Minor dress update and some art

So, between a crazy work schedule and a lot of developments with dissertation and job application things, I haven't gotten to do as much as I wished.  However!  I did finally start cutting out the fabric.  Hopefully I have enough.  It irks me that muslin is made so much thinner than other types of fabric (I speak in terms of width, such as 45" or 54" for most fabric bolts).  Ah well.

But anyway, here's the beginning of the cutting!  I'd do it in the more spacious living room, but I don't want our ferret getting into the fabric and pins.  That would be very bad for the project and especially her if she got hurt.

And here's the horrible mess that the left side of the craft room became.  (From right to left, sewing tackle box, sewing machine, box of fabric [topped with pieces of deconstructed bras]; in front is all the pattern stuff.)

Sadly, I've only gotten two pieces cut and started pinning the third.  It's tricky and slow because I can't use the fabric's actual fold for some of the pieces, and it takes finagling to get the fabric laid out this way for bigger pieces.  But tomorrow's the fourth, and while we'll be celebrating America's birthday throughout the day, I'm hoping to get a little more done.  

In the meantime, my friends and I were talking about art, and it reminded me that I still have a digital painting to finish.  Now, I haven't been in much of a drawing phase for the last two years or so, but in the last spurt of inspiration, I drew this picture of a D&D character I made (yet never got the chance to play, haha).  Here she is, threatening a poor, miserable half-orc.  

I started painting it in Adobe Photoshop 7.0 with my trusty old Wacom II.  Well over a year ago.  But unless I'm in a phase, I only work on a piece for an hour or two at a time, every couple of months.  I think Guild Wars 2 has exacerbated this tendency.  ^_^;;

It's almost done, but I'm down to the background, which has proven itself extremely difficult.  The layout of the drawing itself doesn't leave much room for a clear background, and the lighting I painted is proving troublesome.  And this, friends, is why you do your background first, or at least always have a clear idea of what it should be and where EXACTLY your primary light source is.  I know this, but I rarely plan ahead thoroughly, and I hate doing backgrounds first.

Anyway, here's the colored image with a test background pasted in.  It's a background from a video game, but I don't know which one--I just found it on Google image search along with a host of others.  But this one will be my template, as it's one of the only ones that works both in color and establishing setting.  Eventually, I'll go in and paint my version of it.  I just don't want to.  ^__^;;;;;

If you'd like to see more of my art, feel free to check out my (long-neglected) DeviantArt page.  It's got everything from late high school up through about 2012.  A lot of the more recent stuff is just sketches, but I've got a wide range in there, everything from

X-Men as Disney princesses (even though Scarlet Witch is more often an Avenger)

To

Watercolors painted for a study abroad course

And that's it for today!