A lot of my friends decided to DIY the majority of their Christmases this year. I committed to one project because I'm not handicraft-able by any stretch of the imagination. I hung out with a lot of the sisters in my created family last week at Rimsky Korsakoffee House. (A rad late night haunt in SE.) I asked them to draw in my sketchbook while I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I returned to a fully inked page, and was beyond delighted. The next day I decided to add some color for oomph, but I was happy to have such awesomeness to work with. Included were random snippets of dialogue from the evening's conversations, (Hannah hates tech bros from SF and I was trying to sing Please Warm My Wiener.) Of the four girls out to dessert, Bridget is definitely the most talented proper illustrator so she took the majority of the page. The giraffe is Ellen's, the fu with three eyebrows is Hannah's, all the people are Bridget's, and I colored in everything after the fact.

I love having talented friends who are game to collaborate, it makes everything so much fun!

For Christmas, I decided to make my brother an MF Doom mask. The two of us are totally in love with him, because his rhymes are inSANE. I made myself earrings out of sculpey of his mask, because I couldn't find anyone selling them on the internet.

I knew they weren't going to look perfect, but the world could not provide me with MF Doom earrings, so I had to provide them to myself. I posted the picture on instagram, and my brother immediately commented on it like I WILL PIERCE MY EARS IF YOU MAKE ME SOME OF THESE.

Let me give you a short background on mine and my brother's experiences with clay: I took ceramics in HS for an easy A and something to do that wasn't going to stress me out. I got a C+, and the teacher said that grade was "generous".

On the flip side, my brother took ceramics to meet girls and ended up being a flergin' prodigy at it. It was like he'd discovered his life's purpose. The teacher loved him, he had like, seventy-thousand girlfriends, and he could throw a mean pot.

So, the fact that he was asking me for some earrings was pretty miraculous.

This Christmas, I've been the most financially stable of my entire life, so I sort of went all out. In addition to my brother's clay project, I also got him a Tower of Power t-shirt (the band is a huge inside joke in my family, because my dad always tells us about the time they played at his high school), and a Carly Simon record.

I'd put off his Doom mask the longest, because I'm not 'turn something into something else' creative. I can't sculpt, or build, or craft to save my life, and I'd been dreading the point where I was going to have to ante up and finish it.

I would say all and all, it didn't turn out too terrible. I'm a bit of an artistic perfectionist, so the fact that I even finished anything is a miracle.

If you're worried that you suck at things, remember: try a bunch, f*ck up a bunch. It's totally fine. All practice is good practice!

I hope everyone's holiday was wonderful~

Happy sculpting~!

-Mac

PS

I got a really nice collection of gouache tubes for Christmas that I've been *dying* to try out. I literally got into a small car accident earlier because I was really excited to go get a mixing plate for them. Oops! I'll add some more sketchbook pages to my Journal section as figure the paints out. For now, here's this: