The Little King/IF: Seed

I was very happy to see today’s IF topic, I was going to post this anyway, but as soon as I saw ‘Seed’ I thought of this quote:

“Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.”

Very appropriate with the words I had already typed, below. This quote is usually attributed to the Jesuits these days, but originally it seems to have come from Francis Xavier.

In psychotherapy the tendency of some mothers to ‘worship’ their male children simply because they are male is referred to as the Little King syndrome. Little kings  grow up into men with a sense of entltlement, a tendency towards superiority and arrogance and a belief that their female partners should also worship them. Of course there are degrees of ‘kinglyness’, but all such men are unfortunately very wounded - and frequently very angry with women (well, with their mothers, but the feelings tend to get generalised). The wounding and anger derives from the need to carry the weight of the mothers reflection of specialness - in order to be so special the child cannot be himself, an ordinary little boy, instead he is only allowed to behave according to his mother’s definition of specialness. His true self and real feelings are shamed and rejected. The wounding and consequent anger keeps the man himself isolated and unable to experience true intimacy and may also erupt into emotional or physical abuse.

I hadn’t thought about this for a long time, but when I drew this boy it instantly came to mind. Ink & digital colour.

IF

Age may wrinkle the face, but lack of enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.

Proverb

I’m sure IF is chock-a-block with wrinkly faces this week so I thought I’d add mine to the crinkly mix. This is in progress.

I had real trouble linking back from the site. Amongst other things, I kept having my thumbnail rejected, which is why I’m using an old one - then when I finally got it right I think I might have classed this as mixed media, rather than digital. Oh well….

Ink and digital colouring

Seven random things

(If you click on the image you can magnify it for easier reading)

I was tagged by Emma to reveal 7 random or weird things about myself - so here they are!

This is a drawing of me aged five - the only place you will find bows on me now, is the laces in my shoes (BONUS - extra fact revealed!).

I’m tagging the following people:

Darryl

Kerstin

Casey

Ammon

Mim

Juj

Melanie

And all on the understanding that participation is entirely optional - only if you’ll enjoy it.

And now for the serious stuff: please DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK

Working women

Two final versions (oh the pleasures of finishing things digitally - several versions can be had in minutes!), think I prefer the one with some of the clothes coloured. I also feel the light blue works much better than the dark. For anyone who’s interested I did a line drawing, then painted the background colours seperately, I then scanned both and superimposed the line drawing over the background. The clothing is collage and just required scanning again and then adding the linework - which took about two minutes by the time I’d done it three times. I have no intention of working entirely digitally but it does open up a whole range of effects I either can’t get, or are really time consuming when done by hand.

I’m sorry these images are so small - I had a spot of trouble re-sizing as I didn’t realise simply converting a photoshop document to a jpg would reduce the file size considerably…

IF: Fail (to smile)

This is a rough version of something I’m planning on doing, in part, digitally - but that version won’t be finished for a little while so I thought I’d put this up for IF. The woman in the middle is my partner’s mother.

Liza Minelli

I unexpectedly had some free time over the weekend - Dave is ill with something as yet undiagnosed and has spent the last few days in bed, poor thing. So I was going to do - in fact did do- a drawing for IF, but it was a failure - rather appropriate, however I’m not going to post it as I really don’t like it - one of those occasions that reminds me to do several rough sketches first and work out the problems before beginning. Never mind, Bruce Mau says: “Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure everyday”. Since he clearly knows more about it than I do I’m taking heed.

So instead of the drawing here’s Liza Minelli instead. A line drawing finished in Photoshop - nothing particularly special but I like her face emerging coyly from the blackness.

Beautiful, beautiful boy

This paper scans a little oddly, unfortunately.

Life has been busy since I got back from holiday and I still haven’t sorted out my photos, though I did make a start on Sunday by re-sizing them and deleting the really bad ones. That just leaves the bad, moderately bad and passable ones to deal with! Maybe in a few weeks I’ll get round to finishing.

I probably won’t be blogging too much, or Flickring (has Flickring become a verb?) over the next few weeks because I have a lot on - mainly I’m working on something huge but secret (don’t hold your breath!), but I also have some wildlife illustrations to do and a couple of other bits and pieces so personal work is taking a back seat apart from odd drawings in the sketchbook and The Daily Paper project I’ve started uploading to Flickr. I’ll probably post the wildlife illustrations as and when though, as I’m really enjoying doing them.

So who else is getting snow then? I know some areas of the USA are still covered in the white stuff, Canada too, but it is pretty unusual to get it this late in the UK. Not that it’s sticking, but it was a surprise to get up yesterday and the day before to see snow falling again, particularly since the blossom is well on the way and there are buds and shoots everywhere. Also a little sickening - I’ve had enough of winter - I want sunshine and greenness please, winter’s been long enough.

And finally: IFN is ending. I wanted to do a final entry but it’s not going to happen. I’m sad to see it go, though the site has suffered a little lately due to the increased popularity it’s been a great year and some superb illustration work has appeared there - and it will stay there too, as Steve is leaving the site up for posterity - or something.

I am strong

Amongst many other pleasurable things I’ve been advised to give up caffeine and sugar in an effort to stabilise my blood sugar which in turn should help somewhat with the severe PMS/PMDD I’ve developed. Giving up caffeine should also help with the spiraling anxiety I experience for several days a month - well I certainly hope so. I’m pleased to say I’ve managed these two - sugar has been easy to give up but is extremely hard to avoid - it’s in nearly everything that undergoes any kind of processing, so the knock on effect is that I’m eating even better than I did before. And as from Monday I’ve been caffeine free too. After an enforced withdrawal from coffee (I don’t drink tea) several years ago, and the subsequent excruciating headaches I weaned myself down from 4 mugs of freshly brewed black coffee a day to one small cup of instant - this helped considerably: the headache, which is on a par with a migraine, only lasted for 24 hours,( woo hoo!) and I did have a day of feeling like I was coming down with the flu, but now, five days in I’m feeling better with only a slight headache and a remarkably clear mind - for me, anyway! I’m not missing it too much, which is surprising, because I loved my coffee - but I haven’t been in a cafe yet and had that delicious coffee smell wafted directly under my nose. Of course, if it gets bad I can always drink decaff, but for now anyway, I’ve switched over to herbal teas only at home. Somehow, brewing up a pot of decaff just isn’t the same…

I have a number of emails waiting for responses - I’m sorry I haven’t got round to them yet - they are coming I promise - it’s just been a bit of a heavy week one way and another.

IF: Pet Peeves

So many to choose from…

Here be dragons…

well one anyway, click for a clearer view. This is a logo for Ipswich Green Drinks, part of the international networking/socialising movement for environmentally concerned people.

I said in my last post my creativity had deserted me - the drought continues. It seems to be part of the increasing problems I’ve been having with my menstrual cycle over the last few months. I’ve always experienced ups and downs, but mostly it’s been manageable and I’ve been okay, but since my cycle began to get shorter (normal for up to ten years before menopause, apparently - great I’ve got about ten years to go!) I’ve been experiencing longer periods of really intense ups and downs - so much so that when I found this on the net, I was kind of relieved to find out I wasn’t actually depressed or experiencing some kind of bipolar illness. I’ve had most of the symptoms listed and at times it’s been a nightmare. I saw my Doctor yesterday and she has given me Prozac - two weeks on, two off. Sounded rather strange to me, but apparently for those it helps, it works really well. Only one small problem - I have CFS and people with CFS tend to respond rather adversely to SSRIs - last time I took one (one tablet) I was in bed for 36 hours with what I thought was the flu. Apparently it was a ‘classic fatigue reaction’. So I’m on a half dose trial run, to see what happens. I’ve also ordered some of this cream, so I’ve got back up if I can’t tolerate the Prozac - because I certainly can’t tolerate many more of these mood swings. Each month I just feel more and more exhausted on top of all the other symptoms. And for me, someone who has at least half a dozen ideas every day (obviously, not all good ones ) to be completely without ideas or any kind of creative drive feels like I’ve lost the most essential part of myself. Certainly I can produce things if I need to but the pleasure and creativity isn’t there, and increasingly I procrastinate and when I do start, lose my concentration and mess up. I sincerely hope the ‘drugs do work‘ in this case.

I susepct I won’t be blogging much over the next week, and after that I’m on holiday for a week (hallelujah). I hope to come back, refreshed and drugged at the end of the month and catch up with everyone then.