I hope you've had a positive start to the new year so far. This journal update is to share some exciting things I will be doing with my art this year!

In case it wasn't apparent, I'm not exactly active on DA. I'm really looking forward to the Eclipse update and I hope it will improve the rather outdated and clunky nature of this site - if it does, I may become more active here again - but as it stands, I tend to upload art to DA as an afterthought, and certainly not with the frequency and regularity of my other social media platforms.

My main platform at the moment is Instagram. Not surprising, as I think this is true of a lot of artists right now. You can find me there as Kaydreamer. I share a lot of short speed paints along with my art, and use stories a bit to share what I get up to.

I am also looking into streaming on Twitch, as well as cultivating a presence on Youtube. The Youtube account will be a speed painting account, with possible commentary later on. (Once I think of something interesting to talk about.) Twitch will be for live streaming art in real time, directly from my iPad.

On the topic of iPads, I have one now! Over the past few months I've really been feeling the limitations of using a Microsoft Surface Pro for my art. The Microsoft Surface Pro is not terrible - I can get around the pen being less accurate or sensitive than other tools - however I've recently been working at much higher resolutions to ensure my art is ready for printing and it simply can't cope with my preferred brush settings at that size. In addition, if I tried recording the screen for a speed paint, it felt like it was turning into a slab of lava. I'd been thinking about purchasing an iPad Pro for months now and I finally decided that the new year was a perfect time to invest in a new art tool and start the year positively and productively. It's been fantastic so far, I'm very glad I bought it.

The links to the places I'm most active are below. If you use any of them, please feel free to follow me there. I look forward to sharing my work with you this year!

Instagram: www.instagram.com/kaydreamer/
Youtube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCbyek…?
Twitch: www.twitch.tv/kaydreamer

The last time my boyfriend boiled eggs, he boiled every egg in the house the night before I was supposed to make a cake. When it came to cake time, which I was super excited about, I tried cracking an egg into the bowl and it… well, it was hard boiled. To make matters worse, it was ANZAC Day that day, which is the one public holiday in Australia where basically everything of significance is shut, so I COULDN’T EVEN GET NEW EGGS.

I just wound up eating the egg.

My boyfriend embarked on a quest to ask the neighbours if we could please borrow an egg because I was making a cake and he boiled them all. (He complained that telling them he boiled every egg in the house made him sound crazy and I was like “Yeeeeaaaahh… funny, that. But that’s LITERALLY what you did.”)

Fast forward to yesterday, when my boyfriend boiled a whole bunch of eggs again. This morning I decide to have one for breakfast, because boiled eggs are delicious. I take it out of where we keep eggs in the fridge, smash it on the bench top to crack the shell aaaaaaand…

It wasn’t a boiled egg. It was a regular egg. I smashed regular egg all over the bench.

I love this man, but I just can’t trust eggs in this house anymore.

I love cooking, especially making soups and I'm pretty damn good at it. I'm a massive sucker for buying a new cookbook because I found like... one recipe in there I want to try and need to buy the whole book to have it. (I find shops don't like it when you try to take photos of the pages.) I have a little bookshelf just for them and that's actually full now so they're invading the regular bookshelves.

So, I love cooking, my speciality is soups and I have a couple dozen cookbooks... but I don't actually follow recipes all that often. When I want to try making something I'll often Google maybe three or four different recipes for it, choose the parts of each of them that look the best, substitute any ingredient I don't like for ones that I do, add extra stuff, never actually measure anything and just go by smell and taste and experience. Sometimes I won't follow ANY recipe at all, I'll just choose a bunch of things I think will go together and invent my own dish. I don't just do this with soup either, I'll do it with anything I'm cooking. (Except baking, because that shit is an exact science. Get a half teaspoon wrong and your cake may explode or something.) I think I do this with maybe half the meals I cook and I often forget what I've done because I never write things down, so half our meals are CHEFS SURPRISE, insofar that what it ends up tasting like will probably surprise me too.

My partner's mum gave me a big batch of tomatoes yesterday and, since my partner won't eat tomatoes by themselves or in salads or anything (because he's crazy, they're delicious) I decided to make them into a soup. And because I didn't want to be boring and make the same Italian balsamic tomato soup I've made before, I decided to make a Mexican tomato soup! I looked at a few different recipes, bought the stuff I wanted, ignored the stuff I didn't and proceeded to just chuck it all together with the intention of blending in into a creamy smooth pot of deliciousness.

Well, I wound up emptying an entire jar of jalapeno chillies into my soup. Because they kinda give it that whole Mexican flavour, you know? And they're not that spicy, they're pretty mild for a chilli... right?

Turns out a whole jar of them is a bit spicier than I'd expected.

I know my partner is going to love it because he looooooves spicy food, but I'm going a little heavier on the sour cream in my bowl!

With the encouragement of my gorgeous and supportive partner, I'm starting an actual art project this school holidays. I'm illustrating my sweet little short story, The Faun in the Flower Shop.

I'm hoping to stick to a weekly update schedule, though over the next two weeks I should be able to get the first five or so pages done.

I'm really excited to have a long-ish term project, as trying to keep to a schedule will encourage me to actually draw regularly. I do so with such infrequency that every time I pick up a pen I feel like I've forgotten how to make it work. That's only slightly hyperbolic; I was a better artist two years ago than I am now, and that's entirely down to lack of practice. This should help with that.

Ever since I started up my dedicated Dragonfeathers art and world-building blog on Tumblr, I'd been using the url OhDragonfeathers, as Dragonfeathers was taken by a dead blog which never updated. I've been keeping tabs on dead blog for years, hoping that one day it would be purged... and today that wish came true.

Introducing, the URL I've wanted for ages...

dragonfeathers.tumblr.com

(Yay!)