially the blackcurrant ones. 

Don't they look so nice and inviting and eatable?

-Ava♫

P.S. Lisa, this is kind of for you. 

Don't know if you'll appreciate it or if it'll just make you mourn the lack of Jelly Tots in D.C. ☺

Music

Cupcakes and Stained Glass

I'd like a plate of cupcakes like that. Right now. And maybe that hat to wear too.

Cheers!
Ava

NYC!

Last weekend, for two nights, I was in New York! I had a great time sketching there...lots of interesting people to draw and lots of interesting things to draw.

I have found that I can only successfully sketch people that I don't know. I'm not sure why that is, but it was great fun drawing the people around me on trains and at restaurants. (I think that it's okay to draw people in public as long as you do a good job not staring at them. Most of the time, for me, though, people were just to busy doing something on their iPads or reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.)

While I was in the city I also got to see a fabulous performance of Wicked...

and see some pretty incredible views.

A very good weekend!

Cheers,

Ava