For all you shatter is our seeming, And in breaking we are free

Just something I've been musing on recently. When you personalise your desktop, what kind of images do you use?

I ask mostly because both my sisters seem to mostly use fannish images, and I ... sort of don't. Neither do my parents, but they seem to use personal photographs (or the free images that come with the laptop, but in her defence, some of those are genuinely nice), rather than other images. I don't really do either.

WIP sorta thing. I call it Alien Tower, because I can't name things for love nor money.

Here: http://icarus-chained.deviantart.com/art/Alien-Tower-sketch-134926181

Following the pen around a page again. A woman-type thing, this time. I call her Sphinx.
http://icarus-chained.deviantart.com/art/Sphinx-121657098

And a really old drawing that's been on my bedroom wall for years: Space Dust
http://icarus-chained.deviantart.com/art/Space-Dust-121663412

I'm drawing again, just on a whim, and suddenly I've remembered why art was my favourite class after english in school. Not because I was any good at it (I'm not), but because there is something so very relaxing about watching your hands shape a face on paper. Digging your thumb into the page, drawing shade out to build it up, make it real, finding the logic of line and shade and shape that everything has ... I look at pictures, sometimes, photos of faces, and find myself tracing the shape of them with my thumb over my own features. There's a kind of tactile intimacy about drawing a face, touching without touching, understanding without knowing, tracing lines with your fingers from a distance ... there's just an intimacy and a warmth and a roundness to the experience that's so beautiful and soothing. Even if you hate the person in real life, when you're drawing, just for a minute, it doesn't matter because all you can think is that the lines of this face, the texture of it, is so very beautiful.

It's ... a stranger intimacy again when you're not drawing from life, or even a photo, but from a picture in your head. Then you have to build that internal logic of line and light, find a face beneath your fingers that you've never seen, shape someone from the soul up.

Drawing ... I'd forgotten the fundamental satisfaction and honour and fun of it.