Crocodiles, Retail, and Justin Bieber.

Halloween is awesome. Thus the whole month of October is mostly (more on the mostly later) awesome. I totally meant to do some spooky drawings. But somehow, my Spooktacular (how great would it be if spellcheck thought "Spooktacular" was a real word?) ideas did not happen on paper. All I have for the month of October, besides Wonder Woman, is this pitiful sketch of a dead croc, done in/out of poor taste and boredom. I am not happy about this, but here we are. I may vector it, without the plane, because I kinda like the P.O.'d/confused crocodile. In my disappointment in myself I have a tiny bit of pride in my ability to draw a crocodile on command.



Let's blame some of the responsibility of my lack of arting on my real world job. It sucks the life and thus the creativity out of me. Not all the time, but seasonal has started and that means the crazies are crazier and the assholes are more...assholy. Yes. I don't know if you've ever experienced working in a toy store when people are shopping for the holidays. I do not suggest it. At the very least it will lower your love of humanity seriously, and possibly turn you into a horrible bitter shell of a person, like moi. I've never enjoyed Christmas and now just have further reasons to fear it's approachment (this is totally a word and spellcheck is just going to have to let this go). People are scum and there is no joy in the world for retail workers come October-December. You think on that the next time you're out shopping.

And on a totally random note, I dare anyone to find a girly-er pic of Justin Bieber. The v-neck and what is obviously a glittery necklace is not helping your "I am not a small girl but really a pubescent boy" image, Justin (this random blurb about Bieber is part of the "blabbings" part of this blog, like my review of Twilight, and I wouldn't feel the need to poke fun at a child if I wasn't forced to listen to his music on a daily basis).



So yeah. I might get my Halloweeny ideas on paper or jump right to having to paint people's presents. Because omg it's November already. I need to get back on some kind of art schedule. Hopefully I'll have more art to show for November. At the very least I'll have a finished vector for Pocketful again, since that is due December 1st...

Holidays and Such.

Thought I should update. :P This is for you Sharon.

Been working on sketching and some painting the past couple months. Didn't do too much during the summer besides sketch, but now that school is in full swing for most of my friends here I've gotten into the habit of painting at least once a week, usually at the college I gradated from, in the company of my boyfriend as he works on homework. Would be more if I didn't have to, you know, eat and pay bills by working retail. Another toy store for me, though this one is much more...strict? Driven? Business-like? I assume this is how they've managed to stay afloat in this economy, but I miss KB still. You got to play there.

Anywho. Back to art. Been working on a new portfolio, to market to card companies. Here is what have so far, as of characters.






Christmas, Hanukkah, Thanksgiving and Halloween (click on the images to see bigger and better scans of them at dA). Many more planned, and some silly ones like Talk Like a Pirate Day sketched. After designing and coloring all the characters I'm going to do some with backgrounds, and do some mock-ups of cards, and make a cover for the portfolio featuring most of the characters interacting. Halloween is my favorite so far. <3

Not planning on updating my official site with these till after I make better scans and get some backgrounds going. And the holiday card portfolio may have to go on hiatus, since for a lot of gifts I need to paint something, as I won't have a lot of money for gifts when loans start collecting (which is this November. Dun dun dun).

So that's it for now. May take photos for Halloween, as I'm going to be a witch (hey, I've never been one, and I think it will be fun) and Barry is planning on being Hellboy, with my help. Should be interesting. :)

Nautilus and Ragdoll

Whooo. Concept for "creature" turned out well. I picked the naiad (or nyad) character from the book The Lightning Thief. I did like 10 different ideas, only one had tentacles....and the class liked that best. Works for me. I actually visualize the character to be more bubblely and part of the water but this was more fun. So here's the turnaround character sheet:

See it bigger and better here.

I based her on a Nautilus, and it was quite fun. This is what they really look like:



They are awesome. Funfact: they can live to like 20 years. Poor octopi only usually live about 3 years.

Annnnd here is the color final. Haven't had a crit on her yet, but I'm pretty happy with it so far:


Bigger and better here.

For my children's book class I'm doing an information book on squids and octopi. So far turning out well, have one finished spot illustration, and it look nice. Might have a scan of that up soon.

Oh yeah. Halloween costume turned out well:


Cheapest halloween ever. Dress was like 2 dollars at the salvation army, and most of the fabric my roommate let me have for everything else. And I handmade the doll. Her name is Susan. :P



Bleh. Slow day in Sr Illustration. I'm ready to go onto learning about the new project, but yeah....this class is rarely on schedule. Lunch time though! Es-cap-e!

My Concept of Hades.

I have realized, from my eating habits, that once I am extremely poor and managing my budget like Scudge McDuck (except I won't have enough money to step into, let alone swim in) that living off of $1 lunch meat and noodles in various incarnations will not be hard for me. Today I had a small bag chips for lunch (at work, around 2) and some nacho chips with what was left of some cheese in a jar. Of course, I had massive amounts of caffeine throughout the day, I should take that into my expense account once I start paying off loans.

Anyway. My concept class is going well, now that we are onto character designs and not buildings. Out of my drawings Hades was chosen, so here is my Hades (from the book The Lightning Thief) character sheet.



Novak wanted us to play with dressing our gods in modern and Greek cloths, so Hades here is wearing a toga like shirt and business pants and shoes. And he has gauges in his ears, and two rings (one wedding ring, one just for bling) and black nail polish for some more goth. :P We only needed 5 full figure images, but I threw in the bust shot because I was having too much fun.



Novak really liked it, but we have to take a full figure image to color, so he choose this one:



The Lightning Thief Hades is described in the book much like how I would describe my boyfriend (well, besides the cruelty). So guess who was my model? :P It was a fun photo shoot, he's a good model, and only laughed hysterically a couple times while I tried to get him to pose like he was angry.

In other news my Halloween costume is underway. Still need some more supplies, but everything is planned out, and my dress is cut up correctly. It should turn out well. :D

Oh, bought this bizarreity today:



He's so....freakin' weird. He's a neopet, and for the record, I think neopets are dumb, and making stuffed animals of your fake online pets that you'll just neglect in a month is really dumb. But...he was just too weird to not like. You can never have too many funky stuffed animals, right?

Children's Theater Pamphlets

So here are the finals from my illustration studio class. My favorites is Red, but I like Aladdin as well. Watercolor and some gauche.






Even though I wasn't too happy with being one of the students stuck with Raggedy Anne and Andy (no one wanted to really do that one), I think mine turned out well. Bob liked the concept a lot. Plus, it gave me the idea for my Halloween costume. :D Going to be a rag doll, and haven't decided how beat up it's going to look. Or how bloody. Went to the Salvation Army and bought a good dress to start messing with.

Anyway, these watercolors, along with the rest of the classes, are being sent to a theater and they will pick 11 to use for their pamphlets. Not getting my hopes up, but I'm feeling mine are just as likely as anyones else's to be chosen. We may know by Friday....

It's OCTOBER! And Here's A New Vector.

I like Halloween, to put it mildly.

Working on lots of watercolor stuff for school, but made a vector on my own, since Charlie was so fond of my other ones. Some day I will have two portfolios, one for the vectors, one for the traditional watercolor. For now I have to concentrate on one area. Curses. So I'm doing vectors in my spare time (Read as "at 2 AM").

And now I have this:


Which came from this doodled in a notebook while working on my Red Riding Hood watercolor school piece:



This is about the same size as the original doodle.

The wolf idea came from various sources, some personal, but one inspired by the 10th Kingdom miniseries where the wolf is mostly human.

I always feel disappointed seeing my vectors not in an ai file. No matter what I do they are distorted in some way. Sigh. Here the colors are a bit off. The colors are more vibrant here: http://roguehobbit.deviantart.com/art/Red-99563189 though more likely to be ripped off so thus the giant watermark on the full size version. You can also see the full thing there.

But I'm pretty happy with the final ai file. I had a lot of fun with shapes and colors and flatness of perspective which I just can't capture with watercolor. Hopefully I'll have more vector ideas and time to do them. Must work on Halloween costume as well though...

Of Dæmons and Halloween

I took this quiz on The Golden Compass Myspace page. It first told me my Dæmon was a crow, but there's this quiz thing where friends can answer and then your animal changes according to what they said. So mine has changed to either a ferret or ermine-type creature. Cool. That's what Pan's favorite form is in the books. I can't wait for the movie, though I am worried that they will screw it up by making it a kid's movie. Or worse, trying to keep the original theme but dumbing it down so it's a weird mix. So they either have to kiddify it, or keep it as close as possible to the book. The actors all look like they can pull of the part, but if the girl playing Lyra can't act then we have a big problem.



The PCA&D Halloween party is tonight, and I'm almost ready. Still need a boa, and maybe a sparkle-y purple pin to put in my hat. There will be many pictures, as my roommates are going as Bob Ross and the Prince (from Katamari Damacy). Katie is going as something she hobbled together, but she won't tell me what it is, so I'll have to wait and see. She's very excited about it, so I bet it's pretty nifty. Jason waited till now to figure out he can't afford the V costume he wanted (he was going as V, but the apron and oven mitts version, when he's making the eggies in a basket) so we're going to try to get some Ninja stuff together for him. He already has the cowl.

Wow it got cold. Definitely going to have to wear my winter coat around more.

Pizza and Guy-Me

I'm currently at Jason's place, but as he just managed to fix his computer (new processor) and is doing all his online homework right now, I am bored. So figured I'd update. I'm making a freezer-to-oven pizza, and I hope it's almost ready because I'm starving. Damn Papa John's server being down and me being too lazy to actually interact with someone on the phone.

In school news all students have to enter a "What is Beauty?" contest/thing. No guidelines besides the size, really. It was just an open thing, but then they made it mandatory for the Fine Art majors, and then for the rest of the school too. :/ Besides the bitterness of an extra homework assignment-

Pizza!

Okay. I'm back, with a full stomach and a burn blister. Bah. Anyway, besides that and the fact that we have less time to do the thing, I think it could be kinda fun, it will give me a chance to do something less illustration-y. I have some ideas which I kinda sketched out in thumbnails. Need to do some better sketches though.

In Anatomy we have to draw a self portrait and ourselves as the opposite gender...I normally handle self portraits very well but ever since the end of freshmen year when my face thinned out I've had a hard time with it. I think I see the problem now that I'm posting this crappy pic of what I have so far up:



They eyes and noses are off placement wise. Bah! I mean, it looks like me, but too cute. Ick. And Guy-Me is harder to do then you'd think, even with the help of a beard. I don't have a brother to base the assignment off of, and my dad's features aren't helping much. Guy-Me looks like a monkey. -_- Sigh.

Because I'm bored and Jason is currently playing video games I sneak-attacked him with my cell camera. Mwahaa!



Nice expression, eh? I like how it caught the movement.

I finished the New Yorker project, but I'll wait till I scan it in and put the font on it before showing it here. I have to find time to get to Kinko's and print out a digital copy too before Thursday. Time is going to be scarce this week, and I still don't have all the things I need for the Halloween party at PCA&D. I'm going to be a flapper, and I have the hat, necklace and shirt for it, and I just bought a cigarette holder and some fake cigarettes. Still need to adjust the hat and find shoes. So much to do...