leezul

Starting tomorrow, I will be serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I'll be gone for about 18 months and I won't be online, so I'm afraid there will be no new art.


However, the art I owe people right now will be updated TONIGHT (I'm looking at you, ) and that's a promise. If I break my promise, then feel free to call me a poophead and badmouth me and such, because seriously, what jerkface breaks a promise? Only a monkey poophead, that's who.


I plan on returning to Deviantart (unless Tumblr or some other brand new shiny website takes over or the world ends) and doing more art when I return. But until then, like my friend (whose art is amazing by the way, so go check her out), I will be happily serving a mission.


If you're at all interested in maintaining contact with me, let me know and I'll give you a mailing address. If not, I'll see you in a year and a half! I've enjoyed my friendships I've made on here and I'm so grateful for the wonderful watchers that you are. I'll miss you. Especially you. Keep on drawing.

Okay, so I feel the need to recommend webcomics because clearly my taste is refined and sophisticated and the world would be a better place if everyone read these. Without further ado, here are the webcomics I read religiously:

www.thedreamercomic.com/ The Dreamer by It's well-drawn with an engaging story and fully developed characters. I love the art and the creator Lora is such a kind person. Her characters are incredible. Updates twice a week on Wednesdays and Fridays.
dovecotecrest.com/ Dovecote Crest, written by Hailey Bachrach and illustrated by Bridget Underwood (aka ). It's about civil war reenactors in Arkansas. It has interesting storylines and funny characters (I love Ben). Something I love about this comic is that as you read it, you can see the art make absolute leaps and strides. It gives me hope. Besides, it's about civil war reenactors. I just think that's awesome because I've never known about reenactments until I read this. And the Civil War fascinates me. Used to update twice a week, now is on a hiatus
www.meekcomic.com/ The Meek by In case you haven't already heard of this, you should check it out! It has a very interesting story that I love watching unfold. The art is absolutely beautiful, and although the story itself is not particularly funny, the creator Der-Shing Helmer is seriously hilarious. Updates twice a weekish
www.johnnywander.com/ Johnny Wander, a slice-of-life comic by Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya. Charming and funny as all get out. Updates Tuesdays and Thursdays.
superherogirladventures.blogsp… The Adventures of Superhero Girl by A very funny comic about a girl and her exploits as a superhero. It's very creative and refreshing. Updates every Tuesday.
www.friendswithboys.com/ Friends With Boys also by Goodness. This comic. It's incredible. I've fallen in love with it so hard. It's about a girl who's been homeschooled up until 9th grade and is experiencing high school for the first time. The characters are absolutely fascinating and distinctly different from one another (Alistair. Why is he so gorgeous? I can't get over his mohawk.) and the author is a brilliant storyteller. This comic right now is my number one. GO READ IT NOW. Updates 5 days a week, which makes it even more awesome.

Be warned that none of the storylined comics are finished, so should you happen to become attached to any of these and have to wait an agonizingly long time for updates (although Dovecote Crest is on a long hiatus right now and won't update again until the summer),  please don't hate me. Instead, love me for having excellent taste and changing your life (okay, I'm going to get over myself now).

Have you ever read something so wonderful and fantastical it consumed your entire world and changed the pigments of your eyes and skin and hair and you floated through the air and got turned inside out and exploded into a million pieces? No? Okay, guess I'm the only one.

I learned how to read through Calvin and Hobbes and a bunch of other comics. I'd like to say that Harry Potter changed my life; it did. I'd like to say Flipped changed my life; it did. As did The Book Thief, along with The Goose Girl, the Ramona books, the Chosen, and Ella Enchanted and Asterix and Tintin and Foxtrot, and oh, did I mention Harry Potter? I feel he needs to be mentioned twice. Honestly, I never loved reading like the way I loved Harry Potter.

I remember when I read the first book, feeling chills at the end of the first chapter. Then there was the second book and I was so delighted over Harry figuring out the whole mystery behind the Chamber of Secrets that I jumped up and down and screamed, "YES! YES! I KNEW IT! WOW! YES! YES! YES!" Or the third book, which I listened to on tape. I remember feeling the exhilaration Harry felt when they won the Quidditch cup and cheered and leapt around the room. I remember crying in the fourth book after Cedric Diggory was murdered, just before he was transformed into a vampire. When I read the fifth book, I stayed up late into the wee hours of the night holding a flashlight underneath my blanket, just trying to finish it.

That's when I went crazy. Thirsty for more knowledge of Harry Potter, I went on the internet, looking up sites that specialized in Harry Potter, exposing myself for the first time to fandom. The revelations given in the fifth book opened up an entire world of debate and speculation. I wrote exceptionally bad fanfiction and pored over fanart. I read online theories and debates about the next book – just who was the half-blood prince, anyway? Were the Marauders (you know, Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs) extreme pranksters? Did Snape love Lily? I spent hours upon hours immersing myself into this world.

Boy, did I ever love it. I very possibly could have been one of those crazies, so great was my love.

When the sixth book came out, I was in Vancouver, Canada, visiting my friend Jessie. They got the UK version there, and since those versions don't even HAVE illustrations, I wasn't planning on reading the book until I got home from vacation. Jessie preordered it, so when it arrived, she spent a good portion of the night reading it while I shunned the non-illustrated version.

It was about a good 9 hours until I broke.

Early the next morning, Jessie was upstairs and the book and I were downstairs. Alone. I stared at the book as it lay quietly next to the couch. It stared back like a smug cat, knowing just how superior it was to my weak flesh. I couldn't stand it anymore. Burning curiosity overcame me, and it was going to kill that stupid cat. I grabbed the book and buried myself in its contents.

After an hour, Jessie came running down the stairs yelling, "Noooo!" We spent that day trading the book back and forth, discussing it in between reads. I watched movies  to kill time and tapped my fingers and kept glancing over at Jessie to see if she had progressed any further within the last 2 minutes. I hated that Jessie found out before me who the half-blood prince was, but she was there to hear me scream, "NO!" when I discovered Snape killing Dumbledore. I cried during the entire funeral. I felt anguish over the chaos that was happening in their world. When I finished the last sentence, "…there was still one last golden day of peace left to enjoy with Ron and Hermione," I closed the book and sat.

And sat. And sat. And sat. I just sat there staring at the floor and sniffling, pathetic like her dog.

Then I finally got up, wiped my tears, and went to find Jessie to talk about the book with her, so we could have broken hearts together.

Then came the seventh and last book, in which during the event I locked myself in my room and disappeared into Harry's world, completely in love from the very beginning. I left only for necessary reasons, like using the bathroom or running an errand with my parents, but even then I took the book with me. I was not allowed to have a life until I finished.

I finished it in about 7 hours. Not bad, really. I closed the book, sat, smiled, and then skipped all throughout the house, hugging everyone I could find. Note: do not hug your mother while she is cooking something hot.

The obsession with books hasn't stopped. I'm positively engaged by interesting characters and intriguing writing, so much to a point that I will lock myself in my room for hours or go out in public without getting dressed just to find a good story. I bend over backwards to find out what book a complete stranger is reading and forge friendships with them if we both love the book.  This is what books do to me.

Friends, Romans, countrymen...wow. I'm so grateful for all your favorites and comments! It means a lot to me to see you enjoy my art.

Ever since I moved to the east coast I've been kind of lonely. I still love it here, mind you. I'm so lucky to live here and I'll miss it when I move back west. But books, writing, and my art have become my haven and an outlet for my loneliness. It's really nice to see other people appreciate it.

So again, thank you very much. I hope you all have fantastic summers! Yeehaw.

I was sort-of-tagged-but-not-really by Let the joy begin!

Rules
You must post these rules
Each tagged person must post 10 things about themselves on their journal
You have to choose and tag 10 people and post their icons on the same journal
Go to their pages and tell them you tagged them
No tag backs

1. I can't sleep in past 8. The once and only time I ever slept in was until 11. That day will go down in infamy.

2. I procrastinate waaaaay too much, which is why you never see any art up here. I'm trying to change my ways, I swear!

3. Being a procrastinator, this makes me late for EVERYTHING. Even dinner. I took a class where if we were more than 5 minutes late, we owed the class treats for the next time. We ate well in that class.

4. Man, this is hard. I can't figure out stuff to put down that people would find interesting. So another thing about me: I judge myself too quickly. You know how people advise, "Create first, evaluate later"? I do the opposite. This may be another reason why I don't have very much art on here.

5. My family is obsessed with comics. We have a vast collection in our basement. Growing up, I learned how to read through Calvin & Hobbes, Foxtrot, For Better or For Worse, Bloom County, Cathy, Tintin, and Asterix. SO GOOD.

6. I come from a large - and I mean LARGE - family. As in I'm the youngest of 11 kids. 7 brothers, 3 sisters. 37 nieces and nephews. You'd better believe it.

7. My favorite color is green, which it became about 7 years ago when the boy I liked said his favorite color was green. Desperate to have something in common with him, that immediately became my favorite color. I don't have a crush on him anymore, but the passion for green hasn't stopped yet.

8. The color infatuation is especially nice since I've recently moved to the East Coast to be a nanny for my brother. Everything is GREEN and trees are EVERYWHERE. I've never lived somewhere where a forest is my back yard.

9. I love this song: www.youtube.com/watch?v=at_f98… I grew up singing it, but apparently no one else has. How sad.

10. My whole family is obsessed with music. One thing I love (well, there's a lot of things) about being in a huge family is the variety of personality and all the different tastes. I've listened to almost everything from opera to country to baroque to rock to alternative to pop to classical to indie to hearing my brothers pound on the piano or play their guitars. When we get together, we all sing loudly and badly. Music brings people together. It's an amazing thing.

Oh, and I don't believe in tagging people. If you want to do it, go for it, and link me to it when you're done!

P.S. Not that I mind listening to "World Spins Madly On" all the time, but it's not true right now. For some reason I can't edit the whole "listening to" mood stuff. Is this happening to anyone else?