In which I play with Christmas Playmobil and other pretty things

I meant to do a blog post last night but I was busy having fun with the unfortunately name Gimp program. I tried before to learn how to use it and even invited someone round only to spend the evening using his DS. I don't entirely call that a wasted evening though. Anyhow it seems to me that the best way to learn in the end is just trying to teach myself. I have also decided that the secret to any of these programs like gimp or Photoshop is brushes and 'opacity.'

Brushes!

Woop.

Sorry that was me showing off my brushes. Ah. So by 'brushes' I mean the secret is cheating and using premade art work by other people to do your own. Also please believe me that the final product was a bit more tasteful than the above.

The world is a little bit up and down at the moment. I keep counting 'good things' and 'bad things' in my head. The situation is that I have lots of good things right now, but lots of bad things coming up so bad things now is mostly worry. In fact that is it, there are plenty of things to be happy about but nagging worries in the back of my mind. Like the fact that I was left a note yesterday telling me that something terrible is going to happen to this town on the 12^th December. That really left me unsettled.

One of the things I am happy about is I just bought some more playmobil. More Christmas playmobil! This is it:

Oh yeah! Don't you wish you had a camel and some finely dressed gentlemen on your mantlepiece?

If you read my blog earlier you may have seen that I am rather obsessed with collecting and playing with playmobil even though I may be older than their official target audience. Once of the things I love doing with playmobil is setting up a scene.

To me it isn't all "Ha ha! I have you again Mr. Bandit," but more creating a freeze frame of a moment, leaving it for a week of so and then creating the next moment in the story after that. In each 'frame' or 'scene' I imagine the back-story and who all the people are and what got them to that point. I've done this for a very long time actually. It's more like story brainstorming in a way.

Or just me being silly. I think I just tried to justify the fact that I have too much fun. The overall scene. Here everyone is having a Christmas party hosted by the magical team who run all our seasons. Father Christmas does not go to them, they go to him.

Here a ninja and a pirate share a toast together, because it is Christmas.

Here the zombies eat a rabit rather than a human because it is Christmas. Also an explorer is surrepticiously checking what is in their brains.

I also had a king sharing a hip flask with a pirate (because it is Christmas) and a wolf with red eyes being petted by a small child (because it is Christmas). I love these little touches.