Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Handy Dandy

Just came back from handing in my portfolio. That was it. That was the best I could do in three months time. I'll find out if I get invited back for an exam around the end of June. If there are no ecstatic/hysterical posts toward the end of June, that's probably because I'm sitting quietly in the corner of my room weeping. Haha! Well. All jokes aside, I'm glad it's finally out of my hands. Now I can start to relax . . . kind of. Will keep drawing and practicing, though.

I've also been playing around with the blog. Let me know if the new format is hard to read or distracting. The background is actually taken from a piece that I put in my portfolio.

Anywho! Today's comic is inspired by Tze's post "Always handy to have chopsticks." Tze is a Dutch cartoonist of Taiwanese descent living and working in Frankfurt. I stumbled onto her blog from a link on the octopus pie website, and got excited when I found lots of commonalities between us (female Asian polyglots of multicultural background living in Germany and drawing webcomics, in short). She draws and writes about food, cultures, sweets, more food, and a variety of episodes in her daily life. I'm always impressed at how well thought-out her stories and sophisticated her style is---sorry if I've unconsciously stolen any ideas/techniques! Anyway, this comic deals with a common theme of ours---random moments when we're reminded that we're, well, Asians. haha. Anyway, go check out her blog!


Oh, and the model of the woman with glasses is a former boss of mine. She's American, but she's lived in Japan for nearly 40 years now and is, well, pretty much Japanese in a lot of ways. I just couldn't stop smiling at how cute she looked when she was making us tea and dipped her old cooking chopsticks (saibashi) into the kettle to fish out the tea bag. One of those moments when you forget that she's actually American.

Righty. Off to enjoy the rest of my day. I'm going to allow myself to have guilt-free fun today, and then it's back to German homework and drawing tomorrow!

Jesus. Long enough post, eh?

9 comments:

  1. Hurray, thank you so much for the mention! Quite a long one too. :O Ich freue mich!
    Like the new style, though yeah, the text is actually a bit difficult to read... maybe make the blog background (not the wallpaper) a bit darker?
    Ohh... I cook pasta with chopsticks as well!

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  2. Oh, and the Popular Posts is a good add on. I've been wanting to do something like that too but I use Wordpress instead of Blogger... no idea how to do it. But maybe my blog has too many pictures anyway, making it difficult to load.

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  3. Glückwunsch! Hopefully you can relay a little bit that time. You wanna go outsite this saturday. looks to be the only not rainy day this week....

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  4. chopsticks especially for sticking in the toaster! smaller chance of getting electrocuted.

    i also use them to test if my cakes are done baking

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  5. T: My pleasure! :D It was long long LOONG overdue! And thanks for the feedback; the simple design editor thing didn't give me a choice of HOW transparent (%) I wanted the background, so I just opted for just a simple solid background. I think it's easier to read that way! :)

    R: Danke!!! Sorry for not answering your text last night; I actually didn't see it until this morning. urk. Oh man, is the weather going to be crappy this week? Bluuurgh.

    M: Yes. Smaller chance of getting electrocuted is always fine by me! And yes. I also use the long cooking chopsticks to move things around in the back of the oven!

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  6. I just saw this one Noz - it's so true! The toaster one is a favourite of mine. And I never mix a gin and tonic with anything other than a chopstick. Is that allowed, to just use one? Probably not very authentically Asian, but it's something a friend did in Beijing that I adopted while I was there. Can't do it any other way now!

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  7. Yes! Mixing drinks definitely calls for a single chopstick. I mix my coffee with chopsticks too, actually. You should never question your Asianness Beth...! You're 100% authentic Asian-at-heart.

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  8. another common thing is that yours are the two blogs I actually bought comics from :)

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