My Illustrative Life

I want to buy stuff. But I have no paying job and therefore no money to buy stuff, so instead I guess I will just talk about stuff I want to buy.

If you want to employ me? PLEASE DO. Ask me to draw you a picture for money! I will!

Anyway: Summer lovin’. Summer lovin’ is a thing I do not tend to do; I don’t know how to dress for summer and that makes me cross. T-shirts tend to swamp me, vest tops make me paranoid about my boobs hanging out, most for-girls summer tops are either too staid or too scene or too girly. I bring it on myself, I know. I’m picky! Except for that if I did like them, then they still wouldn’t fit because I am short. Comfortable fit is important, in summer.

But I was having a think this weekend, about what I can/like to wear: sweaters, and what I don’t like to wear: cardigans, and how cardigans are actually summer sweaters. And I thought, well wearing a cardigan over a shirt may be the worst kind of frictionous restraint for me but wearing a cardigan AS a shirt might actually.. work.

So now I WANNA DO THAT.

Cardigans that button up all the way to the collar, not so much v-necks, so they lie like button-down shirts and any undone-ness or flesh airing is on my terms and on purpose. Cardigans that are tight enough to touch my skin everywhere, rather than wrapping vaguely or bagging.

Basically a bunch of punchy knit shirts, is what I want.

These are all from Laura Ashley. They had a pretty great deep purple, white polka-dot version last autumn and I passed it up because I hadn’t thought of undershirtless-wearing yet. Shucks!

Penelope Cruz up there is as her character Raimunda (good name!) in the film Volver - which I found interesting and in some ways inspiring, but would maybe not say that I ‘enjoyed’. She got to wear a lot of colour (and a lot of colours all at once) in that movie, though, which I like - and managed to work the badunkadunk and look overworked-sloppy despite the neat woolen pencil skirts (which I have!) and the whole cardigan-over-shirt thing. I could relate to the sulky refusals and grudges of her character, too. Not the specifics!

I’m not so sure I like the two green examples on the bottom right, actually; they’re a bit too fussy and studied. I want something I can bang around in and warp to my own image instead of live up to neatly - to me cardigans are conservative and sensible, which I am not and don’t aspire to be. But I think the spotty one or the printed ones or the checkered faux-faux-Chanel one down at the bottom could look awesome and crossoverish with the top and bottom buttons undone with a tan and icecream and frazzled-from-dampening hair on a sunny grassy afternoon.

Don’t you think?

I find Ironside very visually inspiring.

It was always a second-stringer detective show, to my mind. Probably because as a child there was nothing much for me to get excited about; Quincy had a lot of shouting, and Charlie’s Angels was kicky, and so on. But recently I’ve started to really appreciate it. I think the direction is great, I love the sets, the clothes, the.. I’m not sure if it counts as cinematography because I think what I mean is “how it looks like it is from The Olden Days, because it is”. I really like the team dynamic and the character interactions are fun. A police detective calling his squad “children” in a non-Gene Hunt sort of way is nice.

Again, I have a load of stills up on my tumblr; here is a taste.