Commission for thatmetalguy1011!
🍄 Artwork is © 2023 by Marina Neira. You may NOT copy, color, reference, repost or use this artwork in any way or claim it as your own. Only the commissioner/giveaway winner & those featured in the artwork may repost with credit and following my Terms of Use.
This one is a bit… unusual, but our partner coerced me to draw my squirrel avatar in different style, as wacky as I could muster and looking as ridiculous as I could manage, as part of a deal in which he is buying me the Trick Or Treat Studios Good Guy plush doll (Chucky). He was very satisfied with the result.
🍄 You may NOT copy, color, reference, repost or use this artwork in any way or claim it as your own. Copyright is © 2023 by Marina Neira.
Badge for Cosu-raccoon! The background was added to make the digital version look more finished, but the badge itself is the character only. 😊
🍄 Artwork is © 2023 by Marina Neira. You may NOT copy, color, reference, repost or use this artwork in any way or claim it as your own. Only the commissioner/giveaway winner & those featured in the artwork may repost with credit and following my Terms of Use.
Cookie icon for Cosu-raccoon!
🍄 Artwork is © 2023 by Marina Neira. You may NOT copy, color, reference, repost or use this artwork in any way or claim it as your own. Only the commissioner/giveaway winner & those featured in the artwork may repost with credit and following my Terms of Use.
This week, like the last, was eventful and busy, but there was time to breathe too. Overall, it was pretty good! The nice thing about writing these posts and looking back on them is realizing how full of fun things my weeks usually are and how different the days can be. Life is always full of surprises and fun experiences!
On Monday we had our belated Valentine’s Day cooking class! I got a beautiful sunset shot on the way there…
And some funny photos during the class itself:
Even though it wasn’t my favorite type of cuisine, the meal was pretty yummy, and the custard we had for dessert, in particular, was delicious! I also got to have a little drink.
I’m sure we will do this again, it was a lot of fun!
On Tuesday we went on our (again, belated) Valentine’s Day dinner. We ended up doing everything on different days. This was a promising French restaurant, and the drinks were wonderful:
The guys liked their food a lot, but I found it all very bland, though the presentation was very nice:
In fact I would say this was my least favorite fancy restaurant experience so far. The only place I wouldn’t care to go back other than the drinks. But it’s still fun to try new places!
I made a new type of salad for Wednesday’s lunch, a variation of the previous salad. This one had a baby spinach base. I think I liked it even better!
Later, after struggling a lot to decide how to handle this drawing, I printed it out into two different 8.5″ x 11″ pages and now I am tracing it onto a large piece of watercolor paper:
I really wish I had a bigger printed to print out my sketches onto directly in non-photo blue or other light color. Maybe later this year. I’ve been doing research on it, and I have one picked out.
This was tank cleaning day. Here’s some happy snails enjoying fresh foods and a clean cage!
I feel like I post too many photos of Tomoyo laying on my bed, but she is so cute…
Recently, during grocery shopping, I came upon a wonderful find. I’d first spotted this guy well over year ago in the same section of our Publix:
I’ll get him later, I told myself. I think I went the day after, or two days later. No dice. I waited for weeks, then months, for a restock. I found out it was scalped all to heck online. Such a bummer! This is a cheap little dino from the cheap toy section at the grocery store. But official JP babies are uncommon (I’ve yet to see that nasutoceratops IRL… 😞).
Anyway, this week, lo and behold there he was again, and somehow he had not suffered from inflation. The price was the same as the first time I saw him. So this little guy came home with me, and now sits between the sturdy legs of mama brachio!
I don’t want to keep finding excuses to fail on my resolution, but it sucks when this was something I missed out on before and it happened to show up, finally. Sigh… 😩
I’ve been drawing a little almost every day. On Friday, I worked on another badge!
Here’s Tomoyo laying on the laundry I’m trying to put away. She can be terribly cute sometimes.
Before bedtime, I got a good amount of writing done. Well over a thousand words. So that was good.
The weekend was really nice! Our partner bought these red ceramic knobs for our kitchen cabinets that he knew I’d been wanting, and we installed them together. Objectively, I can say (I know) they look bad. 😅 But also, red is the accent color all over our kitchen. So, subjectively, I love it. Christopher was about as horrified as we expected he would be.
We had pizza for dinner on Saturday, and I also did our taxes on this day. It was nice to get that off my back.
After a few missed Project Nights, I did a little bit of scrapbooking on Sunday afternoon, and completed two new pages, a Jurassic World one (themed after my new Pyroraptor friend) and a Sesame Street one. Here they are in progress…
And all finished!
On Sunday morning I finally finished reading Stephen King’s “It”. This was a big deal to me, because “It” is the longest book I have ever read (that wasn’t a compilation of multiple books). It never, ever bored me for a minute. I’m going to read a comic collection next, before tackling another “real” book.
I’ll end this post with this GIF of Rosie hiding in the Kallax:
She is very sneaky.
Badge for CharmieUwU!
🍄 Artwork is © 2023 by Marina Neira. You may NOT copy, color, reference, repost or use this artwork in any way or claim it as your own. Only the commissioner/giveaway winner & those featured in the artwork may repost with credit and following my Terms of Use.
A Patreon reward line art I got from Nazznikonanuke that I colored and added a background to!
🍄 Artwork is © 2023 by Marina Neira. You may NOT copy, color, reference, repost or use this artwork in any way or claim it as your own. Only the commissioner/giveaway winner & those featured in the artwork may repost with credit and following my Terms of Use.
January YCH as a Patreon Reward for CrazyNero! The February and January YCHs got finished in opposite order. 😅
Multiple rewards, including YCHs like this one, are available to my Patrons. Even smaller pledges to my Patreon get you rewards, as they are cumulative! Even if you only pledge $5 a month, for every $25 pledged you’ll get a line art! You can pledge here: https://patreon.com/squelfland
🍄 Artwork is © 2023 by Marina Neira. You may NOT copy, color, reference, repost or use this artwork in any way or claim it as your own. Only the commissioner/giveaway winner & those featured in the artwork may repost with credit and following my Terms of Use.
January YCH as a Patreon Reward for Blankit! The February and January YCHs got finished in opposite order. 😅
Multiple rewards, including YCHs like this one, are available to my Patrons. Even smaller pledges to my Patreon get you rewards, as they are cumulative! Even if you only pledge $5 a month, for every $25 pledged you’ll get a line art! You can pledge here: https://patreon.com/squelfland
🍄 Artwork is © 2023 by Marina Neira. You may NOT copy, color, reference, repost or use this artwork in any way or claim it as your own. Only the commissioner/giveaway winner & those featured in the artwork may repost with credit and following my Terms of Use.
Happy Sunday, friends! Here I am with another weekly summary. So far, I still haven’t been able to recover my determination for all my yearly resolutions. It’s very frustrating when life gets in the way of them, even if it’s fun things that get in the way, but I haven’t completely fallen of the wagon. Anyway, let me tell you about our Valentine’s week!
Not much to say about Monday –I spent it getting everything ready for Valentine’s Day, which was Tuesday. Tuesday morning I gave Christopher his present. I wish I’d taken a picture of how I set it all up –the canvas all wrapped up, his bunny next to it, the card and the chocolates. It was there for him to find when he came down to breakfast. But, I can at least show you the drawing I printed on canvas for him:
Our partner ate his Valentine brigadeiros throughout the day. Around noon he took me to Best Buy to pick up some pretty Razer RGB headphones he bought me as a surprise, but they ended up being the wrong ones, so we returned them and ordered different ones later. We got lunch while we were out and it was still a really nice outing, especially since I’d still been feeling pretty low from the week before.
In the evening I went to see my mom, but before leaving, I left his card on his nightstand, and Christopher gave me mine. 🥰 It was actually one of the nicest cards he ever gave me.
When I got there, my mom had a whole fondue spread prepared!
Then we played the new chutes and ladders game. It was really fun and reminded me of playing it with my grandma when I was little!
I gave my mom a card, some chocolates, and a little potted orchid. She had a card for me too!
This was actually a really fun evening. It cheered me up.
On Wednesday morning, we had mate as usual. E.T. had some, too!
And Sweeney enjoyed some cat grinder time:
We found out that E.T. can cross his fingers! Doesn’t this snack spread look nice…
Also, man, it’s so weird but E.T. has always reminded me of my dad. Even when I was a toddler, he was really old and wrinkled. My child brain always thought they looked similar, and I know I even said so… poor dad. 😅
Also isn’t this Daniel Tiger juice cap super cute?
With Shampoo gone, Sweeney has gotten more and more affectionate with my mom…
Don’t mind his swishy tail at times, Sweeney is a bit of an oddball. He was really happy, purring intensely.
This was a really enjoyable visit. I was home with enough time to do a bunch of chores which is always good.
I was very busy most of this day, but here’s a photo of Christopher’s (slightly) late Valentine’s Day present!
Always thrilled to get Godiva, I’d be surprised if they last me a week, haha. The Santa chocolates were an extra sorta freebie. 🎅
On this weekend, Christopher’s Grandma and my mom-in-law came to visit. They brought the little ceramics we painted on our last visit. I think they turned out adorable!
Friday night was really special. For no particular reason other than family visiting, we all went to a nice, fancy restaurant, “Jaya at the Setai”. It was a very glamorous place! There was a huge pool in the middle. Not a swimming pool, I mean a decorative pool:
Here’s Christopher and Grandma…
I had a Fig Old Fashioned. It was my first time drinking whiskey. I LOVED this thing! The cinnamon stick had been burned just a little. It smelled so good.
It had an odd menu –some Thai stuff, some Indian, some Japanese. At first glance, I struggled to find something I thought I’d enjoy. But everything I ate was an amazing experience, it didn’t feel like simply “eating dinner”. I think it might be my favorite fancy restaurant that I’ve ever eaten at!
There was a colorful gallery attached to the hotel/restaurant. While a lot of the stuff was cute (and I love anything with Harvey characters) the idea of rich-ass people buying stuff with these moneyed characters and even Bitcoin symbols is SO cringy to me, haha. 😅 But it made for some fun photos:
When we got home, we saw this pretty beetle hanging on our door:
I’ve gotten to a point with my manuscript where I desperately need guidance of a sort that many, many Google searches have proven unhelpful with. I tried to use my old Nook e-reader to just get free e-book versions with my accumulated credits, but it was sticky and gross (the material that it is made of degraded horrible with age) so I bit the bullet and got some manuals. They are very useful and are being pivotal in preventing a block I can’t get past at a key moment in the book:
To start this day, here is a cute photo of Kotoko napping outside in the late morning…
We had Mod Pizza for lunch!
After that, everyone went inside JOANN to find a frame for the Asuka puzzle that was recently put together. I stayed in the car to avoid temptations, and our partner surprised me with a Blue lollipop holder when they came back!
Later, I spent some time drawing for myself and reading about mapmaking. I spent time outside with our partner doing these things. The weather was mild and it was a highlight of my weekend for sure. Kotoko even kept me company after he left:
Later in the day we went out to buy coals for our partner’s hookah, and he treated me to a geode which you could hammer open. I didn’t actually know what it would be like inside, so it was a magical experience for me. And it looks like a perfect little dinosaur egg!
In the evening, after dinner, we watched the work-in-progress version of Beauty And The Beast on Laserdisc.
It was a really fun experience!
Grandma and my mom-in-law went home on this day, but first we went to have breakfast together:
It was the first time I really didn’t like my food at The Village Tavern. The potatoes were undercooked, and the crab cakes were really fishy. But the little muffin was delicious.
Now I have to tell you about a definite conscious decision to make an exception to my no-new-toys rule –one I would and will do again if another release like this happens. Outside of the Colossal line, my most favorite Jurassic toy line is their Imaginext toys, and within them, the SUPER cheap, super sturdy, XL dinos.
These are released rarely. It’s been such a long time since the last one. Well, they decided to come out with a rainbow chicken I mean pyroraptor. I was not going to pass it up, especially not under $10! I finally opened the box after family left:
I love the art on these boxes and had to save it for future scrapbooking!
You can see next to my hand what a sizable boy it is, and so colorful and cute. I was over the moon when it came in. A colorful highlight to my week! Absolutely no regrets about this one.
I’m gonna call them Salsa, or maybe Fiesta. 🤔 I still haven’t decided.
Anyway, that’s all for this week! Also I want to say, if you are reading this on your email, MANY times I edit mistakes immediately after posting, but you’ll always see just the first version in your email, I think… sorry about that. You’re generally better off reading posts directly on the site.
Have a great week, everyone!
