I'm sometimes human, so...
Damn real life. Damn it. I'm usually online drawing, working and chatting with my "fursona" Elly, but if I'm not you can be sure Real Life, that fun-sucker as it sometimes is, has pulled me away from Happy Town.
Anyway. Elly Sketchit (sometimes known as Sanji's Angel or Roronoas, previously known as L4J, maiden name Mango) is actually Michelle Taylor, a 30-something artist that simply loves odd things. The short story of what happened to me after high school was that I went to college and hated it. One of my art professors was a marvelous man who offered me my first mural job, painting a castle wall scene for a rather wealthy businessman - the one that owned the original Batmobile, in fact. I left college after having been told by all my teachers that "I didn't need it" and ended up freelancing for a few years. I really wanted to learn digital art at that point and went to BCSI to get my degree. Some years after that my husband found me on DeviantArt as sanjisangel (I have several other handles, including "airlobster") and I ended up moving to the middle of the USA with him, where I still am now. If I'm too busy to create (draw, sew, sculpt), I get a headache. Despite my always being busy I have low blood pressure disease, am bipolar and have been known to faint up to 20 times a day. I'm also mildly dsylexic and mix letters and numbers around quite often. (If you see a mistake on the site feel free to contact me)!
I've also always needed to rein in the obsessive compulsiveness I generate over anything I come into contact with. I run the biggest Roronoa Zoro fan site on the 'net, to give you an example. I also run the Anime Estrogen Brigade, my forums here where people kind of ''like me'' can obsess over everything they want ...in relative peace instead of being hounded and/or flamed. Drawing and writing keeps my mind more or less in check as well as bringing in some much-needed income to our household. That said, I'm on the internet in a lot of different places. I've been on-again, off-again on many sites due to the combination of art thieves, flamers, random idiots and my temper.
Interests and Dislikes
If you want more personal crap you can read on I suppose. There's not much. I'm not here to puff up my own ego - I suck. Basically I'm middle-aged, married, and fat as hell. I'm not only an artist but a horror-survival lovin' gamer chick that adores anime, manga and collecting all the plushes she can (yes, including beanie babies). My favorite animals are poodles, hedgehogs (I also own 2 poodles and a hedgie) and everything that's alive except nasty people, spiders and insects of various sorts.
So, hey. How about one of those Annoying Like/Dislike Lists. Why not, right? Okay - I can think of a thousand reasons not, but I'm gonna do it anyway. I've gotten rid of the obvious I LIKE LOBSTERS category. Hurrrr.
Elly  Likes |
Elly  Dislikes |
| One Piece: the REAL one. Japanese. | |
| Roronoa Zoro: Warning! Fangirlism activated. | |
| Early 'They Might Be Giants' music. | |
| Pirates: Real ones. Fave - Francois l'Ollonais. | |
| Coffee: all kinds, except, of course... | |
| Old School Nintendo: Fave - Legend of Zelda 2. | |
| Silent Hill 2: Fave horror-survival game/series. | |
| Animals: all kinds, although I like poodles a lot. |
Elly Sketchit: the Character
The lavender cat creature Elly Sketchit as seen on this website is what is known as a nekomata in Japan. It was believed that after a cat grew to be a decade old, it would develop profound magical powers, typically exhibited by either a tail split halfway down or even splicing into two seperate tails. By gesturing with this tail, a nekomata can animate and control the dead to do their bidding and other various types of magic. In a lot of the art drawn on the site Elly is hiding a section of her split tail behind the first fork as not to alarm others.
She learned the hard way not to show people what she is. Elly was born a long, long time ago in Japan when people believed Gods, Demons and Spirits roamed the earth. She was taken care of by a well-to-do family who were lower-class nobles. She lived to nine years old and on the eve of her tenth birthday the family threw her out, fearing what she might become. Sad and completely confused, she stayed where she was until a pack of dogs chased her into the streets of the town nearby. She would have been killed if a larger dog had not suddenly charged out a side street and chased the others off. This dog turned to her and all she heard an echo of laughter, tinged with bitterness.
It turns out the Gods were hanging around with mortals. The strange red dog was Loki, taking a cruise around Japan for a change. He found it enormously amusing (and ironic) to change her into the creature her former family had feared so much. He gave her the form and powers associated with the nekomata - the ability to control the "dead" with a wave of her tail. She could also now change form to several different variations, including one so human she was able to walk around undetected in the streets.
Elly didn't go back to her human family. She shunned humans, preferring the closest form to her original cat body that she could achieve, but soon found the people wouldn't talk to her in that guise. She grudgingly began to change back and forth and enter the strange people's world from time to time. Castles lay abandoned from time to time when superstitious people thought they were "haunted", so she raised a few dead humans and emptied a castle for herself. Loki (who had been hanging around for awhile) named it "Moy Mell", (properly Magh Mell) which means 'The Pleasant Plain', one of the three ideas connected with the ancient Irish conception of the 'Happy Otherworld' or Pagan Paradise.
The nekomata woman lived many years, seemingly immortal. She endured visits from her 'protector' from time to time, fending off his spurious advances. It was around the year 1976 when she discovered she could also raise inanimate objects like she could dead ones. Technically, it's the same thing but she never realized this. The discovery led to her travelling around and "rescuing" thrown-away toys, objects and neglected pieces of family heritage and such. She brings them back to Moy Mell where they can live life happily instead of feeling the pain of rejection and loss like she did.
