Snail-Male said

I would venture as to guess that you have a working knowledge of actual artistic perspective. All very good work.

I don't know what most of that sentence means, but thank you

Hey Hey, excellent. I love that book as well, I think as an author he isn't celebrated as much as he should be. In Britain he's often overlooked in favour of the eternal fountain of tedium, Shakespeare.

Trekkie said

JR19759- Shakespeare's not that bad- it's just that anything interesting you may find in his plays gets analysed to boredom at school. There are reasons why I don't plan on taking English any further than GCSE.

Shakespeare is alright before GCSE, when you get to do his interesting stuff like The Tempest and Hamlet, but then you get to GCSE and you have to sit through Romeo and Juliet [shivers]. Shakespeare in my opinion only wrote a handful of interesting works (the aforementioned pre-GCSE pair and Macbeth are the only ones that spring to mind and I'd only ever sit down and watch/read one of them), where as everything Dickens wrote was masterful. Yet the only book of his that I could study when I did my GCSE's was Great Expectations (which is one of my faves) and we didn't study any of his prior to that. What is that about!?
Now, not only was the man a brilliant author but was also the social conciseness of an era, exposing the inequalities of society and the terrible living conditions of the working class, in a way that still works to this day, whereas Shakespeare, and lets be fair to him, didn't. And at least everyone in the world agrees that Dickens wrote his own books.
The case for the defence rests.
(Sorry for turning your thread into an argument Weilyn. Can't wait to see more of your work.)

JR19759 said
Sorry for turning your thread into an argument Weilyn.

How dare you have an intellectual discussion of literature in my thread!? Shame on you, you naughty British people!

Seriously though, I hold Dickens and Shakespeare in pretty much as high regard, but on different merits. Dickens created great stories with amazingly well constructed characters, but his prose is, in my opinion, fairly basic. Shakespeare, on the other hand, was a brilliant artist when it came to slapping the words together, but his stories aren't really anything special.

Now, the reason I love Scrooge so much is because his personality doesn't really change from the beginning to the end of the novel. (Yes, I know his change is the whole point of the book, just go with me on this one.) All to often in stories when a character changes from "evil" to "good" their entire personality changes. The despicable monster learns the value of friendship, or some shit, and suddenly wants to hug everybody while puking rainbows and strawberry icecream.
Scrooge, on the other hand, start out as a sardonic dickish cynic, and at the end he still is a sardonic dickish cynic – just look at how he tries to trick Cratchit into believing he is going to fire him. Scrooge himself doesn't change a bit, but the way he views the world changes immensely, and that's really all that matters.
He's still a prick, but he's a sympathetic prick.

Huh… I hope that made any kind of sense, I'm not sure it did…
Anyway, glad you like the picture, thank you for your comments

TheSoupster said
As for the Scrooge, picture, weilyn, it looks amazing. Like other people have said, you've really nailed the expression on his face. He looks haunted…

Thank you! I often struggle with faces, but this one I think turned out pretty good.

Wow, this December has been even crazier than usual. I had so uch to do I didn't even have time to finish the book, much less playing around on the Machine

I never finished all the ghosts, but I'm not going to bother, to be honest. No reason to dwell in the past, maybe I'll give it a shot next year. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is closest to finished, though, so I'll post that at least.

A couple of weeks ago I finished this as well. It is an illustration of an originally Swedish tradition (now also spread to Denmark and to some extent Norway and Iceland), the celebration of Saint Lucy's Day (or Lucia, as well call her). Every December 13 young girls gather in coirs, dress in white, and bring light and warmth to the denizens of the dark and frozen North. It is one of my favourite days of the year, and I never miss the event on TV as well as the local church.

Probably should have missed it this year though… Swedish Television decided to spice up the boring old songs with some rap, for that urban gangsta flava.

…

There is no middle finger big enough…

Anyway:

And, finally, here's my take on Madame Malevolent, for Dblade's character contest.

As always, thanks for watching

The right leg doesn't line up with the foot properly, I'd use the downward angled foot. The right knee is pointing off at an unnatural angle anyway, so you might want to address that first. The head needs to be lowered slightly and the right arm seems slightly too small, maybe use the more muscular bent arm and angle it differently. I'd also use a different left hand, the reverse normal hand. Then use two shortened polls and mask a third on a square over the join, so you can mask one spear to two hands.
Hope this helps.