Slime Mansion

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:

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 @_@

For our first real project in my Digital Illustration class, we were to choose a subject and create a circular emblem of sorts for it in black and white using Illustrator. Examples for subjects included things like sports, dance, hobbies, people, etc. etc. I chose to do mine on dairy products. :B

This was pretty much my first serious attempt at doing stuff in Illustrator outside of the Slime Mansion logo I did before, so a lot of time was spent fudging around, but basically I became very familiar with the Blend Tool while working with this project @_@ Although I haven't really used it again; it's good for black-and-white stuff, but the next project we did was in color, so I became best friends with a different tool for that one, which I'll post here eeeveentuaallyyyy!

This semester I'm taking a Digital Illustration class where, for the first time ever, I'm learning Adobe Illustrator! O_O Vector stuff had always intimidated me because I never really gave it a shot before (and I didn't have Illustrator or any other vector-producing programs), so a lot of things I've done in the past that could've been better if it were in vectors were instead done by hand and Photoshop.

That being said, one of the first things I did when I learned the basics of Illustrator was a vectorized version of the Slime Mansion logo. 8D

Go ahead. Keep zooming in. 8) And just for reference, here's the old raster version of the logo:

...It's not such a HUUGE difference really, but at the time I felt really proud of myself? :D() I've since gotten a better grip of Illustrator, and while I'm not QUITE dying to vectorize everything in my life just yet, I AM pretty excited by the possibility of blowing images up to dimensions of several feet and relishing the razor-smooth edges of my lovely lovely vectors. :B We've had two projects so far using Illustrator with a third due in a couple of weeks, so I'll post those up in the near future!

First thing's first: updates will most definitely be resuming come next Thursday, August 28th!! I've been making more breakthroughs in the script for the overall story lately, so I am very excited to get this thing back up and rolling! I've got the next several pages inked already so there should be absolutely no excuse for me to not finish something.

Also, I finally got my butt moving with finishing streamlining the layout for this site! This includes all the sub-sections like the Guestbook and Links, and but the whole site is now a lot more unified! :D What haven't been streamlined however are the Shop and the Forums--for the shop, I've simply linked to the Mansion Boutique at my portfolio site for now, and for the forums, eeehhh that will just have to wait. 9_9

Additionally, I've also updated the Gallery with all the current illustrations I have related to Directions of Destiny, as well as FAN ART!! Some of which have been sitting in my E-mail Inbox for over two years waiting to be put up @w@! So definitely give those a look :D

Links have also been updated to reflect most of my current webcomics reading list.

Otakon came and went and as always it's fantastic meeting all the Directions of Destiny fans in person! I'm sorry I ran out of copies of the book to sell, but I will definitely attend again next year, but this time with plenty of both Unit 1 and Unit 2 in stock!!

I'll see you all next week with the update!! 8D