Quick Pic Wednesdays! - Yasmin in the club

Happy Wednesday everyone!

As you'll have noticed, I've (provisionally) re-titled WIP Wednesdays. I feel I'm not so much posting works in progress as pics I've created more quickly than usual. 

Quick Pic Wednesdays is a bit bland, though. I could do with a good fat-related punning title that incorporates the idea of a quickly created pic, along with an update on what I'm doing. If I did them on Fridays, they could be "Fast Fatty Friday", but that still isn't particular good. 

Any ideas would be very welcome! 😊

I actually quite like the feeling of being slightly rushed to get a pic out every week. I don't reckon the results are that much worse than when I spend ten to fifteen hours posing, editing, tweaking and so on, as I end up doing with most of the others (there's definitely some study in photography literature about having a deadline and producing quantity leading to better quality than perfectionism).

Anyway, this week we have my first attempt at a character I've not illustrated before: Yasmin Narcisse (Yaz to her friends) from I've got to stop eating these. Her face will probably evolve a bit, and her surname might change, but I'm happy with how her shape came out in this pic.

But how did that shape come about... 

Well, Yaz is a nurse turned beautician, who opened her own small salon in Chester just before the Coronavirus lockdowns hit. At first this seemed like disastrously bad luck, but Yaz was just in time to jump on the government grants and furlough bandwagon and managed to come out of lockdown better off than she'd gone into it, mainly by making money on the side travelling to clients houses to top up their treatments - something she and many of her clients probably considered an essential service, though authorities would probably have taken a different view!

Since re-opening, Yaz turns a tidy profit, helped by the opening of several new bars and restaurants on the same street, including a new Chippy right next door to her salon. Initially objecting to this, Yaz dropped her protests when the owners promised free lunches for her and her employees.

Which may account for her recent need to replace the salon's stools with a larger size.

In addition to battered sausage and chips, Yaz enjoys Nepalese curries, Sicilian pizzas and espresso martinis. Though whether she'll eat more pavlova than Kari remains to be seen. We'll find out soon.

Tim certainly hopes so, or he'll be in deep shit come New Year's Day!

What I worked on this week
Mostly been working on the Kari Christmas story follow up: Take these away from me, and Christmassy pic of Gemma for our competition winner, provisionally titled Gemma's nightmare before Christmas.

What's been inspiring me?
The Stoic principle of Memento mori. I'm a bit of an enthusiast (sucker?) for all the self-help, productivity and live-better philosophy and lifestyle stuff that's popular these days: Daily Stoic, Tim Ferris, Robert Greene, etc... 

Memento mori ('remember you will die') sounds a bit morbid, but is actually a great mantra to live by. When I remind myself that I don't have unlimited time, that the people closest to me might not wake up tomorrow, I find I almost see the world in more vivid colours, cheesy as that sounds, and that I focus and dedicate myself much more to the things and people that matter to me - including working on my WG stories and pics, and feeling an urgency to get things finished and posted rather than flitting from project to project. 

...Well, more so than before, anyway.

There you go: philosophy and fat girls. What more could you want on a Wednesday evening? 😄