Blog Party Post #2: A Productive Snow Day. Who Knew.

I guess I am weird because I usually hate snow days. I can't go anywhere due to unsafe roads, sometimes we lose power, and everything everywhere is closed, and I get cheated out of another fifty bucks from my paycheck.  With all the snow days we've had so far and winter only half over, I think this is gonna be a skinny year salary-wise. I hope I'll have enough to even pay my taxes. :(

Anyway, I decided not to let this day go to waste, after almost a solid two months of procrastination. I went nuts today creating stuff, just trying to get ideas out of my head and finish up old projects.

Wednesday February 12:

This is a Minipacker machine. It automatically inflates a special kind of bubble wrap which is reusable. We got this at work to replace the old bubble wrap and the annoying foam peanuts. Welcome to the future of packing.

Like my shark face I drew on my car's salty grime with my finger? I also drew flames on the hood. Don't ask, just accept my awesome.

February 13: 

Whoa what a day.  I woke up at 3:00 AM to the sound of the house being blasted by what sounded like pebble-sized hail. When I go downstairs for breakfast at 8:00 after passing out from exhaustion and hunger...I find we have almost 2 feet of snow on the ground with plow drifts as high as 3-4 feet.  Dad eventually convinces me to go out and shovel a few cubic tons of snow.


Then I decided to help my Mom bake some cookies, because I'm still awesome like that.  We used an old Land O'Lakes cookbook from 1981 that my Mom used to make lots of tasty stuff from when I was a kid.  I did all this myself, she only helped me find the ingredients and supervised me.  I made coconut almond spice cookies and some orange glazed honey cookies (not pictured) Altogether it's loaded with sugar and really indulgent, as all cookies should be.  Then I heated up a pot of chicken soup to heat myself up before going out to shovel.

Hours later, I came back in and suddenly my creative brain went nuts.  herte's all the stuff I completed or worked on today:

1. Stenciled an army barracks bag to use for a change of clothes or carrying a neatly folded dress uniform at events like Fort Miles. I decided to adopt my grandpa's name and serial number as a sort of WWII 'persona'. The guys at events call me "Mel" instead of Jeff, it really helps me get into the time period and into his character.  Maybe someday I will try a first person impression at an event.

 
2.  Then, I busted out all my acrylic paints and worked some more on this leather pilot jacket, decorating it to look like one of the Flying Tigers. (P-40 pilots who were sent overseas with the Chinese air force to combat the Japanese air force, before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and before our direct involvement in the war.  Legend has it that ancient Japanese pearl divers were mortally afraid of sharks, and when the Japs saw these snarling faces painted on our airplanes, they likely reconsidered their career choice.

All the details and lettering on this flight jacket is hand painted from visual references. I tried to come up with my own design rather than exactly reproduce one from the actual squadron. The Flying Tigers are one of my favorite stories of the Second World War, and they are second only to the Tuskegee Airmen in popularity.

3. And...still not satisfied...I finally gave myself a kick in the butt and started sketching concept art for the Lost Innocence Saga.  My first character sketch: the continental soldier from my creepy Valley Forge story I wrote in winter 2012.

Meet Jacob Ambrose, my fictional Revolutionary War soldier.

I'm actually excited now. I can't wait to come up with more visuals for the amazing characters of my epic story, of heroes spanning the history of warfare.

4. Oh yeah...one last thing. I updated two of my blogs. Check these out and feel free to subscribe if you have interest.  I have already put in 4 years of painstaking work and research about my family's military heritage, which become more exciting and more colorful the deeper I delve into it.

Grandpa's Navy

Dispatches From Company Q

It's late and my head is still exploding with ideas. But I guess I can safely say --for once-- that my day wasn't wasted. It really is possible to churn out this much art in one day, I proved to myself I can do it.

And it looks like tomorrow might be another snow day. I can't wait to see what I'll create with all this free time now that my artistic brain has finally reawakened. :)

Time to go meditate, watch a movie, ruminate or just vegetate. I think I've earned it.