Aug/100
Updated
I finally got all my daily images updated, 32 I had in the backlog, ouch! Here’s to trying to keep up on posting them on time! There were a few gems in there, some sketches where I felt things were coming together. Most of them suffered from a lack of time put into them. Most of my time was taken up with my summer class, I was okay with that since I was painting so much for my assignments. I figured when class was over, I’d get back into putting more time and effort into my daily drawings. Now that class is done with, but I have a lot work! I’m drawing all the time for it (work), but I’m still slacking on my daily’s.
I’ve seen this happen to a lot of artists, where they get their industry job and then have no time for their personal art. I’m not in the career position yet, but with these couple freelance gigs taking up a lot of my time, I’m seeing myself fall into that similar pattern of behavior. I’m glad that I’m aware of it though, it’s something I’ll try to head off before it becomes a habit. The obvious first step is not waiting until the end of the night to do my drawing/painting. By then I’m just tired and want to go to sleep, so I rush the process.
Aug/101
Hello World
I sure have fallen behind in posting my daily images. I think I’m almost three weeks behind, ouch! I’m taking a summer class, Color & Design, and it has been extremely time intensive. Last Thursday I was painting one of my finals, this one a landscape, for almost 13 hours straight. It has been hard to make the time for my personal drawings, so I’ve been doing a lot more sketches, rather than paintings.
I’m almost done though and while I had initially had no interest in this class, I’m very glad I took it. I’ve taken color theory before and so the thought of retaking such a class sounded like a drag. This class though ended up being more of a painting class and we just applied color theory to our projects. I like that.
I have a few work related projects that are really coming together, I’m having fun drawing in my style, but for others projects.
My main computer got hit by a virus of some sort yesterday, so I’m in the process of getting that taken care of. I really hate it when my computer goes down (for whatever reason). It ends up being a splinter in my mind that I can’t really forget about until I’ve fixed it. Luckily there’s a lot of scanning time involved so that’s allowing me to step away and get other stuff done.
Some exciting news, last Friday I got an email that I had been accepted into one of the Pixar animation classes. This class is taught at the Academy of Art, but has instructors from Pixar coming over to work with us and run the class. I’m looking forward to really nailing down my core set of animation skills and building out from there. A good goal for myself is to do more animation “studies”. The same idea as quick sketches in drawing, I need to be exercising my animation skills in smaller, easier to finish, projects. My drawing skills have been really benefiting from that type of exercise, it’s really time I applied that to animation as well.
Nov/080
A chance to breathe
Today is a me day. I’m cooking good foods rather than eating out and working on personal projects. I’m painting the sketch from my last post and I’m planning on doing some new drawings. I’m listening to the new Sigur Ros album, I’m digging it. They are selling their album for download off their site, awesome!
Today and tomorrow are the first two days off in a row I’ve had in…well, a few months. I’m going to take the opportunity to watch some movies tonight, it’s probably the only time I’ll have to do so until the end of December when school gets out. I plan to watch the Dark Knight and perhaps some anime. I’d like to watch Honey and Clover or Haibane Renmei as well, but my housemates are going to be out this evening, so maybe not. Maybe some Ghost in the Shell though, I’d like to finish watching Second Gig!
Speaking of gigs. On top of school and work an old client of mine recently asked if I wanted to do some product renderings for a design he has. I’ll post some shots of that as I go along. It’ll be fun to do some 3d modeling again.
Come winter break, I think I might tackle a new theme for my blog. I’d like to change it up some, though I don’t have any specific ideas yet.
Oct/080
The times, they are a changin
Well I’ve been rather lax in making blog posts. I don’t feel that I’ve had any free time between school, homework and work and I typically feel like I need time to feel I can sit down to write.
So the triple-boot didn’t work out. I could get both MacOS and Ubuntu to cooperate, but Windows wouldn’t play with the others. I ended up going with a MacOS and WinXP dual boot, that way I get my productivity and gaming covered. Ubuntu was going to be an experiment in alternate, and interesting, operating systems. Well, another time.
School is going well, I feel like I’m learning lots. I spent six hours working on my 2d animation yesterday (we’re animating the flour sack character jumping off a crate). I’m keeping mine really simple so I don’t get distracted. I got about 80 frames drawn yesterday, I’m going to shoot it tomorrow night and see how it’s looking. There are some sections that really looked promising and others I’m not sure about.
Far Cry 2 comes out tomorrow, I pre-ordered it last week and I’m hoping Kimi can pick it up for me while I’m at school. Or I’ll just get it on Thursday. Now hopefully I’ll actually find some time where I can play it!
Not much else I feel like saying at the moment, just wanted to give my blog some love.
Sep/081
Homework at Home
This weekend has been the first in some time where I’ve had two days off in a row, I feel like I’ve finally had some time to rest. During the week I always have two days off from work, but then of course I’m at school those days.
It’s tough, I really wish I wasn’t working at all so I could put all my energy into school, but I’m enjoying work so much, I’m getting to do lots of things I’m really interested in (baking, food prep and soon I’ll be getting training on the line). Bill keeps joking that Kimi and I will probably take over the Bread Workshop, that really caught me off guard. I’ve always had a dream of having a bakery/cafe/small restaurant. I’ve no idea what the future holds for me, and there’s no way I want to stop pursuing animation and art in general, but all of a sudden it seems like that dream has much more of a chance than I’d have thought. Interesting.
I have a lot of homework to get done today. YCON starts this weekend and lots of friends will be visiting. I’m starting with my 3d animation homework as I find it a lot easier to focus and get started on computer work.
I just ordered a new 24″ iMac, I’m looking forward to getting that setup. I had thought of getting a new tower instead, but the iMac includes a gorgeous monitor and has such a small footprint (I should be able to get rid of both my g5 tower and pc box), that I couldn’t resist. My work area at home isn’t ideal at the moment, I have the aforementioned two towers next to my desk, two keyboards and mice on my desk and it’s just too much. I can’t wait til it’s simplified, I think it’ll work much better for me.
I’ll still be using two monitors, so I won’t lose that functionality. I forgot to order the mini dvi to dvi adapter though, so I’ll drop by the apple store before school sometime this week.
Sep/081
Thirty To Go
Thirty minutes before I’m off for my pastry and break baking shift. I am exhausted. It’s not so bad at all when I’m moving around, but now that I’m just sitting and waiting, the exhaustion has set in. I’ve just about been up for 24 hours, which is rather rare for me, I typically can’t go that long without sleep. I’m confident though that once I’m moving and out in the crisp air, I’ll wake up again.
On top of everything else I feel emotionally drained. It’s been a long day. I look forward to sleep, only five and a half hours to go and I can lay down!
I’m doing decently on the homework front. I finished my figure drawing homework earlier, that felt nice to get out of the way. I’ve a few supplies I need to pick up before class, but I otherwise feel ready. The only homework item left is for my 2d animation class. We’re doing a falling leaf animation this week. I need to finalize my background layer and path of action for the leaf and then onto animating it. After work I’ll sleep, then I’ll head to the animation lab to get that all finished. I hope it won’t take more than a few hours.
Wednesday evening I need to check in with the court house and see if I need to report for jury duty on Thursday. I decided to not try and get out of it this time (I know a few tricks). I feel ready to finally give it a go, but the downside is that my initial report in date is a school day. Because of that, I’m hoping I don’t have to report in, at least on Thursday. I only have each class once a week, so missing a single day cuts out a lot of instruction.
And now fifteen minutes have passed. Time to brush my teeth and put myself together. I feel the pastries calling me!
Sep/081
The Bake Shift
I’m working the bake shift this evening/morning, Tues from 4am to 8am. It’s going to add up to a long day, but I’m excited to be baking pastries!
I’m working at getting some homework done at the moment. I’ve been pretty busy this weekend and hadn’t really gotten a chance to get much done in that department. On Saturday I helped cater for a wedding, that was a lot of fun, I hope to post about that specifically in the next few days. On Sunday maiki and I took a nice walk around Berkeley, sampling many treats along the way. Much conversation was had.
I had a simple exercise to do for my Advanced Animation 2 class, a basic ball (of the heavy variety) bouncing in place and coming to a stop, using the techniques learned in the last class. I did it pretty much as he wanted, but in the end I opened the graph editor and adjusted the curves so the ball had more apparent weight. Specifically, I broke the tangets of the curves to make the adjustments I wanted, though that wasn’t something he showed us. He had mentioned that technique can lead to problems when scaling an animation, but I didn’t really know of another way to get the same effect, without overloading on keyframes.
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Aug/080
Cut to fit
I’m starting to feel a lot more comfortable at work. I get nervous working up front at the register, I end up feeling more pressure when helping customers. I’m slow and worry about getting their order wrong or making their espresso drinks poorly, but it’s getting easier.
I spent most of the day yesterday in the back helping to prepare foods for today. I’m slow with a knife, but everyone has been really helpful in showing me tips. They all seem to understand that I’m coming in with no experience in that department and have been very patient with me.
My big story from yesterday was from dicing onions. The first few had me crying, but after a while I couldn’t feel it anymore…although I did feel a bit dizzy! I made sure to take breaks and drink water. ^_^ I felt sorry for the gentleman working next to me though. When Kimi came back to visit me, she said she felt the wave of onion from five feet away. She kept her visit short!
Aug/080
Pastries
I started a new job today at The Bread Workshop. Kimi has been working there since the end of June, I’ll be working there on a temporary basis. That works for me, since school will be starting September 4th.
Today I was learning the basics of opening and how to use the registers. I was also making espresso drinks, which was a bit stressful. I really didn’t want to mess up anyone’s drink! They make all their own breads and pastries fresh each day, I hope to get in on that. I’ve always wanted to work in a bakery ^_^
I’m really looking forward to getting back to school. I’m excited by most of my classes, I’ll be taking advanced animation two in which I believe we’ll be focusing on facial animation. I also have an intro to 2d animation class, that should be interesting. I hope to get a lot of drawing practice from it. I’ll have a intermediate figuring drawing class, I hope to make it to more workshops this semester. Finally I’ll be taking a class called gestures and emotions in art. Kind-of an acting class for animators.
Dec/070
A turning point perhaps
On Monday Kimi and I drove over to the Compusa in Emeryville, they’re closing down and we wanted to see what sort of deals they might have. As it turns out, not a lot at that point. We’ll check again in a few days and see what we can score.
A half block away we saw the Pixar Animation studio. It was pretty grand looking with a big archway and everything, I felt chills. I’ve always been so impressed with their storytelling and seeing how close they were to where I live really made the place seem approachable. I’m thinking of trying to get a job there. I do have some qualms about working for such a large company, but I’ll talk about that at another point.
I’ve always had a hard time disciplining myself and it has hurt my progress in the arts. I want to get better at drawing and animation, but I don’t put serious time into working on those skills. Instead I sit at my desk and think how much I want to be drawing, but I don’t draw. I have a mental wall that keeps me from getting started.
If I want to have any chance at working for a company such as Pixar I really need to focus. And so I’m going to try and do that. I have some story ideas I’ve had percolating in my mind that I’ll use as a training ground.