casual kitty

Casual day! Which apparently means Hello Kitty and plaid-skirt-with-hot-pink-nailpolish-spill. I have a new item of black clothing (joining two or three others), thanks to my lovely cousin!! It's gathered at the bottom, which I find incredibly cute.

I promise I won't wear the leggings out in public without a skirt or something layered over them, though. I only did that sort of thing when I was in third grade and stretchy stirrup pants with loud floral patterns were my favourite Saturday pants (my mum wouldn't let me wear them to school with my hot-pink scribble-design shirt and four different coloured socks).

winter knits

Thanks, all you who keep checking in here!  I promise I won't give up, even if I fall behind!  And it's the holidays, after all—I'm allowed to be lazy and spend time with my dear family rather than my dear computer, right? :D

Until I get the rest of the way caught up, have a sweater-dress!!  It's new, but I waited till the last Sunday of Advent to wear it (to match the last purple candle being lit).  It sheds purple fuzzies EVERYWHERE.  Good thing I got a sweater-de-fuzzifier for Christmas!

no cookies

Oh look, it's another grey dress!

This was a day of much running around... and then sitting at home wishing I were better at planning ahead.  I got it into my head at 11pm that I should make eggnog cookies to bring to the family gathering on Sunday, but found I needed at least one more egg than I had, and couldn't reach my brother to have him pick some up for me (he was later dropped off at our house by a police officer! at 4am! because he had locked himself out of his car. scared me out of my wits, seriously).  But the frantic weekend is over now, and as of today (Tuesday) I have acquired eggs and made cookies.  Hooray!

grey knit love

Grey is my favourite non-colour.  It's so much more interesting than white or black!  Warm greys are especially nice.  Knit fabric (like soft tshirt material) is also nice.  When I was little, I had a grey dress of knit material with a pink flower print, and I loved it to bits (not literally).  It was warm and cozy, and when I spun around wearing it, it twirled up fabulously.  This dress reminds me of it a little!

unmotivated jellyfish

Hum.  This pose was very not-thought-out; I was feeling extra unmotivated, so I just went with the first thing my pencil drew.  As it was, I had to make a deal with myself that once I got my drawing(s—I was already a day behind) done I could watch the new episode of Princess Jellyfish.  It worked!!

material fascination

So I went to the fabric store.  It turned into a both wonderful and torturous experience, as I found myself surrounded by countless lovely colours and patterns and all manner of prettiness... but I couldn't exactly take every pretty thing I saw back home with me.  I didn't even have a very good idea of what I might do with most of the pretty I found—I've done a little sewing in the past, but I'm easily distracted and never stick with things.  And yet!  The pretty!!  Cute, classic floral prints; Japanesque novelties; batik; colourful retro designs!!  Ooooh!

Eventually I got what I needed and narrowed down my choices of what I wanted (the designs up above were all purchased as fat quarters, so whatever I make of them will have to be fairly small.  but on the other hand, they were super cheap!) and managed to tear myself away from the place.  But I want to go back again... 

So if anyone has ideas for small fabric projects I could make of these, please share them!

sleepy ruffly

The second part of the bored-sleepy set.  Again I am sad that I can never quite achieve the vibrancy of my medium-dark turquoise clothes with the flat colours available to me in a digital palette.  Alas, RGB...

sleepy brights

I've been getting bored lately.  Boredom makes me sleepy.  But fortunately, sleepy poses are new and interesting, which makes them easy to draw! (that may sound strange, but for me it's more difficult to draw when I don't have a specific pose in mind, or can't think of an interesting way of drawing a more "normal" pose, than when I sit down with an unusual idea in mind.)  I whipped this sketch out in a matter of minutes!

Tomorrow's a sleepy day too.  It's good weather for curling up under a pile of blankets... mmm.

update-update

Some more new-old outfits posted!  Eight of them this time: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8!  I used the scan-a-pattern-and-warp technique again for a couple of them (since I had to scan the design in anyway in preparation for today's outfit).

winter seashell

Please excuse the strange pose, a direct result of the previous day's pose taking up more than its fair share of the page.  This outfit's theme(?) was pink, for the third week of Advent.  I decided that turquoise, like yellow, (and green, brown, and purple,) looks great paired with pink!

christmas decoratin'

Saturday evening was spent with the family (minus one, plus two), decorating the Christmas tree!  Yay!! It was nice to go back home and be a part of that.  My own tree is very small and still rather sparse in the ornament (and light) department.  But our family's Christmas tree is packed with lights and ornaments and happiness!!

This year it was my turn to hang the Dancing Cow ornament, the treasure of our collection.  It's a wooden cow with a pull-string that makes his arms and legs move, and was one of the first ornaments my parents got for their tree.  There was also a hunt to find the paper fan angel with a photo of my brother's 8(?)-year-old face, another (slightly) more recent treasure.

christmas sock weather

Straight hair!  It's a straight-hair-no-glasses day.  And now... for a few hours of today, the 10th of December, I am going to savour being all, entirely caught up on daily-fashion posts.  Tomorrow I may fall behind again, but today I can be satisfied.

Whew.

caffeine-silly

I figured out something good while doing the dots on this shirt! After doing the dots on another day's first and getting tired of it, I decided to copy-paste a chunk of screentone from a page of the manga I'm lettering* and invert the colour (so the black dots became white) and plop it on top. Instant-dots! Hurrah! So easy!!

Anyway, on this day I had a peppermint-mocha latte and did some crafty stuff with friends.  It was fun, but after I got home, I realized I had waaaaaaay too much energy and could barely think straight.  Is my caffeine-tolerance that low?

*(for anyone who didn't understand that—manga refers to Japanese comics, and many of them use screentone, which is a black-and-white pattern that, when printed, creates shades of grey (or other designs) on a printed page. sometimes the dots are close together to create a dark grey; sometimes farther apart to create a light grey shade.)

charming, yes?

Another evening spent with the kiddies at church, who were adorable and wild and hilarious.  Yay!!  I actually managed to be cold wearing all this (but then, I had forgotten the armwarmers at home after taking them off to make delicious potato curry for the church's dinner potluck).

diamonds and dots

My head is swimming with colours right now, as I just did some more catching up and coloured a few older drawings, which you can see h-e-r-e-! (or just check out late June and early July dates).

Now I kind of want to take a nap like in this drawing!

rock the stars

...I went shopping :D I find the best way to properly integrate new clothes into my wardrobe is to wear them as soon as I get them.  If I don't, or am hesitant, it's probably a sign that I didn't really want those clothes and shouldn't have bought them.  So, welcome, purple starry shirt and blue starry shirt with thumbholes in the sleeves! I enjoy drawing stars.

uselessly cute jacket

Back to yellow and purple! And layers.  That jacket always makes me feel cold, despite its long sleeves, and despite "keeping you warm" being the basic purpose of jackets. I used a pair of legwarmers as insulation.

strange coincidences

Oooh, as I was drawing this Saturday night I was so! excited! to post it, because the funniest thing happened!

For some reason that evening I had been browsing my early pages of daily fashion drawings (I first started this drawing project last year in august but got a little sparse/lazy around november and finally gave up in december until I restarted again this May) and happened to notice one wearing the same striped polo shirt I was wearing that day.  I thought... "Haha, it'd be funny if I wore it the same day last year!" but then I looked at the date, and... well.  Not only did I wear the same polo shirt on the same first Saturday of December, I ALSO wore the same pants AND the same yellow shirt!!  Of all the clothes and all the combinations I could have...  Is my brain so very predictable??

complimenting complements

At church a girl randomly complimented my sweater.  I wasn't sure if there was a reason why beyond her just liking it and saying so, but I do rather like this traditional looking v-neck.  It was perfect for our annual Advent Adventure craft and activities night :D  I helped with a craft making yarn-doll angels, my friend's idea.  They were super cute!!

Also, any time I wear a red sweater with my navy pleated skirt, I think of the American Girl doll Molly.  Didn't she wear something like that for Halloween?  I could be getting it mixed up with the skirt she wore for her regular outfit.  (but she had to wear a normal skirt under her tissue-paper hula skirt too, right?)

and off we go!

Sometimes I just need to wear a ton of pink. So I do. And it makes me so happy!

happy december!

I had a long day, full of playing with small children. Generally this is alllllll good with me, but our church's congregational meeting went longer than the usual Wednesday-night activities, so by the end of the night I think all the kids in the nursery were getting impatient and stir-crazy. Also, one of them was getting kinda bossy with me. I don't take well to bossing, I think, because I was and will forever be the big sister of my family, which means I am the one who bosses everyone else. It can be no other way!

Hey look, you get a bonus mini-drawing of my outerwear! December greeted us with a picture-perfect snowfall, our first of the season. Of course it was a day on which I had plans to walk to a friend's! While I was out walking about town, I happened to pass some guys from the local news who seemed to be videotaping or photographing me as I walked by. Whether this made it into the evening news as part of a story about how It Snowed In Our City Today or not, I don't know because I don't have a tv. But if it did, I'm glad I was wearing a full array of colours!

the cleverness of me!

As I was working on a project on this Tuesday morning, still in my pjs, a particularly useful idea suddenly came to me (looking back, it wasn't really that big of a deal) and suddenly I heard a little voice say, "Oh the cleverness of me!"  I replied, Oh, Peter you silly boy.  I took that as my cue and decided to dress up Pan-inspired.  Hooray!  All ready to fight pirates!

grumpy girl

I woke up and realized I didn't care even a little bit what I wore, so I wore a sweater that I didn't care about.  I think this outfit is nice in theory—I like the colours together, the texture, etc, but it just made me grumpy all day wearing it.  The sleeves were loose and baggy and would get in my way.  The skirt had one of those hook-eyelet clasps above the zipper on the side, and it poked my skin and annoyed me.  Only my tabi socks and loved-to-pieces grey jeans could cheer me up.  Blerg. It might be time to move on from this sweater.

improvised lace

For various reasons, I ended up sleeping over at my parents'. I hadn't planned on this, so I only had yesterday's outfit and one recently-laundered lace shirt to throw in the mix! Oh no! Same is boring, so I did my best! to make up something new. Mum generously shared her belt with me, and it turns out I liked it so much she let me keep it and I wore it again for the next two days.

Wearing a scarf around my head turned out to be really cozy.  I'm considering adopting a 50s(?) movie star look, except I don't really like wearing sunglasses...

bossy princess

Oh, oh!  An excuse to dress up!  My littlest brother's birthday was Sunday but he was headed back to school that day, so we all got together Saturday night and had Chinese food.  I ordered Princess Chicken!  It's a good thing that dish is so delicious (despite all the green peppers, which I eat first to get rid of), because I can never resist it when I see that name.

(meep... just barely fit everything in the tags field)

cool friday

These light blue drawstring pants are another item of clothing that frequently stumps me—I can't decide if I like the crinkly-bunchy look of the drawn up pants or if I think it's excessive (the drawstrings go most of the way up, from ankle to the side-pockets).  This time I spiced up the look by making the drawstrings into multi-loopy bows, like little pom-poms!  Tada!

thanksgiving dreams

I am a fickle lass.  I couldn't bring myself to post more plain old black and white sketches—it's so booooring!  I need colour.  So I did my best to colour these all fast-fast.

So, belatedly, Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrated it!  I hope you had lots of yummy food and a pleasant break from the normal routines!

red-orange-yellow-yellow

I don't remember what I was fretting about when I drew this picture... hmm.  Anyway, I'd just done my laundry (at my parents' house) the day before and came back with some of my favourite items.  So I wore them all at once :D  Skinny jeans, yellow tshirt, tabi socks...♥

second grade self

Last day of my temporary job!  I wore this outfit in honour of my 7 year old self, whose most favourite ever colours were fuchsia, violet and blue-green.  I still remember sitting at an elementary school table colouring a picture of flowers with my treasured crayons in those three colours.  While I was working in the design room, the young daughter of one of the designers came to meet her mum, and she too was decked out in pinks and purples.  We matched!

stepping on roses

I went and coloured this one after all (really quickly, like in 10 minutes), because I liiiiike it.  I went back to helping out as a designer, and they put me to work cleaning the lower leaves and outer petals from the roses.  By the time I finished the job, I found myself standing in a crimson and green sea of rose petals and leaves.  So dramatic!

Also, one thing I appreciate about glasses is being able to tuck a flower between the frame and my head, just above my ear.  Flowers are nice accessories.

dramatic colourless lys

I am trying out posting just the sketches, no colour.  It's not as exciting, but at least I can keep up this way.  If you feel inclined to colour them yourselves, go ahead! (and let me see too :D)  At this point I think most of the things I wear have been worn in previous posts, but if you're unsure about the colours, just make it up however you like!

[jan 2011 edit: i couldn't stand it; the lack of colour was making me sad.  so now it's in colour, along with the others I originally posted in b/w.]

curry flurries

Working on catch-up, still.  Maybe I need to go back to just posting these as b/w sketches and worry about colour when I have an endless supply of free time again.  Hmm.


Anyway, I got a little dressed up to go out for lunch with my dad at an Indian restaurant down the street from me.  This past... spring? I discovered an Indian curry cookbook (660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer) at the library, and I've been in love with Indian food ever since.  But so far I'd only ever made it myself, so I was curious about what the food at a restaurant would be like!  They had a lunch buffet, so we got to sample a bunch of dishes.  It was all tasty, but I think next time I'll try ordering off the menu to experience the food at its best.  Now I'm even more determined to try making paneer with goat milk someday...

christmas elfin

I was called in to work in my mum's department at work, helping them design floral arrangements while one of the regular designers was out with a broken arm (of course it would happen at the busiest time of year for them). Mum had talked to me the previous week about possibly helping out, but it wasn't until 10pm Thursday night that she actually called me and asked if I'd be willing to come in on Friday. Of course, I agreed :D

Afterwards, I went to see Scott Pilgrim (for the third time) with friends!

I realized while colouring this drawing that I'd forgotten to write in what all I was wearing, so I had to search my memory for the colour of the shirt and the rose earrings (I have two pairs of rose earrings, in pink and in red). That's the danger of getting behind on these. But I recalled the purple shirt that almost-matched the bandana, and I figured I would have worn red roses since I was dressing in Christmas colours (for which purple totally counts—it's an advent colour!)

moss forest

In my internet browsing and wandering, I came across a mention of "mori girl," one of many (manymany) fashion trends in Japan.  Mori means forest, so the trend aims for a natural, woodsy, fairy-ish look (or something like that).  I thought it sounded just lovely :D

This outfit doesn't exactly fit that image (the fairies I know prefer skirts), but it's got the forest part, anyway.  You can imagine I'm a moss-covered tree in the middle of deep woods. Maybe it's the morning of an early frost...

elegance

I had to start a new layer in Photoshop for nearly every item of clothing in this outfit, what with all the sheer layered items.  Gotta keep it exciting!

piratical

This is exciting, right!?  Look how awesome I am!!

In high school, or rather right after graduating high school, I went through a pirate phase (try and guess what year that was and what movie hit theaters that summer and it'll all make entirely too much sense).  But I suspect even before that I had a soft spot for them, as a fan of Peter Pan and his wonderful, exciting battles with Hook.  I asked my brother while wearing this outfit what he thought my theme was, and he was initially stumped.  Maybe the red-green christmas colour combo threw him off, but when I told him "I'm a pirate!" he said, "Oh yeah, Disney style with all the stripes."  I never really thought about Disney being the one to popularize stripes on pirates before... but they also seem to have established the "Alice is blonde and wears a blue dress" rule.  So apparently Disney's depiction of pirates have made lasting impressions on me.

bored nostyle

This is Bored Lys: "who cares if anything matches" edition (although maybe the socks and orange shirt are close). I was actually going to wear a red-white striped shirt with this too, but I changed my mind.

I can't be awesome every single day... but I'll try to make up for it with the next day's outfit.

un poco rococo

There! See, I have not abandoned you! An update... an outfit over a week old, but it's colourful and lacy and pretty, so you'll forgive me? :D

I have many more drawings of outfits to post, I just have to scan them and make them nice and colourful. But I will do that in the coming days! Maybe not tomorrow, as tomorrow is Thanksgiving (despite the date on this post—it's backdated to correspond to the day the outfit was worn, not the day I post) and I'll be spending it with my family.  But look for more soon!

In any case, I like wearing (and making) knit scarves, but dressy-type scarves can be nice too (in other words, I'm thinking I need to acquire a couple more for this winter). They keep my neck warm, which is good because most of my shirts have wider or more open necklines. And they can be worn so many different ways! When I wore this outfit, I seriously considered wrapping the scarf around my head in a piratesque-fashion... but I decided my neck needed the warmth more, and my hair was too cute to cover up. Next time, though...

slapjack happy

It's the night of the (annual?) Escanaba in da Moonlight-watching party at my friends' place!  I attempted to dress up like a Yooper, but I'm not sure anyone caught on without me pointing it out.  Oh well, it amused me anyway.

The plaid shirt and boots both came from my brother.  I felt like some kind of bizarre godzilla clomping around in the boots :D  But they stayed on as long as I kept the shoelaces tied tight!  And I discovered that flannel shirts are soooooooooo waaaaaaaaarm.  I think I want a couple (in my size, though).

stepping on pearls

So I put together this fancy monochromatic outfit and then was disappointed because I didn't have anywhere to go to show it off. But then I ended up going to the library and the grocery store after all. I'm sure they appreciated my snazzy hat and super-cute heels.


You appreciate them, right?

maize and blue plus green

Happy lucky 11-11 day!!  Somehow, whenever I decide to wear one yellow item, it turns into wearing a bunch of yellow.  I've also picked up a tendency to pair it with shades of blue.  Oh no!  Is it because they're the colours of my little brother's school?  My mum is always going on about "maize and blue" and I admit the colours do look quite nice together.  But I'm wearing green too, so I guess I'm still okay...

Oh, that reminds me!  I think it was in fourth grade; I had this navy blue cardigan/sweatshirt (with navy print sweatpants?? I can't quite remember) that I liked to wear with a mustard-gold turtleneck.  But then!  I found out my teacher was a State-fan, and bitterly opposed to those colours.  And he was like the awesomest teacher ever, so I trusted his judgement of college sports teams whole-heartedly.  I never wore that outfit again :(

Oh well.  It sounds like a kinda dorky outfit anyway, now that I think about it.

the princess swoons

My landlady said I looked like a princess when she saw me wearing this outfit!  Hee!!  I really, really (reallyreallyreally) love the red lace over yellow tights.  It's so lovely~  Also, I seem to have gotten stuck on the yellow-purple colour scheme.  But I love it, so...

The book in this drawing is the last volume of my favourite manga (世界でいちばん大嫌い, or I Hate You More Than Anyone), which I read last night.  It's a wonderful series :D  (and much more full of love and happy and adorableness than the title might imply!)

nice guy pose!

For this and the next day's drawing, I let a bit of my geekiness out.  Heh heh...

Here I drew myself sort-of like a certain character from a certain manga (Japanese comic) series, simply because I happened to be looking at a picture of him when I opened my sketchbook to start drawing. Sometimes I just need to draw in a different style than the usual.  If you don't know who the character is, don't worry about it :D  If you do... hurrah!

fancy girl

I have been waiting for the right moment to wear this necklace—I ordered it from Forever21's website a couple weeks ago and when it arrived it was even more glitzy than it looked online.  So it was a little harder to integrate into my everyday-wear...

My aunt's church put together an "Iron Chef"-style baking competition and had it filmed at a local TV studio.  My mum and I got to watch and cheer my aunt on!!  They called themselves "Dueling Divas" and the chefs all wore sparkly tiaras and crowns.  So my sparkle wasn't so out of place!  One of the teams even wore feather boas... until the competition started, of course.

winter patterns

So many patterns!  I love that about winter—I start piling on the layers and end up with a combination of all kinds of things I never would've thought to put together.  Makes me feel warm and happy!

Being a pattern-lover, of course I am also quite fond of ties.  I can't get enough of the paisley and the intricate designs and fancy colours!!  They're too delicious.  I am slowly building up a necktie collection from relatives who don't wear theirs and department store clearance/sale shelves.  I have been told thrift stores are another good source for ties, but I never remember to look when I am at one.

sweater and sundress

Catching up... I did something different for this drawing, can you tell?  I scanned in a section of my dress and warped it and ran it through a filter :D  Does it look okay?  I don't intend for it to perfectly match my usual simple colouring style, but I think a collage-y multimedia look is alright... and using the warp tool in Photoshop was pretty fun! Trying to replicate that pattern by myself would be rather tedious, and would keep me from working on more of these drawings!! So I might do something like this again with future pattern-heavy clothes :D

hurrah!

I'm getting behind on posting! Oh no! I tend to get busy on weekends, and I've been wearing outfits with a bunch of silly patterns (which take more time to colour)... and sometimes I just wanna be lazy. I'll try to get all caught up tomorrow!

In the meantime, I like this outfit and this drawing, so it can stay on top of the page for a while.  Purple and yellow are my faaaavourite complementary colour pair.  Throw in a tinge of pink and I'm in love-love. I knitted the scarf last winter and it's my current favourite.  It's so soft and warm!

reach for your dreams

I started this with the thought, "I want to do a drawing from behind..." It's really fun to draw feet from the back—that's the entire reason I like drawing people facing away.  But I didn't have anything specific in mind beyond the feet, so the rest was just whatever happened to happen on the paper.  And that was this.

I cheated on the light pink shirt and used Photoshop's butterfly brush to do the pattern.  But you can hardly see it anyway, under all that lace!

let's play!

Oh, this drawing happened so easily! That seems to be increasingly rare these days.

I help in my church's nursery every other week (on Wednesdays), and this was one of my nights.  I spent a good portion of the evening shielding myself with a giant stuffed (foam?) block as toddlers attacked me with more giant stuffed blocks.  One of the kids seemed to enjoy charging at me and then falling over dramatically as I pushed back lightly with my block.  I worked up a sweat battling the tiny people!

runnin' boots!

Boots!  Lys, how are you not tipping over, running like that?

This is probably the most accurate drawing/colouring of these boots, of the three I've posted so far. Sometimes I refer to the original item of clothing as I'm colouring but sometimes I don't.  This time they were still sitting right behind me, but if they're in my closet or by the front door, you see what my brain thinks the boots (or any other item of clothing) look like when I'm not actually looking at them.  It's kind of fascinating, actually (at least I think so).

I also wore my pink fuzzy scarf for most of the day (indoors!) but I forgot to draw it!!  Too bad.

a million sweaters

Happy November!!

When I wake up on a wintery Michigan morning and I'm coldcoldcold, all I want to do is wear like a million sweaters.  And then I end up like this.  Warm and cozy all day long!!  Sweater dresses are pretty awesome. This one has big floppy pockets, which makes it the awesomest sweater dress ever♥