Kinda hate it when I get stuck on technical problems

About a hundred years ago, I wrote this fantasy series about half-way through before deciding it didn't work out, and ever since then I've been trying to make it work, while writing other stuff. I've finally settled with comic format for this story. But now I don't know if it should be in my comfortable watercolour style or if I should face the next steep learning curve for me and do it digitally.

Watercolour pages:

Watercolour pros:

- I've been practising this for years, so I'm pretty okay with it at this point, I feel like I know (mostly) what I'm doing

- It's kind of the most natural style for me, fits exactly the dream-like impression I want to create

- people have liked my watercolour effects and a fantasy story is the perfect playground for that kind of stuff

- I feel closer to what I'm creating the less I have "between" me and the art, the more minimal the medium is the better

- I won't lose the original pages unless my house burns down or something

- I just always figured I was a traditional artist

- I've already drawn about 60 watercolour pages of this comic

- watercolour is just SO flexible and I love it

Watercolour cons:

- the cost of the paper will be astronomical for a comic as long as this story

- I probably just think I can't create as good digital effects because they aren't "the same"

- I probably just think I can't feel as close to my art in digital form because I haven't got used to it yet

- I'm probably just identifying as a "traditional artist" because I think I can't be good at digital art

- the process just takes so much more time when you have to scan hundreds of pages

- it's outdated in most places that host comics and could be less approachable for that reason

Super quick and rough digital sketches:

Digital pros:

- cheap

- takes up no physical space in my room

- will definitely make me better rounded as an artist

- I finally found a brush I like, it looks soft

- these sketches make me feel like I COULD get better with practise

- I've already been doing some black-and-white comics digitally for a year or so, and I can see I've been improving more than I thought

- what feels like limitations is probably just my lack of skill and if I learned this tool it could open so many new possibilities

- I make speech bubbles digitally so it's way more simple if the whole thing is digital

- you can't ruin a digital picture

Digital cons:

- I think my technical weaknesses will be more apparent because it's still a "harder" tool

- every time I draw digitally I get annoyed by how little variation I can create with the way I move my hand

- even though watercolours may be perceived to be outdated, what if I lose my special touch without them, what if the perceived outdatedness could be a strength and not a weakness?

- I just LOVE watercolours (though that doesn't mean I couldn't turn out to love digital as much in time)

- I literally came up with this thought last night, while sketching those two characters

SO...

????????

I mean, who says it's too late to change course? That's not the case, it's just that at this point I feel like I keep postponing this project because I always start it again in a different way. Why this project? I mean, usually I get a book idea and I write the book. I get a comic idea and I draw the comic.

I don't think it's a problem with the project itself, like, it's not my subconscious telling me not to tell this story at all.

But for some reason this is hard for me. Maybe I've just had it in my head for so long and I want it to be perfect and it never feels perfect enough.

And if I threw a coin and took a gamble I know I would be disappointed if it didn't give me the digital option.

Maybe it's nothing bad? Maybe it's just finally the time for me to really learn digital drawing? It doesn't mean I can no longer do watercolours.

I mean, I should probably just go for it, it's not like I won't notice if it doesn't work for me.

Who knew what a ballet skirt could do

After training at home one day I started playing with my wrap skirt, and quickly got a little obssessed with how many things I could do with it that I had never thought of before. Ballet classes usually have a uniform or at least some guidelines for how to dress, and even though my school doesn't have a uniform, most people still wear pretty much the same colours and styles every day. But at home, you can do whatever you like, right? So, I figured this might certainly spice up training alone at home!

Most of these styles I came up with, I could actually dance in and they would not fall off or get in the way. (All except the last off-shoulder.)

The pictures are crappy because I was just taking them for my own amusement, and so that I would remember these styles. I didn't think I would share them, so I didn't put any effort into it... But then I thought this would actually be pretty fun to share. I gave them cheesy names.

That's it! I hope you had a portion of how much fun I had while doing this. xD

A Corona Post

Maybe this will be interesting for me to read in later years.

The negatives:

• My ballet school closed a couple of weeks ago, which happened pretty fast in the end. Well, I guess everything has been happening fast, but I mean, we were talking with our teacher probably two days earlier that we wouldn't be closing in the foreseeable future. There were no confirmed cases of corona in our area yet at the time and I guess no one really understood how fast it spreads. But things changed in a couple of days and all schools closed their doors. Competitions and our spring show are also cancelled, obviously.
• I'm out of work for the time being. I only started working in a sushi restaurant a couple of months ago and now it's closed as well. It's a new restaurant, so I don't know if it will survive and whether I will have work at all anymore, so I suppose I have to start looking for a new one, which is a shame because I really liked that job but I can't just rely on it being there after this crisis is over. The problem, of course, is that if the job market around here was bad before...
• I had to move in the middle of this crisis, last weekend. Moving is stressful to begin with, so this move was definitely the hardest one for me yet. Me or my girlfriend don't drive and neither do most of our local friends, so we had a friend come over from quite a distance away to drive a van for us, and I was just waiting for the government to ban travelling altogether, but luckily it only started happening today, four days after our move. For now it's only in certain areas though. It was also the first time that I was physically the strongest person so I carried all the heavy stuff myself or with our friend. (Until now I've always had my dad for help!) The day after I was so tired I couldn't do anything but watch Gilmore Girls for almost the entire day.

These were probably the most significant things so far, but I'm sure the situation will get worse. Obviously, just like everyone, I've had to cancel all plans that involve getting outside of my house but right now things could still be a lot worse. In my area we can still go to the store and visit friends even if most places are closed, and there's a lot of space in my city to move in nature and it isn't heavily populated so avoiding people isn't very difficult.

The positives: (Yes, there are positives)

• Some people are awesome. A local law firm decided to buy tickets for cancelled events in the spring season from three local culture and sports organizations since they lost practically all ticket income because of corona. The three they chose were the city orchestra, Kataja Basket Club and our ballet school Relevé. My teacher, the owner, was besides herself. She thought it was a prank at first. The law firm challenged other organizations that aren't so affected by corona to support those who are.
• I have all the time I want in my hands right now and don't have to feel guilty about wanting to spend it home. A feeling shared by all introverts. Even if the loss of work means I'm poor again it is far easier to be poor when you've got nowhere expensive to go anyway. I'm going to enjoy getting my new home in order and I'll be working on my comics and writing.
• Since my new home is finally big enough for a ballet barre I figured I needed to get one right away since I would be training at home. The move was a perfect timing actually, because it would've been nearly impossible for me to do ballet in my old home but here it works out! I asked if my ballet teacher's husband could make a barre for me since he's quite handy and now he's making them for everyone, which is very cool of him!

I'm sure I'm yet to discover a lot of negative and positive things I'll face in the near future, but this is what I've been thinking about these days. I don't want to waste a good crisis, so we'll see what the future holds.

Aand this has nothing to do with corona but I'm besides myself because I finally have ground under my feet instead of a balcony when I step out of the living room door. It's tiny but I'm so happy!

30 Day Challenge: Best trip of your life (How I met my girlfriend)

In my second year of high school I got a chance to go to Japan for a short (three weeks) student exchange. The possibility to go to Japan was one of the two reasons for my high school choice. (The other reason was the music program.) Every year, two people were chosen for this short exchange in an all-girl high school in Osaka. I still kind of find it hard to believe I was picked. Luck was on my side, and the choice was mostly based on written applications. I tend to be much more convincing on paper than in person.

And that's how I met my girlfriend, Rita. It's been, what, almost ten years now.

It's kind of baffling to think that we probably never would've talked if we hadn't been the two people chosen for this trip. I knew of her, but I'm pretty bad at making friends spontaneously, and I wouldn't have had a reason to talk to her without this. According to me the first time we met was at the info for the Japan exchange, before we applied. We happened to sit close by and I started talking to her and we talked almost the entire half an hour about anime and Japanese culture. But it kind of doesn't count because afterwards she had no memory of talking to me. So, if we hadn't been chosen together we most likely never would've talked again.

She counts that the first time we met was after being chosen. I still remember that well too. I saw her friends circling her and congratulating her at school, in the lobby, just when I was getting a hot chocolate from the coffee machine. I knew those reactions couldn't be about anything else than the Japan exchange, since the e-mail about the choices was supposed to come that day. I hadn't had a chance to check my e-mail yet (Oh, the time before smartphones...), so I went to ask her who else was chosen. She tilted her head and looked at me with a ”Do I know you?” -look. Since then that expression has become all too familiar to me. Whenever she's caught off guard and doesn't get what's going on she has this same expression: Her whole face is a big frown and her mouth hangs open. But it seemed obvious even then that her brain was processing, so I waited. Then she concluded that the other name mentioned in the e-mail couldn't be anyone else's, and she pointed her finger at me.

I managed to find a picture from Japan where she has almost that exact expression except the frown is not as strong in this one.

She tells me I was funny, because I kind of tried to do a very slow pirouette to celebrate, without spilling my hot chocolate. And later she got kind of embarrassed about pointing at me, thinking it must have looked rude, but, excuse me, who cares, I'd just heard that we were going to Japan! One of my high school dreams was coming true!

I don't even know where to start with Japan, really. It may have been the best, but it was also the weirdest trip of my life. I had never been that far from home, so I guess the culture shock was to be expected. Everything about Japan made me feel like I had stepped into another world completely, even though the Japanese and the Finnish as a people are significantly similar in a lot of ways if you look past the initial culture shock.

Anyway, feeling out of place started the moment I got out of the plane.

The air. So. Humid. For a moment I thought it would bother me for the whole three weeks, it just felt so heavy to breathe. I had never felt like the air itself was difficult to breathe. But in the end I got used to it surprisingly fast.

But I suppose the most significant thing that made me feel so out of place there was that I'm used to blending in with the crowd. In Finland I've always been exactly medium height, medium blonde with medium length hair, not fashionable but not exactly quirky (maybe a little now that I'm older). I've never drawn much attention in Finland. But oh dear, Japan was a whole new ball game. I'm sure a lot of foreigners have had a similar experience in Japan, but, honestly it felt completely ridiculous. The same attributes that made me completely inconspicuous in Finland, made me the center of attention in Japan. And you would think that Japanese people are as reserved as Finns and understand personal space? As if... For some reason people there seemed to think it was completely fine to touch my blonde hair without asking, to stare into my blue eyes at almost a kissing distance and stare really obviously and without shame at my E-cups, just because they find these things exotic.

I think we could almost play another round of every anime fan's favourite game... "Spot the Main Character" with this picture. (I'm not even the only foreigner in it but I'm still the one to stick out first.)

And because it was an all-girl school, I essentially got to experience what it's like to be "the prince of the school". I'm not even kidding. Groups of girls would start screaming, actually truly screaming, when me and Rita walked past in the corridor. Sometimes someone wanted to give their e-mail to us or ask us to add them on Facebook or something and they would always blush so deeply and have a bunch of girls behind them cheering them on.

It was baffling to me. If this wasn't my fifteen minutes of fame, I don't know what is. And it was kind of a shock to me that Japanese girls actually did behave like the girls do in all the manga that I had read for a few years by then. I always assumed it was exaggerated, but really, it isn't, not significantly, anyway.

And some random guys on the streets were equally baffling. Once when I was just walking out of a train, minding my own business, a guy came behind me and almost jumped in front of me, like close, and yelled: "Konnichiwa!" at my face. And then he slowly walked away, looking at me the whole time with a manic smile on his face. He didn't even look where he was walking!

For some reason it was me who got the most attention out of the two of us, even though we're both blond and Rita is the loud one.

I didn't always appreciate how random strangers thought it was okay to be so rude (because I was an interesting foreigner?) but I really loved my host family and I'm pretty sure the feeling was mutual. They made sure I got to do everything I wanted to do there, they even took me out to eat sushi multiple times because they knew it was my favourite food, even though it's considered to be pretty festive food.

Don't I look happy. You won't find a sushi place in Finland where the sushi comes to your table on a conveyor. What.

I certainly had a lot of new experiences there and I have to admit a lot of the most memorable ones had to do with food, because I had been reading so much manga and seen so much Japanese food in them that I never had a chance to taste before. One of the coolest things was the school bakery. Me and Rita both fell in love with panda shaped buns that had chocolate inside them and some other chocolate bun too that was kind of like a cinnamon roll but bigger and just with a lot of chocolate instead of cinnamon. I'm still sad I can't get those anywhere. I loved everything I tasted in Japan from takoyaki to yakiniku.

We had a lot of time to bond with Rita because exchange students had their own hangout room in the school and for some of the time we were the only ones. We also didn't go to every class with our host sisters, just some, and then we had some cool ones separately, like tea ceremony and Ikebana. But we also had a lot of time to spend in the exchange student room alone, and I got to witness a lot of Rita's randomness during the first week that I knew her. She would do things like lie on a table on her stomach because she had eaten something that made her feel bloated. She would climb on a chair just to look at the room from a different perspective. From the start, she was a very entertaining person to observe. Once she completely shocked some poor truck driver who was looking at us curiously, and she just smiled widely and waved at him as if they were best friends.

I was initially a little sad that we weren't expected to participate in everything. Like when we had an overnight camp with our host sisters' class we were not expected to make food with everyone or attend all of the activities. But, I must admit it was nice that we were also scheduled to bathe separately, because we had so much room, though it seems a little unfair. We got the whole bathroom for just the two of us, and we got to bathe first too. Even though we weren't exactly treated like everyone else, which would've been nice in a way, it was also nice to have a lot of time to bond with my new friend. She was interesting to me from the start, because she was so free and easy in a way. I was used to people opening up to me, but she took it a step further, like asking me to massage her and braid her hair and lie beside her in her bed before we went to sleep, even though we had really known each other for just days. She was also kind of brutal. Like, when we took that bath she took a long good look at me and said: "Well, you're exactly like a hentai girl with your boobs and your mellow personality." Haha... But for some odd reason I didn't mind any of it at all. I just found her personality very curious.

I had some troubles in Japan too. Like the fact that it took 1,5 hours to get to school from my host family's house and it took three trains and two buses and some walking on top of all that. And it's not really the time or the long way but the fact that there are so many people everywhere. I am not used to such crowds and it drained me of energy completely. Sometimes I was so tired I fell asleep right after coming home from school.

Language was another issue, since I don't really speak Japanese. I took one course in high school but it's nothing really. I probably picked more up from anime than that course. And the level of English of Japanese high school kids it pretty much the level of my Swedish. (Bad, even though I studied it from seventh grade.) Our host sisters went to a special English class so they were better than average and communicating with them was fine, but I always needed my host sister to translate to her parents and some teachers too.

Certainly there were some cultural differences that were not easy to pick up on or understand. The thing we were the most bewildered by was that pretty much no one in our host sisters' class actually liked manga or anime, but instead they loved things like High School Musical, Hannah Montana and Justin Bieber completely unironically. In Finland no one older than maybe 13 would. (Or if they did most people wouldn't admit it.) And as the weeks went by it became clear that this might be a part of a bigger phenomenon. It seemed to us that the Japanese kids our age were treated in a way that seemed younger than they were, from our perspective. Maybe it's a part of the communal culture in Japan. Students were made to do things like walk in pairs during a field trip (something that would never happen in Finland after elementary school). Everything about their life in and outside of school seemed so scheduled to us. I think kids tend to have a much longer leash, so to speak, in Finland when they are much younger. It seemed to us like Japanese kids were mostly taught to obey and not ask questions. While in Finland I think that kids generally would assume they have a right to know why some things need to be done a certain way, and if they're given a good reason they're happy to do it, but they would feel a need to know why. I'm speaking very generally of course, but that's the feeling I got in Japan: Asking "why" didn't seem like a cool thing to do.

I think what I liked about the people there the most was that I was not expected to be outspoken or talkative. I realize that it probably comes from a place that has many problematic aspects as well, but, people tend to assume that Finland is a country of introverts, and while that may be true in large scale, any day in Finland is still always a draining experience for me socially. I feel like I have to use every last bit of my tiny storage of extroverted energy just to get by. I didn't feel like this in Japan very much. I had other issues, like crowds and attention that drained my energy too, but I didn't feel like I needed to pretend to be more extroverted than I was, very much. All I needed to do was half smile and nod and people loved me for it. Writing it out makes me feel a little icky about it now, because it makes me think of all the ways in which that is problematic, but back then I was just happy because it made my life easier.

Here's another thing that Japanese people can do unironically which is actually really cool. They had beauty contests at school where boys dressed as girls, and they were very convincing. Almost none of them were over the top, they just all looked really good in skirts and wigs and put serious effort into it. In my middle school some boys dressed as Spice Girls one time but they didn't even try to do it well, it was all a big joke. I appreciated that this kind of thing in a high school festival could be not-a-joke. The picture is from our host sisters' friend's school were we went to see the cultural festival.

My main take away from the whole trip was my new friend, though. Of course, we got to know a little of each other before the trip began but essentially we got to know each other in Japan. I guess someone could say our friendship began in a "misattribution of attraction" sort of way since people say it's common to find another person interesting if you go through an adventure with them. But I think the ten years of ever deepening bond that all happened after those three weeks speaks louder. And still, without Japan, we probably never would've gotten to know each other, because neither of us was the kind of person that the other would've instinctively wanted to make friends with at first glance. So this is one of those situations where one distinct detail actually has the power to change your life. There was no way we would've found each other if we weren't chosen together for this escape from our normal reality. Sometimes it's only in extreme circumstances that you can really see someone, and that's definitely what happened to us.

We look like such awkward nerds.

We thought it was because of the time we spent away from our usual circles together that made our relationship difficult for other people to grasp from the start. But it was probably more than that. People didn't seem to be sure how to categorize our relationship and neither did we, for a long time. Maybe it's because we grew into what we are now, so slowly but so steadily that most people started assuming were we a couple before we did.