Enter the dragon head

Here's another project I've had to do at my job in the library - for the Chinese New Year which funny enough is tomorrow in my time, I've been asked to create this Chinese dragon. I'm not sure what else they're doing to this display but if they're doing anything else interesting I'll be sure to get a shot.


First I drew and painted the dragon's head using several printed references I was given from the staff. The design had to be quite big because it was being put up on the boards on the walls so eventually I had the final design drawn on a piece of my own paper that I took the trouble of bringing in. Also brought my own watercolours as I've done with the birds, because well, felt tips aren't the best things to use to fill in such large areas with colour. Several layers and blends of watercolour later, I gave it a final touch of gold glitter glue. I had a bottle of gold paint somewhere at home that I would have brought in, but where I've been moving everything about it's gotten misplaced.


Then I was assigned to create the body just by sticking scraps of different coloured paper and foil [or rather, a McCoy's multi-packet] in some wriggly manner and then cutting it out. Might seem easy stuff but it was actually quite tedious to position everything and then stick them down with PVA glue. Then again this is the children's library after all, plus I get paid to do this sort of thing so who am I to complain?

First post of the new decade

Hello, I'm back on Blogspot. I hope everyone's had a happy New Year's, Christmas, Boxing day, Guy Fawkes etc. All I can say for myself is that the past 3 months have been a rollercoaster.

First of all, I did indeed go to the MCM expo in London ExCel, which was absolutely fantasico. I will certainly be going again and cosplaying the next time which is in May, hopefully by then I'd actually be able to buy more stuff from there. You can view my take on it at DeviantART, and more photos can be found at my FlickR page.


The next epic thing going on is that I now have a job at a library, as my profile now states. Unfortunately I don't work many hours a week, which isn't my fault, but the pay has been amazing [for me anyway] and I've been on some major spendups as well as supporting my family with it. Some of the things I do there include shelving, shelf tidying, unpacking and stamping new books, flat packing boxes, and even art and craft - since they've discovered that I draw and paint, I've been set up on working on displays for the children's library most of the time, as well as preparing pieces of paper, felt etc so that the kids don't have to when they make penguins. Below is a recent project where I had to draw some birds for a birdwatching event the kids are having.


The robin's a bit fat there, but I think it's given me a little experience on drawing birds, something I rarely ever draw. I've also finished up a pretty funky looking Chinese dragon for Chinese New Year, which I might post as soon as I can get a photo of it. Additionally, I painted up some sort of mural in the women's toilets, which is basically a montage or stars, moons, butterflies and a mountain. I'm surprised my clothes didn't get ruined while I was doing it.

Lastly, just the last weekend alone has completely flipped my world upside down. Not only did I go to the cinema for the first time in 2 and a half years to see Avatar, I have found myself an other half, and that other half is none other than Aaron Foster aka Gagaman. For the past 5 years I've been a fan of his artwork via DeviantART, but it wasn't until about 3 years ago [or 4, if the first time I ever spotted him counts] that we had bumped each other in real life at boot sales, funny enough, and I plucked up the courage to say hello.

Since then, we had been very good friends because we're very like-minded, but after the expo in which we spent quite some time hanging out with each other, we had gotten closer and closer, and eventually arranged some days to meet up and hang out some more. It was only when that last weekend came and went, that I've expressed my feelings for Aaron. Now, I'm still besotted [I'm shaking as I type this] because of how he feels for me.

So that the past three months. I am only praying that the future stays this perfect.

I'm just gonna spit it out

Am I getting good at facial anatomy yet?

Now for the one thing that's eating me up right now. For a few months I've been thinking about coming with an old college friend to the MCM expo in London after we had a chat about it on MSN and she said, "come with us sometime". I was thinking of cosplaying as Penny Crygor from the Warioware games, but I didn't really put much effort in looking for costume parts so if I do go then I'm just gonna dress ordinarily. I told my mum that we've been on trips before and that it's like a comics, movies and media con and at the moment she seems OK with it.

There's the next worry, having the money for it. I still haven't started my job at the library because now they're saying they're refurbishing the library I'm working at, and at this rate there's no way I'm getting my first wages until very late in the year, so any money I get from my incapacity benefit [I get no more than £20 a fortnight from that] or that I get given, I'm trying to save for if I do go. I never get to go out anywhere so why should I miss out on anything?

Other than that, I'm due for an MRI scan tomorrow, at least I don't have to pay for that. For the last month I've had to see doctors about how I'm being affected by Asperger's physically and so far, so good. The neurology doctor bangs me on the knees and such, then I have a blood test, and now that. Not sure what's next after that.

Background studies oh joy

I'm still doing background studies, both videogame and real life/photo inspired alike.



Obviously judging by the Ray gnomes, this is Rayman 3 inspired, though the aims here were to build up layers of colour among pencil lines. Not sure I like the way I tried to apply detail, but I do like how it's almost like it's night time in the Fairy Council, just like in the game. Not forgetting that there's also light coming from the window; maybe next time I'll add little fairies.

Almost a month back I did something similar, based on a trip I took years ago when I was at college.



Here, not only did I try to experiment with light pencil lines, I also tried the splatter technique, something I actually don't use often because well, not so easy to mask this paper with masking fluid so I had to use paper. Man, this was such a boring place, all we ever did was poke a dead fish that got washed up on the beach; shame I lost the photos I had of it. What I do like here is the bushes - the colours used for that were just a mix of viridian and Payne's grey. It's amazing how many more colours can be made by mixing, something I do practice a lot.

I still have some unfinished scenes to finish.

Back to basics

The old template and title had to go, it gets ever so rusty after a while. So what have I been up to the past three months?

First of all, I turned 22 years old in April. Wasn't really anything special, what with the credit crunch and everything, but certainly not the worst. I got a good amount of birthday money and put most of it to good use. Nearly a month later, we spent one whole day at Thorpe Park, where we gave one of the latest rides, Saw, a whirl...whoa man, that was so wicked!

However, a week before the day out, I made the tough decision to pack up the voluntary work at the charity shop. I felt that my general life would hardly improve if I carried on for much longer, and in turn, I landed a job in a library within the borough. As of now I've yet to start, and I'd had just sent my medical and criminal record forms away. Only time will tell about my luck with this.

Regarding art, I pretty much struggled, I'll have to admit, again. I have a feeling that I'm not improving at all, and a part of me wants to blame video games. Another part wants to thank them though, because I think that even if you're only drawing WarioWare related doodles, you're still drawing, and any drawing is healthy, right? When I'm not drawing such scribbles, I'm attempting animals, as seen below.



That's the cat next door, and he's a cheeky sod. He dreams of coming in our house one day to eat my dog's food, but he'll never get in when Jessie's about.

Experimenting with "anime"

Today, I decided to fire up Inkscape [kinda like to Illustrator as GIMP is to Photoshop] and try an "anime" style for a change. I've never been too much of an anime fan, but I'll let you in on saying that there are a few anime shows that actually appeal to me, and no they don't include Naruto and Bleach. When I was younger I had tried to copy its attributes, but it often led to some disastrous results.



I'll have to be honest, I'm surprised with the results here - it amazes me how simple things like shading and highlights really bring such a picture to life. I've studied a few anime shows, and most of the time the lineart is done with think lines, so I tried that.

Inkscape is a nice alternative to Illustrator once you get the hang of the most important too of all - the bezier. It works completely differently to Flash, Paint Shop Pro, PaintBBS and Photoshop, but it doesn't take long to get used to. I've used it to make my hand drawn lineart smoother and more crisp with a feature called POTrace, before importing it back to Photoshop, and what's nice is how it can export a lovely PNG file that's ready for colouring elsewhere. You can colour in this as well, which I've done apart from the blush, but if you want to go beyond cell shading, then plonk it into Painter or something.

I suppose turning a non-Japanese product into this is just pot luck - some top-end American, British etc cartoons might work, others won't, and vice versa.

A new [scanner] light

Last week, I was at a jumble sale, in fact, the very one I picked up a Nintendo 64 from, and found a scanner there for £3. It looked quite a nice one - an Epson Perfection 2400 Photo. So I bought it, but for a while I thought I had some bad fortune. When I set it up, while I found that the software was indeed XP compatible, it was making a sound like a hammer hitting nails, and I thought it was broken. The next day, my grandparents came round for dinner, and I asked my grandad to see if he could fix it. It turned out that all it took was to flick some kind of switch at the back that somehow locks the pulley inside, and now I'm free - to scan!

Despite being a clunky thing, it works wonderfully, perhaps more so than the old HP I had, so now I've had the chance to scan and upload some paintings and sketches that I had left unscanned for well over a month.


Recently I've come back to one of my old fandoms, the Worms series; since I found my copy of Worms Open Warfare 2 on the DS. I ran out of games that I haven't beaten at least once, so I thought, why not? As a result, I've finally finished my crappy old comic The Shovel, and I'll probably end up making another anytime soon.


This painting was inspired by a time last month when my mum and I were baking a cake for my older sister, who turned 23 then. The first time we made one, it became nothing more than a pile of crumbs, and we were quite baffled by it because we were sure we got the proportions of butter, sugar, eggs, flour etc just right. We must have missed, or used too much of another ingredient. The second time, it had little black dots in it, which I think might have been just burnt sugar. I also put too much food colouring in the ready made icing, which wasn't even that nice anyway, so it ended up being a red blob of gooey, sugary mess. But it had to do. My sister recently started to take interest in cake decorating, so hopefully we'll make better, prettier cakes in the near future.


Finally, good old James Pond and his amphibian sidekick, and I imagine they'd be about five years after the last game of the franchise, Operation StarFI5H. While I was doing this, it had finally come to my realisation that using strong colour isn't really the best idea if you are going to shade something, as you can see with their jackets. Never mind.

An ancient muse

Glad to finally have some motivation again. In the space of 24 hours I managed to finish two pages of a Worms comic that I left unattended for a whopping four years, and I'm now on a bid to complete the last two pages of that, and to complete a stitching to give to my grandmother. I never felt so busy in all my life yesterday.

Now for a story.

Three months ago, I was assigned to visit the University of East London, for the sole purpose of learning how to cope with the journey there, and to meet with a man named Martin, that was one of a few people that had come round my house to talk to me about my future. From where I live , it takes about three trains and a bus to get to the campus. The first time I came, it wasn't so bad, and I met a lady named Bee who, with Martin, talked to me about getting into University and the help I would get if I enrolled.

Two weeks later, I had to come again to meet them, as well as a lad with Asperger's, and two ladies that discussed their learning and financial support they offer. That went quite smoothly, until I went home. There were some severe problems with the Docklands Light Railway, which turned what was normally an hour long journey to one of three hours. The second me and my mother walked through the door, I was sobbing, because I know that going to Uni would become a complete disaster. I felt at my most broken that night, like my future has been shattered. All because I'm too socially inept to take this journey.

I felt like I let down and wasted the time of those I met on those days. But I had to think. Why did they even suggest that I should go to Uni anyway? Apparently, I already had the qualifications I needed for Illustration, so I didn't need to go to college again, but now this is what they're suggesting to me. I'm not going to that college I went to again, even if they relocated. It was such a disorganised waste of time, and it wasn't any wonder that I wasn't the only one that dropped out.

I haven't really a clue on what to do next now. I mean, I want to have a good professional reputation, but I know it's going to take a lot of work.

Bbbbrrrrr

I'm really surprised that the snow we had on Monday hasn't completely melted yet. It's been so bitterly cold, thank god I have this heater to take place of the crappy radiator in here. Even more so, I'm surprised I'm still actually drawing, despite freezing my socks off and virtually living on toast at the moment.

Just to be safe, I have officially discontinued use of my old scanner. Thankfully my new digital camera that I got for Christmas can spill the beans on what I've been working on.


Fanart based on a very good Wii game going by Wario Land: The Shake Dimension. I actually started this last week, and have been doing it little by little, because colours that accidentally run into each other while wet don't really make a happy painting. Bigger brushes don't half make a difference when doing such large areas though. More WIP shots are on the way.

Stripey scans

With Christmas dawning near at the speed of light, I've decided to take a break from stitching so I can concentrate on drawing again. Unfortunately, in recent days I've noticed something really peculiar with my 6 year old scanner. At first it started scanning things as if someone put coloured cellophane over it, then it started scanning with like, horizontal bars. Like when a printer gets all dry and makes lines in what it prints. I take it that it's a warning that maybe after Christmas I ought to buy a new scanner. Bit late to ask for one for then, gawd knows what mum and dad bought me apart from a Wii game I've been waiting to play for 3 months. In the meantime, I aim to draw more with the tablet.

I've got one more day of work tomorrow, and then I've got a 5 day weekend until next Monday. This will be such a blast, what with movies on the telly, games, family etc... wish I could have 2 weeks off though, just like the old days when I was at school age. Pros and cons of having to grow up, gotta love them.

Coming soon from StaceyW Arts

Good evening. I finally started work on my portfolio site. Very early stuff so far, and for some reason CSS has become easy again. I've not come up with a name for this site yet, but one thing's for sure, a dog looking very much like my own will be its official mascot.



Blimey, the difference setting things to higher resolutions makes! And studying photos, Jessie doesn't really sit still for long enough when I'm drawing her. I'm currently painting this sketch up in Painter and it'll be used somewhere on the site for decoration. Thing is though I'm still trying to get my head around how blending and painting works in Painter, I still haven't found a brush I'm most comfortable with.

The site will showcase only the very best of my art. How much of that I haven't figured out yet, but either way this won't be launched until 2009.

Now if only everything I do these day doesn't hurt my back.

Photoshop drawing video

Finally it's up.



I've been meaning to do a video like this for a really long time, and I realise now that it's much harder to work on something while the capture app is on because of the slight lag. It's basically to show what happens to the picture when I'm CGing stuff in Photoshop.

Yeah yea yeah I know my choice of music is shit bla bla volume slider.

From the murky depths of our loft...

LOL Lion King.

So last week, my dad took me and my sister up into the loft so we could get some old junk down and clear it up a bit. Some of the things we found included our old toys, books, a NES, and these horrid things. Or to put it lightly, drawings I made when I was in primary school.



When I was in year 3, before I was moved into the special unit where I spent year 4, we crapped on several sheets of paper and bound them together with treasury tags to form books. I found 3 of those, Religious Education, Science and History.





Seriously, what the hell?





Now these I definitely remember drawing when I was in the unit. They had like this Acorn or Amiga computer or something that had an MSPaint like thing and I mostly drew canids. I can even remember wondering why certain bits wouldn't fill in because of one pixel. First one is just some dog, while the other is supposed to be Vixen from Animals of Farthing Wood or something. I dunno.

But damn, do they take me way back! I feel so damn old.

Me ol' Bamboo [or new, rather]

Earlier this week, I ordered a new Wacom tablet. It's come to my reality that I simply cannot afford the big Wacom daddies [Intuos or a Cintiq even...oh a girl can only dream], so I opted for a Bamboo one which costed me £30 from Amazon UK. I wasn't expecting the greatest quality from it, in fact it wasn't the same one pictured, but when it came yesterday and I started fiddling about with it...gawd, it's a LOT smoother than the old Aiptek I used for the past 5 years!

So I spent most of the day drawing little fan sketches as seen below.

As much as I'd love to have an Intuos or a Cintiq, they're really pricey and it would have taken me years to save up for one. At least I won't have to worry about it now and I can spend money on Christmas gifts. The Aiptek I believe, costed a little more than this, and here is why any Wacom tablet is better than that:

• The only one used a serial port. How behind the times can you get? Even if I got it fixed up, I would have had to get a USB adapter to plug it in. All this thing has is a USB to slip in, easy as pie.
  
• I can't get over how smooth it is. Any lines the Aiptek made were really bumpy. The Bamboo doesn't do it 100% perfect, but it's still looks neater.
  
• Easier to set up, in fact, it worked straight away when I plugged it in. You do have to install the driver software to get the pressure levels, as with the Aiptek, but when I first used that it took a long time for it to start getting detected.
  
• NO BATTERY for the pen! That's right, the old one had to have a AAA battery in, and it was poorly built. The Bamboo pen doesn't need any of that that nonsense.
  

The only thing I don't like about the Bamboo so far is that it takes a lot of work to handle. Perhaps being loose with it might make my arm feel a bit more comfortable.

It also comes with Art Rage 2.5, which I've tried before, didn't really like, but if this CD has the full version I may try it again. But I installed Corel Painter 9 and have Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and Flash anyway so it's no big deal really.

I urge anyone who's looking into getting a tablet to get a Wacom one. They're the best. No other tablet label does it better. Here it is in action.

How I typically paint a painting

Hi again. I'm feeling generous today, so if you ever wondered how I make certain types of my art, now's the time to see. In this tutorial I'll be going through my latest painting, "Fuchsia Air", step by step. This painting used watercolour, gouache, graphite pencil, white acrylic ink and colour pencils.


First, I taped up a piece of Waterford 300lb paper onto my card board with masking tape. That helps it to keep the painting taut while being worked on, and gives it a somewhat neat border around it [sometimes paint can leak underneath it but it's going to be digitally trimmed anyway]. Then I start my sketch, trying to be as neat as possible, which is important because erasing isn't a nice thing to do.


The next step is to apply masking fluid, which is a mixture of ammonia and latex and is used to protect certain parts of the paper from being painted on. You don't have to cover the whole character here, just around the edges, and I've flicked some about to make sparkles. A word of warning though: always use an old trashy brush to apply this stuff. It dries quickly to a sticky state on the brush and will not come off. It's also important to use a bottle within a year, otherwise it stains your paper with ugly yellow bits.


Now that the fluid is dry, I'll paint in the background with one colour. I painted it dry with a half-inch brush and then blended in some water. A few specks of salt were added, though I got impatient and used a hairdryer to dry it off. The masking fluid is then rubbed or peeled off, whichever is safest for your paper [it can tear sometimes], and now I'm ready to paint the character.


Here I started painting her skin and the fuchsia with a lot of colour. Most other artists use light washes and build it up, but I usually paint with thick colour depending on what colour a part is. The trick here is to work with that quickly but as neatly as possible, and to use an appropriate sized brush [here I used a size 2] to apply colour that's still wet. Texture can be added by lifting colour off with a wet tissue, the type you wipe your nose with as opposed to toilet paper.


More parts of the drawing are filled in, and now I've started shading and highlighting. For the shading, I used violet paint, which works well with warmer colours. In fact, it works so well with wamer colours I added some around the edges of the background. For the initial highlights, I switch to a size 000 brush and paint in some white acrylic paint as lightly and carefully as possible. The masking tape is removed early as no more work is needed for the background.


Time to bring in another medium, gouache. This is like watercolour, but with white paint mixed in, making a much thicker paint. Recently I found it very effective to produce coloured lineart in a traditional piece, as opposed to colouring pencils and re-inking which I used to do and didn't make good enough results. The gouache I use it a bit too thick straight from the tube, so I mix it with water on a non-absorbant material [like this Fererro Rocher box I re-used] to make it flow better.


White watercolour paint is added instead of the acrylic ink to give more subtle highlighting, such as in the flower. If it's too light, it can be painted over. The lineart is applied as carefully as possible with the 000 brush.


The lineart is done now, but I found that the yellow ochre I used for the nightie didn't look so good so I went over it with a 2H pencil, a HB is too dark for that. More shading is applied as well, but again this has to be done with care to avoid the gouache from running - dry gouache paint can be reused when water is used on it. I also started applying details, like the stigma of the fuchsia.


Final touches are added, like the design on the nightie which is painted in blue to add a little cool colour to a warm painting, and white speckles painted on with the acrylic ink. Since this is textured paper I'm using, I picked up a couple of colouring pencils and drew on certain parts to indicate scales, mainly on her face, chest and arms.

And here is the final result. I hope that this tutorial is helpful and informative, and until I show up with another tutorial, happy painting!

Card making

In all honesty I haven't been making a lot of digital art as of late because once again my tablet has gone a bit doo-lally. While I found that I can make oekaki art for example entirely with a mouse, it just feels a lot better with a tab. So, I've taken up the art of card making.

This one here is an original painting that I just painted onto a bit of watercolour paper I folded in half, and for once, I'd take a crack at using gouache paints again as well as watercolour and white ink. I found that using an older shader brush can achieve some realistic effects, like the daisies in the grass, the foliage in the background and the tarmac. As with all techniques, it takes practice to get it the way you want it. The full picture can be found here.

It's a little known fact that I really like cross-stitching. Although very time consuming, it's a soothing activity for me really, and a rewarding one too, as the finished results can make great gifts for the family, even if they were copied from magazine designs. During the last few months of last year I was working on a Christmas themed one that I aimed to give to my nan as a present, and despite a few mistakes here and there, it turned out to be a lovely gift that my nan loved.

This one above is old, must have finished it months ago, but it was only until last week I decided to make it into a card. In Hobbycraft, they sell lots of different cards that are designed for card making - ones that come in different colours and sizes, and one that have already had holes cut in them, perfect for stitchings to be stuck in. For this though, I had to buy two, and cut a heart shape in one of them to match the shape of the heart. Maybe I should get cookie cutters next time and try those to cut out neater shapes. I don't know who to give this one too, so I'll make a few more. I just hope that they never get thrown away after all the hard work I put into the stitching.

Back to paints now, and here is my desk that gets easily trashed, and two more cards that I'm painting on. The one on the right is done entierly in gouache so far, as it is much more opaque than watercolour. For the other one...something tells me that the masking fluid I'm using is going a bit off, and it ain't just in the smell, it also discolours [and sometimes tears!] the paper.

It might be quicker and cheaper just to get a pack of 40 Christmas cards from your local Woolworths, but to me, making my own cards feels like I'm putting my own effort in it. What it was, I bought a pack from the charity shop I work in and gave a card to each of the other volunteers, and my manager said to me "These look like PDSA cards". Quite embarrassing as back then I was a bit strapped for cash.

Art dump numero dos

Blimey, after looking through my 2008 art folder it seems that I've been doing more art than I thought. So here's just a selection of what I've done in the past month.


This is one of a number of commissions that I've sold to a few members of furry website Furaffinity for $5 a piece. I had to lower my usual price so that I could quickly round up some money in order to pay for an eBay sellers' fee that pretty much took me by surprise. The first lot's been paid, and now I'll have to wait for the next invoice to come. In the meantime, I've been selling a few DVDs that we don't watch anymore, and thankfully all of the ones I put up so far sold.


A couple of weeks ago, I came across a toddlers' programme on Nick Jr called Yo Gabba Gabba, which pretty much absorbed me these past few days. It's kinda like Sesame Street but shorter, with only 5 costume characters, and with more modern musical pieces. Soon I had read an article about how some hackers used a picture of Brobee to deface a Metropolitan Police website, which was one of the funniest things I read last week. So, here is Brobee being a British policeman, watching you in a newsagent near you.


As of late I have come back to one of my old fandoms, the Rayman fandom. I bought a copy of Rayman Raving Rabbids for the GBA the other day [more info on that will be posted on my new Rayman blog], and this picture was inspired by a certain level in said game.


I've also made myself into one of Rayman's kind for use in the Rayman fandon. Not to worry, I'm still keeping Robo.


Lastly is an original that I am quite proud of. For this I had been experimenting with Chinese brushes and ink, which were effective for making silhouettes of trees and foliage in the moonlight. I think I was remembering some scene in a collection of Disney cartoons called Make Mine Music where there were two swans flying about in a blue lagoon. Other than that I'm not sure why exactly I chose to paint swans, but eh, anything for an original piece.

Say Hi to Jess

I've been meaning to post this for a long time but I had spent too much time downloading stuff via bittorrent. That's my little doggie being all cute like she always does. To think that only today she was having a nutty half hour over a glass of water!



Doesn't she look adorable though?

I'm thinking about...taking a break from fanart so I can concentrate on drawings like this, because I get much more kick out of drawing things from life than copying the same cartoon picture over 100 times. Having said that though I've to make more Duckula images to replace some of those on my fansite that are rusting a bit, and I have concept art for a rather mental SpongeBob SquarePants/Crystal Maze parody to finish.

And to be honest, I don't give a shit if I don't get so many comments on my original art on DeviantART. It's a good thing actually, most of what flows into my inbox is quite retarded, especially on my old Mario fanart.

Cheerio.

Holy Rhino Daily Dev!

Remember the painting of the Rhino priest I showed you earlier? Well, the other day this very pic earned me a Daily Deviation at DeviantART, meaning that along with a number of others, it was featured by a gallery director [in this case, by one of the two directors for the Anthro gallery] for a whole day. Man was I ever thrilled by it, it shot my spirits so high I could barely type into my Livejournal because I was shaking! I got a shedload of favourites flooding my inbox as a result, and well, I don't know what else to say about it.

I always wanted a Daily Dev someday or another, and every day I looked and looked to see if I got one. And it's a good thing I got one on one of my anthro pieces, because it shows that those are just as appreciated by many people as my fanart. Maybe I should do more stuff to do with anthros and animals more often!

Anyway, for good measure I shall post some oekaki work I did a few weeks back.

My hips don't lie...

This pretty much sums up how I've been feeling recently. For about two weeks now I've been having this dull ache in my right hip and it worsens whenever I move around. I've tried having hot baths and using freeze gel, and I've tried to rest, but nothing seems to work so far, so I guess I'll have to suffer it for the time being. I could really use a hot water bottle right now. [Art was done in a friend's oekaki].