Hazel Jean Larson

( Kyle )

I really want to have a water balloon fight in the park where the balloons are filled with glitter and paint (water-soluble and non-toxic, of course!) so even if you lose, you win.

Also, I came across this today, and I'm obsessed: Bold Line Drawings Layered on Top of Deconstructed Images of Fruit, Flowers, and Animals in Tattoos by Mattia Mambo. brb adding Milan to the list of places I totally have to go for art reasons.

( Katie )

I'm looking forward to kicking all your butts on Saturday! (◠‿◠✿)

Previously, she was Lucy Pevensie from the Chronicles of Narnia books. While evacuated to the country to avoid the Blitz, 8-year-old Lucy discovered Narnia in the back of a wardrobe. Her three older siblings eventually follow her there, and through the course of their adventures, they save Narnia from the White Witch. They spend fifteen years there, ruling together as four kings and queens--Lucy is crowned Queen Lucy the Valiant--and then stumble back to their own world entirely on accident, where no time is passed and there are all children again. She returns to Narnia two more times during her life--once when she's 9, with all three of her siblings, and then again when she's 11, with her brother Edmund and cousin Eustace--and then has to live a normal life until she dies in a train crash at 17 and gets to return to Narnia forever, along with the other Friends of Narnia.

Now she's Hazel Jean Larson, 27. Hazel grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, which she loved. Her family never had a ton of money, but she got to run until her legs gave out and then sprawl out in a field and watch the clouds go by. She enjoyed taking care of the animals, which were also the subjects of her early attempts at life drawing. As long as Hazel did her chores and her homework, she otherwise had the freedom to do whatever she wanted. This usually meant drawing on every scrap of paper she could get her hands on and later, when she needed a bigger canvas to work with, she painted murals on the sides of the barn and the shed. To keep herself from drawing in the margins of her school books, she usually doodled on herself or her friends with gel pens. She wasn't a perfect student--she was sometimes too busy daydreaming, and for a few weeks when she was fourteen she smuggled a kitten to school with her every day because it needed bottle-feeding and there was simply no one else to do it--but she did her best. Hazel has always been pretty hopeless with computers, though. She's fine with gentle ribbing about it from friends, but actual teasing upsets her. She wants to be better at it! She loves video games! She really should be more competent at the digital art stuff! It's just not something that clicks in her brain.

Her parents would have preferred if she'd become a veterinarian (she did love animals, after all), but Hazel couldn't imagine spending all those years in school, and her science grades weren't good enough to get her through an undergraduate program, let alone into vet school. Her older brother definitely would have preferred if she'd stayed closer to home for school, so he could keep an eye on her; he was always protective and she always worshipped him a little bit. But she ended up moving down to New Orleans to get her BFA in studio art at Tulane, and even if her family would have preferred it otherwise, they were supportive (and pretty consistently lure her home for holidays and home-cooked meals). Hazel grabs most art opportunities that come her way, but her most consistent work has been as a concept artist, especially for video games. She likes helping to shape the story, bringing the characters and the world to life. Oh, and she has a pet duck. She rescued him about a year ago and named him Rusty, after her brother. She maintains that the resemblance is uncanny.

Hazel is currently unaware.