Five days from now, I’ll be turning 26. I haven’t really thought about how to celebrate it—I just have a lot of work to do—so maybe I’ll just have a quiet dinner with family and some old friends.

I honestly find it a huge relief to be able to blog again. I’ve passed up quite a lot of blogger and press events for the past month (damn, I so wanted to go to the Interior Design exhibit that Blooey invited me to, going there would have given me cool ideas when we finally have the funds for a house renovation), and I still haven’t gotten my usual monthly movie fix. I just don’t have the time. It’s a miracle I even found time to breathe 😛

A week ago, Marc was starting to pity my sorry state. Or maybe he felt guilty, since I still found time to cook for him regardless of my uberly busy schedule (in fairness, he’s the one doing the laundry). He finally admitted to me what he said to Abe when they were scouting for a laptop more than a month ago—he wanted to get me a Wacom Intuous 3 for my birthday.

Since I’ve been such a hard-working good girl, my husband bought me an early birthday present:

Ok fine. It was partly because of my loud mouth I got this cool gadget sooner than I turned 26. I was complaining to him how hard it was to draw on paper, scanning it, then retouching in Photoshop. It must have been fate, since the most recent project we had required quite a lot of illustrations. So there. I finally got the 9”x12” Wacom Intuous 3 professional tablet I’ve been dreaming of for who knows how long.

No, I’m not selling my Logitech G3 laser mouse. I still need it. There are just some things that are easier done using a mouse. But the pen tablet has been quite useful whenever I draw, and that is something that I rarely used to do.

To be honest, I have always been insecure about my traditional art skills. If your dad can take awesome pictures and draw very realistic portraits, your mom can work magic with watercolor and oil paint, and your younger sister can sketch landscapes better than you can ever dream of doing—you just can’t help but question if you were born into the right family. I have ventured into abstract, but honestly, I sometimes can’t even make out whatever I’ve tried to say and express in the outcome. There was always something missing, you know?

I’ve long accepted the fact that cartoons will always be my “art specialty”—well, cartoons are the only ones I can think of that would somehow be at par with what my family can do. But I never dreamed I could do something like this:

I made this graphic card for the Toblerone Thank You Day site as part of a client project of our web design company. Go there if you’d like to send it to a special someone as a Thank You card (I have more illustrations there, as well as some by Rina Albert). I know it’s not much, but I’m proud of it. It’s the first painting I’ve done in a long time, and the very first I made using my Intuous.

I guess now’s the time to finally accept the fact that no matter how much I like traditional paper, pencil, and paint, they never really liked me. My PC and Photoshop are the ones friendlier, and I should stick to that so I won’t feel so insecure anymore 😛