Slime Mansion

This was an illustration, or I guess a series of mini-illustrations, done for a class I had last spring taught by Dorte Christjansen, one of my very favorite professors I've had at Fullerton thus far. :D It was our first project and we were to choose two subjects and arrange them together in various ways based on certain criteria and illustration techniques she taught us, and being a fag for cats and plants of course I chose to do the flower and cat. :')

It was during this semester that I got Rupert. I think shortly after this project was due. Aheheh. >__> Even the little cat in the middle-left illustration looks like Rupert--I can't remember if it was just because I had already seen a photo of him, or if it was because I've just subconsciously always wanted a cat exactly like him. o_o

Anyway, mediums used in this project include pencils, color pencils, inks, watercolor, and gouache.

It's been a busy week, and it looks like it's gonna remain that way until next Wednesday at least, but I feel like lately I've finally been getting a better hang of managing my time properly. My room's actually pretty orderly and clean right now, which is to say that I'm not dying I guess.

A long, long time ago I made the emblem for the Alatus Institute using just pen and rulers and stuff, and scanned that into the computer and somehow vectorized it using some shady freeware that I managed to find that automatically converted it for me. Of course, the nature of shady freeware that automatize tasks that require the intuition of a real live human being meant that the same vector file I've been using since 2002 or whatever has been fundamentally flawed, and me being a vector dummy did nothing about it.

Usually the logo was either small enough or obscured enough that I think most people probably didn't notice how crooked and crappily-made it was (or did they??), but it's always bothered me nonetheless. SO, one of the first things I did when I actually learned how to work with Illustrator (other than the Slime Mansion logo) was re-vectorize the Alatus emblem! Properly!

Woo new emblem woo silky smooth mmm!

...E-except when I showed my friend Tina, she commented on how the old emblem looked more organic while the new one felt a bit sterile. :< Ohwell. So now I've got some hand-drawn renditions of the emblem that I'm working on instead. 8D() I'm thinking that ultimately I'll probably end up with maybe three versions of the emblem: the current new one, a simplified one, and a hand-drawn organic-looking one. And I guess I'll just alternate between the three on a case-by-case basis?

ramblerambleramble I'm going to bed good night XO

The second Illustrator project in my digital illustration class this semester was to make a internet game background based on a theme he provides each of us. The theme I was given was "heaven." I had a tossed a few ideas around for it, but ultimately I ended up drawing cows again, + other livestock? aheheh. o_o

The week before the project was due my professor taught us how to use the gradient mesh tool, which I ended up abusing for the entire project. It was a bit of a masochistic endeavor in that it took forever to do, but I sorta liked it. >__> I had vowed to myself that I wouldn't stay up all night again for this project like I did the last, but alas! Better luck next time D:

Incidentally, I just got a job (!!) as a graphic artist in my school's Graphic Services department (hurray steady income!!) so I guess I'll be getting a lot more practice with vector stuff from now on. :X But normal pencils and digital paint illustrations will always be my true love!!!

Last semester in my business writing class, we had a group project where we had to come up with a business plan to present to class. The idea I came up with for my group was Cottontale Creations, an online t-shirt company that specializes in "Comic Tees"--t-shirts that tell stories. Basically, the plan was to set up this t-shirt company where we would release t-shirts in a series of three shirts or so, where each illustration on a shirt represents a "panel" within a comic, and all three shirts put together tell a complete story. The example we used for our presentation were these little doodles I made of Little Red Ridinghood:

These were sketches done of Rupert last year before I started drawing the actual comic. I guess it's sort of like pre-production, except my thought process when it comes to comics is not nearly as refined and polished enough to really label it as such. 8D() A bit of experimentation with different outfits and minor changes to his hair going on, with a bit of extreme winter sports thrown in there. o_o

As always my thumbnails are a complete mess and indecipherable to anybody but myself. And yes, a lot of the panel boxes are empty too--usually if I just place the box where it's supposed to go in the thumbnail, it gives me enough of a reminder as to what's gonna go in there. If you can even tell what's going on, the final layout ended up a tad bit different, but for the most part it's all there? ah ha ha why am I even posting this _-_

Not actually a real book cover though; this was a project done back in Spring '08 in my Illustration class. The assignment was to pick a book and create a new book cover for it using illustration techniques and mediums we learned in the class. I asked my professor if I could use my own book (so that way it's more relevant to the rest of my gallery 8D()) and she OK'd it, so this was what came out of it!

The whole thing was done in gouache on a big 18"x24" piece of I think watercolor paper that my professor gave to me, and one of the most distressing aspects about the project was finding a scanner for this thing! XO Originally it was scanned in pieces and put together on the computer, except the colors were totally crappy when I did that. Eventually we found a Kinko's with a large-scale scanner which I had to pay like $10 to use, but at least it gave me an image that was actually presentable! @_@

Incidentally, I did some more work on my Art Archives from Wednesday and now I have an automated script set up to thumbnail anything I upload and display onto the server on the fly. ;D This'll give me more motivation to upload my sketches cause I won't have to worry about thumbnailing them all the time now!! Woooo @_@

Spent a bit of time today revising the main index for the Art Archive on this site so that it's a little more attractive. Before it was just some bulleted links that took up maybe 5% of the total space on the page, aheheh. Unfortunately the actual contents of the folders are still plain ol' text links, so I'm lookin' into fixing that up so that I can get it to easily generate thumbnails whenever I upload stuff onto my server. I know there are a few PHP scripts that can do that out there, but they're a little too complicated for my needs, which is basically to just chuck my files into the archive, let it display as a thumbnail (without me having to manually make each file into a thumbnail), and be done with it. XO

(yeah sry, I'm not witty enough to come up with some elaborate April Fool's hoax. ...or more like I'm just too lazy to. >_>)