New masks

[merimask]

As promised, some pictures of my new masks.

They're not really "new", since I do these all the time.  I have a basic "half-mask" pattern that I trace out on the leather.  Then, with a stylus, I etch a dragon onto one side of the mask (most often with the wing sticking out beyond the edge 'cause I just like it that way), and then I cut out and carve the whole thing.  Usually, I do the mask in black and they look like this:


...but I felt like getting colorful so I did the blue & gold mask above, as well as these two:


I'm curious to see what people think of them.  I'll find out next week in Kalamazoo, I guess.

In other news, I am SO happy that our nation's multi-billion dollar Homeland Security Act has protected us from...Meatwad.  Way to go!  Yeah, I guess if you squint and tilt your head a little, the 'Lite-Brite" display of a Moononite flipping the bird might look like a bomb.  *sigh*  Maybe I'd be more inclined to be outraged by it all if the freaking displays hadn't been out in public for weeks and weeks...I guess they SUDDENLY looked bomb-like on Wednesday (wednesdays will do that to ya...more people don tinfoil hats on wednesdays than on any other day of the week...it's true!).  What's next, exploding Wile E Coyote displays?    Beware packages that look like HUGE anvils with "ACME" printed on the sides!  We need to coin a new term for this phenomenon; "Cartoon-Terrorism".

And OMG if Sessoumaru dies I am going to be monumentally pissed-off.  It'll cause a great disturbance in The Force...almost as if millions of fangirls "squeeee!" all at once, and are silenced.  Takahashi (as I was pointing out last week) has a penchant for using "one word" titles for the chapters where characters are killed off.  "Wind" for Kagura, "Light" for Kikyo, "Void" for poor little Kanna.  I swear if I see that next week's title is something like "Pride" I am just NOT going to read it.  *shakes head*

Comments

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Ah, as a fellow dog person, you might like it very very much indeed -- it's one of those "Watership Down" sort of tales where all the lead characters are critters and humans only appear in the most tangential sort of way. (It's particularly amusing to a dog geek as they're all recognizable breeds, including some sibes and mals and of course lots and lots of akitas...and the dogs sometimes even introduce themselves to each other by breed as well as name, which just makes me giggle.) Although fair warning, it might also be rather distressing to particularly soft-hearted animal lovers because there is a LOT of violence -- dogs being shot by human hunters or hit by cars, wild dogs hunting for their meals, dogs fighting with other dogs, dogs fighting with bears...if you had trouble with the blood and death in, say, "Wolf's Rain", this might be a bit hard to take...especially since the character design here is a wee bit more cartoonish-cutesy, and several of the main characters, including the protagonist, are still puppies.

Wikipedia has a decent intro to Weed and the earlier series, Gin. If that sounds intriguing, the nice folks at http://www.asd-fansubs.com have all 26 episodes of Weed in English fansubs via BT, IRC or direct download, and they're about a third of the way through a new-and-improved fansub for Gin...the older fansub is probably floating about online somewhere, but I haven't gone looking yet. (As far as fansites go, http://www.gingasite.net is probably one of the most extensive ones in English...outside of Japan, most of the fansites for this are based in Finland, Sweden, or Norway, none of these series seem to have reached anywhere near as much success on the continent or in the UK/US as they did in Scandinavia.)