More Dots and Snow

Rain, sleet, and snow. Lots of snow. Too much snow. Seriously it's been like what? Three weeks straight where we've been hit with like a snow storm, and a week or two before that where we've been hit by a storm.

Buuuut of course Suffolk still opens its doors despite the fact that we have raging blizzard going on out the window of my ISOM class. TBH it's a bit of a mixed feeling now. I actually like the fact that the school is still open, because well, I enjoy  going to school lol. Not going to school for just a semester completely changed my views about what I want to do. And that just happened to be going to school and learning the stuff I want to learn.


Here's what I've been in class recently. At first we were doing just tons of Dots. Like literally dots across a 19 x 24 piece of bristol paper. It was too boring for me to take a picture of so I decided to not upload it. Using tumblr (trying out tumblr now yes...) with pictures and whatnot turned out to be pretty troublesome anyway... But anyways here's two resolved thumbnails I did. I drew out a ton of smaller ones to get my ideas worked out and did 2 of them to scale here.

It's pretty basic. Rules are 3 - 4 shapes per region. If they overlap change its color from either white or black accordingly. I felt pretty happy about the one of the right. When the professor reviewed it he was like "oh shit, this is great" he didn't really have anything bad to say at all about it. It had a lot of small areas where the color would change so I guess he just liked how there was so much attention to that particular detail. TBH I just threw shapes around randomly without having to really worry about placement lol.

In the end we would end having to paint it out using acrylic on bristol paper. The actual painting itself was only 6 x 11 which is stupid imo since I just wasted a massive sheet of bristol for almost nothing. Surprisingly enough, the small painting took me about 2 hours to finish since I really had to be careful not to make the lines too "organic" looking. Making things look straight and civilized is not one of my strong points so it sucked....

But yeah since I was able to learn how to draw out figures properly I finally saw some real concrete progress in my stuff. The three earlier were done observationally, but it was quite good just going over all the body parts and drilling them into my head so that I know what goes where. This pic here was pulled out of my ass, I screwed up a few times at first but eventually it came out pretty well.

Last pic here is one that I've done recently. I was originally just testing out my sumi ink and brush while practicing different dots, but then I ended drawing out the face, the coat, her scarf, and went on from there lol. For some reason I really like those dark cityscape pictures. In the future I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes one of the main themes of my stuff. Especially once I take those computer art classes so I can use illustrator and photoshop.

Well that's all for tonight. I'll stick around tumblr to see how it is. Not too happy so far though =_=, too many little annoying bugs.

Coming back from the Art Store

Feels good to blog again.. but I need to stop making typos ;_;

Came back home just in time before the snow storm started lol. Man what good timing. On Monday I spent my day after class buying $150+ worth of art supplies. The professor gave us this massive list of stuff to buy, even after my little shopping spree there was still about a third of the list left to buy =_=. After spending so much money on books it really sucked to watch so much more go into the art supplies. It was pretty cool buying my own portfolio and everything but jeez the stuff can get pretty damn expensive. At least it's a "one time" buy sort of thing.

I'm so glad I finally got a digital camera, I've been taking pics of everything...

I bought the more old fashioned looking portfolio. I think the measurements were like 23 x 33 or something, so it was just the right size for me. Honestly I wish I had gotten the portfolio with the strap-on so I could carry on my shoulder rather than lugging it around all the time. But oh well, its just another way to work on my manly muscles.

Bristol paper pad and a Sketchbook so far. And yeah, 1st project is all about dots lol

It's kinda neat carrying around for the first time. Because people really do look at you and think "oh hey this guy must be a real artist" and whatnot haha. But I'm pretty sure I'll grow to hate carrying the thing as time goes on since it'll probably get pretty heavy as the semester drags on. We apparently have 12-14 fat ass projects to do this semester. Which is pretty nuts considering that is what you would typically do during a regular high school year in an art class. So basically imagine all that work and probably a lot more being squeezed into like what? 4 months or something X.X.

So I bought the big important "one time" purchases on Monday, unfortunately I didn't really want to carry an Art Bin along with the portfolio with my school bag hanging from my shoulder all at once so I neglected to buy it until today.

I feel more like a construction worker carrying it around

So today I went to buy all the other dispensable sort of stuff. I bought my brushes, sumi ink, pencils, pens, painter's tape, ruler, knife, triangle.... I bought a lot of stuff. The list was pretty long but when I put it altogether into my box it felt juuuuuust right lol.

I felt like such a baller when I threw it all together

One thing that is going to haunt me forever is the price of paint. Paint is soooo expensive. I bought a decent tube of it for like I think $13.99 or maybe $15.99. I'm not sure how long the tube will last me for, but it doesn't look like it'll be too long seeing how big our projects need to be. I could only afford to buy 2 tubes, Mars Black and Titanium White. If I went and followed my professor's orders, I'd be buying those $30 jars =_=. Plus this is just black and white, there's still other colors to buy >.<. 

Well aside from all that stuff, I was also required to have a digital camera. Never in my life have I ever had a camera, and shit it's pretty damn fun taking pictures. I think taking pictures from an art perspective is by far one of the most exciting things I've done in a while when it came to art. I'm quite positive now that taking photos of scenery you want to illustrate is a really really good way of practicing. Some of the pictures I've seen of like a full blown out scene really made me question whether or not an artist drew everything off the top of their head. In the case of George Seurat, that guy and other like-minded guys spent a lot of their time visiting different places and sketching them out so that they would have ideas to put out on canvas when it was time. So it's certainly a good thing to take photos and use em as reference. One of these days I'm going to take a pic of my desk and computer and draw my own little "anime girl in your room" sort of thing LOL. There's sooo many pieces that people have made with that, it's not only awesome for the artist (lawl) but it's also a ton of fun to look at. To be honest I'll probably have to set my anime illustrating passions aside and focus on doing the usual realism sort of work. It'd be a little embarrassing to bring in projects loaded with people with big eyes and ridiculous long hair lol. 

Here's an example

I really really loved how this room was illustrated. It's exactly what I want to try to draw at some point. Although it could've been done straight off from the top of the artist's head, I highly doubt it, unless their that amazing- that's always a possibility. There's just soooo much attention to detail. One of the problems of trying to imagine what a room would really look like is the fact that the things that naturally accumulate and clutter up in a room are extremely difficult to process into your head. I'm also suspicious of this artist simply just uploading the photograph and simply recoloring it over while keeping all the perfect lines. Whenever I've done a "room" type of drawing, it always comes out really uncivilized. Human homes aren't natural because of all the perfectly straight lines there are that exist. In this pic, the artist did such a good job of making every detail look perfect that it makes you say "wow, it feels like a real room."

Another Example

Yeah yeah more Hatsune Miku lol... This is one of the pics out there that I believe to have been made from scratch. There's nothing in particular in the pic that stands out as something you would recognize right away in reality. Sure there's a rubik's cube and a goddamn old school Mac but those are two objects you'd rarely see in a common household. If anything I'm quite sure that whoever did this, probably took the foundations of some room and added to it. Because seriously who the hell would still have an old Mac like that lol. In the future I'm pretty sure that this is probably what I'm going to come up with when I give it an attempt, and hopefully I'll make that attempt in the summer during my Computer Applications class, where I'll finally learn how to use Illustrator, Photoshop, and w/e else there is.

But for now... just gotta keep drilling those basics. I should probably pick up other foundation courses too..

A New Start

Yeah.. I've definitely almost lost myself these past few months. It's like stuff you would see in a psychological satire, but in reality, it's very real. It does happen. People go a little nuts at some point in their lives, I think we all do. But when we recover from it, we grow to become better people.

So how about an update?

Dear Me,

So the past 6 months, I've been sitting in the shit hole, and just this month I was hoisted from the pit of shit and brought back into the warm light of life.

Haha, well thats a short TL:DR summary of the events that have happened to me the past few months. I mean I took off a semester, involuntarily, which a huge difference from taking off a month voluntarily. So it was pretty painful, I had trouble keeping myself composed and whatnot. On some days (like the last 2 entries) I would just have random thoughts or rants (outbursts tbh), it was really silly, and IMO also pretty damn immature of me =(. It was really tough, I don't like to bitch, but for real- it was tough. If anything it has been one of the biggest life changing things I've had in my life so far. I never ever wanted to go back to school so badly.

Annnnd, swinging back to the present- I'm back! Back in school, finally. Like this past week, although I have to wake-up at 5:30 AM every week to commute, I've never felt so relieved and so goddamn happy. It's such an amazing feeling, to be happy. Like holy shit lol, I just don't how to describe it. If anything, my overall wellbeing has improved dramatically, just because I finally dragged myself out of my mixed solemn state of depression and insanity. Everything around me just seems so clear and wonderful. It's like, all the bullshit in the world doesn't affect you anymore, because you've got your mind focused on more important things. 

So I dropped my Global Business/Finance double major. I didn't like it. I didn't want to spend my college life digging around through stacks of numbers and vague economic concepts. I switched over to ISOM, which is Information Systems Operations Management. Which is basically the business side of using computers to deal with company data and what not. My specialty =). Plus it also has a wide range of possible careers which includes dealing with running websites, managing corporate data, computer technical work, database management, the list goes on. But they are all careers in which I would verrrrry comfortable working in. 

And as for minor.... ART!!! FRIGGIN ART!!!!!!DIAS()D*()YNDAJ YEESSSSSSS!

Best decision I have made in my life so fucking far. I mean seriously, I'll put it down right here, January 2011, best decision in my life thus far. I love it so much. I can't believe I didn't minor in art as a freshman. Seriously. Here's the deal. If you don't follow your passions at all in any way shape or form, you are making a huge mistake in your life. Huge. I've been very skeptical about it, but now I've confirmed it. Always follow your passion, even if it's a far out sort of dream, you can always still follow it in some way- no matter how unrealistic it may seem. There's always a way.

I'm going to turn this blog into mainly an art blog. I've put up things in the past and made some good progress by sticking things and critiquing them heavily with my own efforts. In truth, well with the new knowledge I have, I discovered that my way of trying to learn things was actually really flawed. I was taught as a child that using references to draw things was bad. In truth its what you're actually supposed to do in order to improve yourself at a quicker pace. As for the design aspect of art, or in other words- the creative side, that too can be taught. But of course rarely anyone has any clue as to how to exercise their brain properly in the creativity field, so I was doing very little by myself trying  to desperately come up with the most oddest looking designs.

Ever since I've taken my art course, I improved quite a good bit. Maybe not so much on the technical side, but a lo ton the fundamentals side. I was lacking the most in my fundamentals. I just had no direction in whatever I did, as a result progress was slow and often discouraging. 

Right now it's still pencil and ink, but it's like on a whole other level compared to my old work. The design exercises so far have been super useful. It's awesome when you can go to school, and then go home right after and use what you've learned right away. 

This is what I was drawing tonight as I wrote this blog. Originally it was a doodle, because I needed to practice drawing "Dots" (lol) for the first project. I'm thinking about finishing it up, and putting it on my big bristol paper and ink it with sumi ink. I really liked how the design classes can give you ideas.

Some more drawings I did to practice. These are really recent, using the new things I learned to my advantage. Learning to draw figures practically requires you to use something as a model. It's just not possible to Learn it by imaging it in your head. Well actually you can do it all in your head, but you'd probably come out with some abstract looking figures. I like mine with well defined proportions that I can agree with lol.

More practice sketching. Gotta push those boundaries and flesh out poses that I'm not comfortable with drawing, it's the only way to improve. And if I can't do it using my own head, then I'll just find something to refer to. In France they often had nude models pose for young aspiring artists to draw them. So there really was a place for using things as models. 

Basically this entire time, I've been approaching art the completely wrong way. Right now I probably still need some guidance, but if I keep taking these classes and practicing, I'm bound to become a pretty legit artist. So far I like how much better I've gotten. If I compare my current little mini personal project which is the first picture on the blog, to things in my old forgotten gallery there's a noticable difference. I really have a good feeling about this year. I really do.

It's New Day

I hate awful blogs. Like the one below this one >.<. It's really awful lol. I can't even look at it. More over I'm surprised that people have read it, but thank you to the people that have.

I guess you could say I'm in the midst of picking myself up, and I've decided a good way to go about it is to try something completely new. Which is.... writing =O!

Reading Manga, short stories, web articles, it's one of those little productive things you'd do that don't really get mentioned to friends. Before I was really big on drawing and everything, but lately it's been hard to sit down and try to create something that I really can be satisfied with. Everyone has their own little thing that they do in order to please themselves. Everyone has something that they do so that at the end of the day they can nod their heads and say "Hmm, yup that looks good to me." Maybe even after all these years, graphic art isn't for me =(, or maybe I just having been going about it the right way. Either way, it's become a bit too much of a hassle to try to put aside time as well as gathering materials to make art. So I thought, hey, maybe writing will be more convenient.

Being a big critic on anime and manga, I'm pretty sure I'll tear myself apart when rereading the crap I write. I went onto some community forums and the advice they gave me is to basically write my balls off and read a shit ton which I'm glad I already do.

This is probably why people make those blogs full of random stories. A while back I used to browse blogs to burn time and once in a while I would stumble upon blogs that would make absolutely no sense. There would be no beginning thought and concluding thought, and each entry seemed to be entirely different from one another. It was only until I did some minor detective work (searching further back in their history) to find obscure comments of what they liked and what they didn't like about their writing, that I understood that what they were doing was just keeping work in a safe place- the internet.

Not a bad idea, I did something like that too except with anime reviews. Most of them were awful, but the Minami-Ke one was my particular favorite, the best one I've made, and the last I've made since lol.

Well time to turn on some music and just make my fingers do work.

Living a life of Satire

It's been a constant downward spiral. I really wonder how low I'll keep going until I finally pick myself up. I wonder why I stopped visiting my own blog. The internet is such damned place sometimes, maybe that's why I try to stay away from expressing my thoughts through blogging, after all anyone could be reading it. But maybe that's why I get the urge to come back once in a while and do a blog, only to delete it when I realize it's really stupid to share my pointless thoughts. How many times have I done this? Too many =P. It'd probably be better to just keep a personal journal. Shit, but the allure of someone on chance to stumble across this blog is so attractive and exhilarating. They would be like "haha, get a load of this shit guys". Being a little cynical here? Well it's true isn't it? I can't count how many times I've shared those "fail" videos and images to my netizen friends. If anything at least it's proof that they've acknowledged my existence.

But honestly I only get the urge to actually go out of my way to blog when I get that "forever alone" type of feeling. That's kind of how I feel today, it's been a horrible day. Such a shitty day. Before I blogged because, you know, it'd be a fun little project to record my thoughts over my life. But sometimes it's not just fun, sometimes its fucking necessary to reach out- even a little bit, to prove to yourself that you're still alive.

.
.
.

I don't know. Today sucks. I won't say why, because I'm talking to myself here. I already know why. But leaving a note behind saying that this specific day sucks will be well worth it. My life keeps spiraling down. How will I be in 2 - 3 years? I don't know, I really just don't know. I hope that if I do happen to look back at this blog maybe I'll be able to finally come to terms with myself and just do SOMETHING.

I feel like I'm in a silly satirical cartoon. Ever watch the movie Taxidermia? That stuff is like a big mind-fuck. And my mind is doing some serious fucking right now. Nothing good has been happening. I don't have anything good to share. Well maybe I could say I'm a fucking amazing actor, for putting up a smile while working at my shitty job, and saying "How are you doing today?" as if I'm the happiest person in the world. Shit the liquor store guy next door seems to have been pulling it off for fucking years and he looks just fine.

At least I'm not alone. I read a blog about a 28 yr old guy who works at a pizza place as an assistant manager. He makes $37,000 a year. He has not finished college, nor is he enrolled into a college. All his friends have moved on. They have good career jobs. Some are married, some even have kids. And here he was, all alone, at the pizza parlor. He reached out to his community to ask for help. They gave good advice. Just DO SOMETHING.

Do something. Good idea. I don't know when, but one day I'll do something.

Or here I go again. I almost deleted the blog. I lay back in my chair. Brood over my cynical thoughts. Maybe I should try to pick up writing? What an awful writer I'd make, haha. I lean forward in my chair again. I highlight the entire blog. I don't hit the delete button. Lean back into the chair.... Well today must be a really shitty day for me to actually do this....

*sigh* =_=