'That Goddamn Regret'

Everybody has done something they regret. I know I have. Some people, it's only minor regrets, wishing you'd revised harder for a mid term assessment, a bad choice in hair, make up, or clothes. But a lot of the time the regret is a lot more serious to you, maybe not terribly regretful in someone else's eyes, but in your eyes it makes you ashamed.

I've just realised how much I regret one thing in particular, I should have been regretting it for months now. I went against my own morals for someone else and it just hit me today how sick it makes me feel. My stomach is turning, and I'm just so angry at myself. As this blog isn't anonymous I'm not going to post exactly what it is I regret, but I can still talk (i.e vent) to you about this feeling of regret.

Yes, I do have minor regrets, only they're very minor. I tend to try and live for the moment. Emphasis on the 'try'. Unfortunately, I'm the kind of person who will always, always, dwell on the past, no matter how hard I try. I find it incredibly hard to let go of emotions I feel at certain points in my life because I naturally want to cherish them, no matter how painful or upsetting they are. I only let them go when another emotion replaces it on reflection, and lets face it, sometimes the emotions brought on by reflection can be even worse than the original emotions in the first place.

I tried to let go of some very painful emotions today, and all I felt afterwards was shame. I'm incredibly ashamed of what I allowed myself to do under the influence of another, it went against my morals, and for now at least, I feel truly disgusted in myself.

I'm going to try and wash myself clean of the whole affair. Literally, I'm going in the shower now.

P.S: Don't worry, it isn't anything illegal that I'm regretting, just things in general that I allowed myself to be influenced into doing :)

See! I can draw! Kind of...

I think I mentioned this in my opening blog post, but I do like to dabble in drawing every once in a while. Admittedly, I'm not the best at drawing, but its something I enjoy and I have improved on since I started. Well, I thought I'd take you through the process I go through to get a picture done. No, this isn't a tutorial, this is done through days worked on the picture. So, without further ado, I present to you the making of Beneath the Surface (obviously didn't take inspiration from the Dream Theater song ;P)

Day 1- Sketching and Line Art

I tend to chose a pose from Posemaniacs, a really great website recommended by art students and illustrators alike to make sure that you get your proportions as close to reality as possible. I tend to add  my own twists to the poses depending on the character. For example, Lila is a quite athletic character with small breasts in comparison to the model on the website, so you do have to adjust things accordingly. Then you clothe them and line them so that the scanner can pick up on every detail you want clear, and I tend to add little notes there and then on the picture, just to remember everything. Although, as you'll see towards the end, I will stray away from these notes. A lot.

Day 2- Basic colouring: Body and Clothes

I'm a very messy colourer. You know when you're told as a child to colour inside the lines? Well, I was always the one who coloured way too far over the lines then rubbed them out afterwards to make sure that I got the colour everywhere I wanted it and more. I also have a habit of colouring skin darker than it will be in the final picture. It just gives me a wider spectrum of colours to use for shading I guess. As you can see in comparison to the Day 1 sketch, I'm already playing around with the line art and adjusting it so that it looks better. Also, I always got for a background in a colour a world apart from the other colours I'll use in the picture. I know, I know, purple is quite close to pink...But they're still very different colours!

Day 3- Tidying up the lines, detail, and more skin.

You see, if I had started keeping the lines prim and perfect earlier, then I might have missed out little sections of colour. Believe me, it would be just my luck to miss something like that. I added a woolen texture to the cardigan by crisscrossing rapidly over the layer, different sections of crisscrossing for different sections of the cardigan. I think it's quite effective myself, but bare it in mind that this is the first time I've really attempted to add texture to clothing...Normally I have a habit of trying to pass off all fabric as silk or cotton. whoops :') Also, getting started on the neck, putting in the basic shadows and shapes.

Day 4- FACE.

Lets not focus on the hands for a moment. They're just there to be there at this point. But yes, the face! It isn't even finished in this stage, I adjusted it later on anyways. I always put the coloured features: eyes, lips, and blush, on a separate layer so that they wont be effected when I start adjusting the skin tone- lets face it, those eyes are light enough as it is. As for the other facial shading, I finally figured out how to do it properly (kind of) with this one. It's so glaringly obvious now that I think about it. All it is is putting highlights in the same manner as you would make up. So L shape on the cheek bones, a few lines on the forehead, chin, nose, and corners of the mouth. I feel so stupid now.

Day 5- Hands, Face, Skin and Hair

So first off I realised how unhappy I was with the nose of the last picture, it looked incredibly flat and, well, it just wasn't very well done. So I got the help of my friend who studied art to give me a lesson in nose drawing, and viola! Decent nose! Then comes the hands. No-one can help me with hands, and even now they look incredibly stupid, I'm definitely not happy with them, not one bit. It's getting the shape right that's the problem! But once I was (very loosely) satisfied with the hands, I could finally start adjusting the skin tone- See how the facial features stand out better now? After the skin tone comes the hair. Honestly, that's my favourite part of drawing people, doing the hair!

Day 6- Click here for the final piece :P

Yes, I'm doing a cheapskate 'go here for the rest of the story' thing. So shoot me :P

The Creation of a Play

Yes, I know it's been a long time since I've updated, and no, I'm not going to apologise for it. Down in the real world, shit's getting pretty damn serious, what with exam season and all. Anyway, even though I'm not going to apologise for it, I am going to make this an extra long, hopefully less than rambly post that will be both informative and entertaining. And you know why it will be informative and entertaining? Because these past few months have been very busy for me. A few weeks ago, I got my History results back from my exam in January, A, 3 marks off of an A*, but that's not the most important thing that's happened to me.

Oh no, something magnificent has happened to me over the past few months, and I can't remember whether I've mentioned it to you at all. I wrote a 30 minute play, the first play I've ever written, and entered it into the Chesterfield's Young Playwrights Competition. I got through to the Semi-Finals, and it was performed this weekend.

I should really describe to you the shock I had when I first found out that I had gotten through to the final, however, I think it would be better to describe the shock of the person who rang up to tell me that I was a Semi Finalist. She called up whilst I was in school, and my dad answered the phone. My dad knows that anyone who knows me should realise that I'm in school at 2pm on a Wednesday afternoon, and so said down the phone, cautiously, that I was in school.

An awkward silence.

I think my dad told me that the next thing she said down the phone was 'How old is she?', to which her replied '15'.

Another awkward silence.

'Seriously?'

Anyway, I called her up when I got home after screaming a few times in excitement, and things progressed from there. No, it was the past few months where things really got hectic. As some of you may or may not have seen, the Derbyshire Times posted an article about the competition a week before the plays were performed, and it was only then that I realised the sheer enormity of my achievement. I was against Drama Teachers, Playwrights of 30 years, people with years of experience far beyond my own.

And what about the actors hmm? I met them all the man who played Seth, Darren Johnson (not the Darren Johnson on James LaBrie's Facebook friend list), has had a massive role in the English Soap Coronation Street, where he played PC Henshaw, and also had roles in 'Where the Heart is', 'Emmerdale', and 'The Royal'; A real actor, playing one of my characters! Corinne Handforth, with equally impressive credits, Norman Mills, and amateur actress Jayne Dent all starred in my play!

But it's all well and good telling you about who was in the play and their credits...But what about the subject matter of the play? Schizophrenia. Inspired by Dream Theater's Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence with it's message of tolerance and the interpretation of the subject matter. If they can approach such a subject artistically, why can't I? I was lacking inspiration when I found out about the competition, and as I always do when I lack inspiration, I whacked on some Dream Theater. SDOIT came on, and suddenly, I knew what I wanted to write about. Mental Illness. Which one? After some research, I decided that Schizophrenia would be the greatest to represent; After all, how many people confuse Schizophrenia with Multiple Personality Disorder?

The play was minimalist, no set, no props, just hand gestures and mime. The illness, the voices inside the protagonist's head were personified in the character of Seth. The story was told through her eyes, through which she saw her parents as monsters who cared more for their image than their daughter.

I was told I had potential, when the play was through I heard people whispering about the play all around, 'I can't believe she's only 16', 'That's such a mature topic', 'She'll go far.' Overall, I came second, one vote behind the person who came in first.

It was the first play that I wrote. I came second in a playwriting competition by one vote. I'm entering next year, and I already have my concept down. So let me leave you with the opening Monologue from my first piece of work, Monsters.

'Can you remember those stories your parents told you? The boogey-man and the bed bugs? Can you remember that they’d check under your bed, just so you could sleep with the light off? Those monsters were never real, Leah. The ones who slept in the room next to you, the ones with the eager eyes and bright lights…Maybe they were…'

 Me with Darren Johnson and Corinne Handforth, aka Seth and Mary