art

You are currently browsing articles tagged art.

So it’s been awhile since I posted anything at all. I suppose I should recap the last 8 months…

I stopped Nutrisystem because it was actually making me sick. I had lost about 19 pounds total on the program. I have since gained most of it back. I had hoped that eating healthier and more homemade stuff would keep the weight off, but alas and alack.

In March, Babylon and I moved in together. It may seem a little fast but we’ve known each other for 5 years now so there weren’t many surprises. We got a brand new 2 bedroom apartment and it’s fantastic. It’s not on the ground floor, so there’s fewer bugs that wander inside, and there are zero children running up to the patio, as it’s a balcony and it backs to a bunch of trees. It’s also controlled access for the most part, so I don’t get as many random unwanted visitors at the door.

I’ve been making about 80% of the meals we eat every week. Some are from scratch, some are semi-homemade, but it’s all been delicious. GatheredTable has been really great with helping that too. They send me new recipes and meal ideas all the time and it’s been pretty inspiring.

Oh and in a few weeks, late July, I’ll officially be an aunt to a lovely little nephew. My brother and his wife haven’t announced the name yet, but I’m so excited. I’ve been buying everything I see that has foxes on it, not only because the nursery is orange, but also because foxes are awesome. At the baby shower, I gave them a box, with many foxes, and some baby socks. Also, Dr. Seuss books, including Green Eggs and Ham and Fox in Socks. 

Babylon and my anniversary is the 4th and my birthday is next week. I bought myself a new 1TB Xbox One with a bunch of games as an early birthday present. I’ve been mostly playing Neverwinter though. I’m already level 55. Out of 60. And I’ve put way too much money into it, considering it’s a free to play game. But it’s awesome.

I’ve been working on the Carbon Saw stuff recently and I think I’m going to launch a new Indiegogo campaign soon for the new Dr. Voodoo game. Through the awesomeness of Udemy,  I’m trying to learn Swift and also WordPress coding to be able to create the game and make the site better. Carbon Saw is also officially an LLC now. It feels awesome to finally be doing something with my ideas.

I’ve been working freelance recently with a woman who is trying to preserve her family history into a book. It’s a pretty fun project and it’s helping me pay my bills so that’s always good.

I’m still doing tutoring on Saturdays too. It’s been more scarce because of the school year ending, but I’m supposed to see my student this Saturday. Hoping that actually happens.

This week, I’m at camp teaching animation to young children. We’re doing hand drawn on paper and stop motion with cameras and maybe some computer animation later with Scratch. It’s been fun but exhausting. And some of the kids are trouble, but most are pretty good. A few are really good at drawing and are picking up on the basic principles of animation pretty well. So that’s cool.

Well, it’s time for me to take the kids outside for a bit. Most are at the pool today, but a couple stayed behind with me to do more work and have fun with animation stuffs. I made a little video today for stop motion too. You can see it here. It’s a small tip of the hat to America for legalizing gay marriage and taking another step toward equality in this country. Go America!

Tags: , , , , ,

Otakon is next weekend and this will be my first time attending. Luckily, it’s not my first time making costumes. You can see some of my previous costumes if you’re my friend on Facebook or if you’re in my Google+ circles. I’ve done others costumes and never got pictures of them, but the most recent are:

Irish and I are doing Joker/Harley for Otakon on Saturday and then our group is doing Archer on Sunday. I’ll be Rona Thorne, the Russian sniper double agent. And Irish is going to be Cyril Figgus. He’d be a perfect Krieger, but he’s shaving his face for Joker, so that’s out. Over the next week, I need to fix up our costumes and find the last bits for my Rona costume.

Over the past several weeks, however, I’ve been working on Demon’s outfit – Cloud from Final Fantasy 7, the game. He’s commissioning me, so I was actually happy to do it. I had to make him some black pants, a pauldron, and a belt. I will also be bleaching/dying his hair to blonde. The pants took the most trouble, honestly. I had never made pants before. But they turned out pretty great. And although they’re not all that tight on his waist, they don’t fall down. They’re comfortable.

The pauldron took a lot of creative ingenuity. I ended up using a kneepad from Lowes as the base for it. Then added part of the second kneepad for the neck guard. To make it look like 2 layers of metal, I got crafty with some paper and thin cardboard. Then I coated the whole thing in duct tape, added film canisters as the spikes, and primed it. It wasn’t until after priming that I realized I hadn’t taken any progress shots. So here it is primed:

And then painted black, which is hard to see:

And then I painted it with a light, partially dry brushed coat of silver metallic:


And finally, with the straps all sewn together and on Demon, himself:



I even got him the wolf emblem to clip onto the strap. I was going to put it on the front of the pauldron, but he liked it better this way, so that works for me.

I’ll post the process and pics of the belt next.

Tags: , , , ,

I’m very proud of my awesome creation of the day. I had been working on it off and on for a few days and trying to figure out the ActionScript for it to work. I had a breakthrough today and here it is. My spinning compass of awesome. It’s in Flash, so that’s unfortunate for iStuff, but hey, at least computers can view it, and maybe some Droids too.

Hopefully this will be the beginning of many more fun, animated and pretty things at work. Though that means more work for me, it also means more recognition. And they’ll need me to stay around to keep doing these types of things. I hope.

Tags: ,

Based on feedback from some of my friends/readers/interwebs, I’m going to be changing the blog a bit:

  • shorter posts
  • more frequent posts
  • more focused on the topic
  • maybe add some images
  • and maybe redo the layout design (might mean moving the blog to my own server, which I don’t really want to do)

If I could use the same design I have right now, but maybe move the sidebar to the right and change the color scheme a bit, that’d be cool. I’d like to use an image of my own as the header too. But I can’t seem to do that without uploading a whole design. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done wordpress design before (see: talesofthegrey.com), but again, that was hosted on their server. And datapike.com is unavailable. I think it was open when I first adopted the handle, but shortly after that it got scooped up by spammers/squatters. Dammit. Maybe I’ll try to get datapike.net …. sigh… I don’t know.

Post your thoughts in the comments.

Tags: , ,

Just one more hour to go. And I’ve finished everything I have to get done at work this year. Here’s hoping nothing plops onto my desk at the last minute this time. And as long as I have the appearance of being busy, the girls shouldn’t be shunting anything off onto me. *fingers crossed*

So in the interest of enjoying my new iPad, using the iTunes card my supervisor gave me for Christmas, and also getting back into drawing stuffs, I bought Sketchbook Pro for $3 (normally $8ish) on the App Store, and after seeing reviews for Inspire Pro, bought that too, for $1 (also normally $8ish). And since I know I’m hopeless at drawing with a fingertip, I went ahead and bought a Pogo Stylus on Amazon.com for about $8 (normally $15). I have just received confirmation that it has been delivered and I can pick it up from my doorstep when I get home. So excited to play around with it! I need some drawing ideas though. That was always my biggest problem: inspiration. I can draw from life just fine, but when it comes to drawing randomness from my head… well I suck.  In fact, there’s really not anything random in my head as far as visuals go. Not anymore, if there ever was.

And now I’ve killed enough time that there’s only 45 minutes left til my 3-day weekend starts. Yay.

Tags: , , , , ,

Turned in my final from last semester instead, the crime scene thing. Oh well.

Tags: , ,

Mike fell asleep. We’re fucked. Oh wait, no… I’M fucked!

Tags: , ,