(no subject)

I'm trying something new with my sketchbook. One of the big reasons why I've never been terribly successful at keeping an actual sketchbook (as opposed to drawing on loose sheets of paper) is because I feel terribly inhibited about what I draw. Rational or not, I feel like my sketchbook drawings should be good, or at least suitable for public consumption, because other people might look at them (and if you're sketching in public, people do totally look over your shoulder; also, friends like to flip through each other's sketchbooks, etc). I feel kind of weird doing a nice artistic drawing of a flower and then having the thing right before that be an entire page of superhero legs.

... so I'm flipping it. The front direction is my "public" sketchbook: flowers, seashells, trees, etc. Then, flip, and the other direction is for experimental stuff, fanart, copying random bits of other people's art, badly drawn stick figures on which to drape Kismet costume designs, pages of experimental eyeballs, etc. Not that I would never ever show anyone the back half, but it'll at least save me from having to show it to curious grandmothers when I'm sketching in public.

I'm not sure if this will work, but I've tried having separate sketchbooks for different subjects and that doesn't really work either - it just results in even more mostly-empty sketchbooks with a few drawings in the beginning. So we'll see how this goes.

In other (comics-fandom) news, I have a brand new tentative prediction for Age of Ultron -- not based on any particular spoilers, just speculation due to the comics and various actors' general caginess about what happens to their characters in the future.

( Not actually spoilery, except somewhat for the comics )

Rambling from the department of me

You know, when you really can't make a drawing come out right, flipping it and drawing it upside down is incredibly helpful, at least if you're drawing from a reference (in this case, a photo of a shoe from an awkward angle). It forces you to stop drawing what you "know" is true and just look at the lines and angles. (In other news, WHY ARE FEET.)

Playful speculation about Age of Ultron aside, I have absolutely no idea how I am going to manage to stay unspoiled between now and May 1 2015. NOT A FREAKING CLUE. I only managed to be as unspoiled as I was for the recent crop of Marvel movies because I was a) mostly interested in the Iron Man parts of the franchise, and b) not on tumblr all that much (and even so, I did get a couple of pretty major spoilers for Thor 2; it's nothing short of a miracle that I didn't know anything about Cap2 going into it, but I think that's actually one reason why I enjoyed it so much). Now that I'm following a bunch of Avengers-related blogs on Tumblr, there is NO HOPE, especially since movie trailers come out so long before the actual movies. (It wouldn't surprise me if there's an Avengers 2 trailer associated with Guardians of the Galaxy. Which I'm really looking forward to, by the way. Yes, I know it's going to be ridiculous. Hopefully it will be the good kind of ridiculous.)

Despite watching nearly every superhero movie that's come out since the very first X-Men movie (EXCEPT FOR WOLVERINE, LET'S NOT EVEN GO THERE) I haven't seen either of the new Spider-Man movies yet, and I'm weirdly reluctant. I guess it still feels too soon for a reboot to me.

ETA: Fan video - Inception/Captain America AU with Steve and Bucky. AAAAUGH. (The only thing that annoys me about this is that you can't turn off the subtitles. Why not?!)

How about an unpopular fannish opinion for the MCU

Still feeling unusually chatty, so here, have an opinion. (Obvious disclaimer applies: this is just me, and there is nothing wrong with anyone feeling different about it. There are many people who love it for reasons equally valid to why I don't!)

It's a trope that appears in quite a bit of post-Winter Soldier fic ...

( Cut for fannish ramblings and spoilers for the movie )