March 29

Okay, so maybe i have been slacking off a bit. ButI have something to show for it!! See, what I've discovered about myself is that when i learn something new, put it down for a while and then come back to it a while later, I get a lot better at it. Doing things this way has cut my Rubik's cube solve time from 1 minute 10 seconds down to 50 seconds, and further practice cut my time down to 34 seconds. With yoyoing, taking a break allowed me to land tricks i never was able to before immediately after picking it back up. With digital painting, I've gotten a lot better somehow. I'm not sure why this happens, but it's been pretty consistent through everything. 

I messed around a bit with the tools this past week (monday or tuesday) and i could see a difference. THEN, my prof for the course showed me a tool that i already knew about and i THOUGH i knew how to use... well, lets just say i was wrong. I had no idea how to use it, but now that i DO know how, I LOVE LOVE LOVE IT!!! It finally feels like I'm painting on a canvas instead on a computer screen.

So, to show what has changed, I'll show a project that I've been working on for a few weeks. The goal was to make a Renaissance style self-portrait. Here's the first version (before the break).

So... I'll say it's okayyyyy. Not finished yet because i got sick of it and that's why the shirt is all wibbly-wobbly, but overall i really don't like this one. It's flat, feels dirty and just bleh.

Fast forward to after break when I tried new stuff and my prof showed me how to use the tool. I decided to redo the portrait. here's the re-done version.

SOOOO MUCH BETTERRRR. It's not flat. the colors are better. everything feels soft and blended. The darks are darker, the lights are lighter and it just feels so much better overall.

And that's not the only one. There's this one from March 27 of Andrew Huang:

And this one from March 28 of my girlfriend:

It's just like whaaaaaaaa???? There's a difference here for sure. I don't know if it was more the 2-3 week break I got to refresh my brain, the  knowledge of how to use the tool, or both but I'm happy with where this is going.

As a side note, this has also happened with oil painting. I was getting nowhere fast with my skill, eventually I just broke down in the middle of class, got a counseling session with Barb (my painting prof) and from that point on all of my preconceived notions on how to paint just ran away and my skill grew exponentially. I don't have any before/after pictures for them, but trust me. It was significant.

Stuff From my sketchbook(s)

I'm working on bigger projects, I promise!! School just takes up a lot of my time during the week, so i only really have weekends to work on my own stuff. 

I realize I'm behind on my daily paintings. I have them, I just need to get a chance to post them which involves emailing them individually to myself to get them onto my computer and posting them. With the number I have to do it could be a little more time consuming than just doing one, but still. They'll be up in the next few days.

In the mean time, here's some stuff from my small sketchbook.

It's difficult to get sketches of people in chapel without getting the back of someone's head, so that's more or less what i do in chapel... drawing the back of people's heads. The bottom person is about as much as i ever get to see of a person's face in this time. 

From a chapel two weeks ago where there was a black A Cappella band singing in another language. I decided to try and get gestures of them before they finished which was easier said than done.

Finally, here's a sneak preview of a renaissance style self portrait that I'm working on.

Feb 25

Have another (better) chinchilla

I'm still hating on the iPad paintings. Okay, imagine that you know how to type and can type pretty fast without looking at the keyboard or anything. Now imagine that you lost all your fingers except for a pointer, so it takes a million times longer to type anything. That's how i feel with iPad paintings. It seems like anything that is optimized for tablets takes so much longer to do anything (not just painting, but adjusting settings and things like that) because you get one finger to use instead of the whole keyboard/mouse/tablet combo. No me gusta.

Feb 23

Really not feeling all that great today. Sooo...

Feb 22

Ball jointed dolls are great for pose studies. I wanna get one for this reason. Until then, here's one I found on tumblr :p

Feb 20

HAPPY BORFDAE TO MEEEEE

Continuing with iPad paintings, i decided to give in and buy every brush set that this app had to offer for 5 bucks, which is a good deal considering that i saved something like 11 bucks fromif i'd have bought them individually. I'll just have to wait and se if its worth it, so woo??

Sooo a friend of a friend is moving to a new place and they can't keep their pets anymore, so there's a possibility of my getting a chinchilla or two (it would have to be two.... *spoiler alert*) in the next while... However this will only happen if parents as well as cats are okay with it, the price is right, the stars align just so, and Patrick Stewart posts a youtube video of himself singing "Get Lucky" in the next two weeks. So the chances are slim, but I have wanted one of these fluffy little guys since the late 90s, so I'm gonna try my absolute best to make it work. But they are the cutest little guys you will ever see. If you don't believe me, go to youtube and type in "popcorning chinchilla" and if you don't let out some level of squee, you have no soul.

But for now, here's a painting of one.

I made the stupid mistake of painting on the background layer instead of a new layer (I should really know better by now), so he has a white glow like he's some kind of holy/angelic fluff machine or something.

Feb 19

Rick (my one adjunct-profs) wanted a finished, (or nearly finished) plan for a lamp that we are to build by the next class (to clarify, the plans are for the next class, not a finished lamp), so i didn't have  time to do a painting today. Instead, you get the plans for a lamp inspired by the A-bomb. For the sake of not starting a riot, it is code named "Rocket." 

Wow, it made it a really bad image, but that's partially my fault. I made the design life sized, so it would have been a really large file if i hadn't scaled it down significantly.

 Feb 18

I felt like breaking out of the norm today and doing a vector portrait, even though i'm supposed to be painting on my iPad. I regret nothing. Loved it.

Feb 17

Moved on to iPad paintings today. Hating it. I think it's the fact that it's so tedious and time consuming to change the settings compared to desktop apps. For example, in Photoshop to change brush size, its either the "[" key to make smaller or "]" to make bigger, and to change the opacity of a brush, you just hit a number key to change the percentage ("1" =10% opacity, "2" = 20%, "3" = 30%, etc). On ipad, you have one finger (or stylus) that you use to adjust things, and almost everything is a slider. Plus the stylus' point is so large compared to a pen/pencil/tablet stylus. I've heard arguments that its offset by the ability to zoom into the canvas for detail work, but it still doesn't feel  -right- to me. I don't know, maybe once i use it more I'll get a feel for the controls, but for right now I'm hating on it. So, here's the first -real- one i did on iPad. Don't judge. Please. It looks nothing like who it's meant to.

Decided to take Friday and Saturday off for Valentines day and focus on spending time with my lovely girlfriend since i feel like I haven't been able to spoil her lately. We were treated to Applebees by my parents, saw Frozen finally (SO GOOD!!!!!!) and had a one-on-one lunch date before seeing the movie. So, it was a good weekend. 

I was, however able to do some sketching in church today. I did a sketch with my inkling to see how it would turn out, and shaded it in photoshop real quickly. Surprisingly accurate, and easier than scanning the sketch in.

February 16

Feb 13

I've had this guy designed for some time (two years?) but I haven't done anything with him until now. I'm really happy with how he turned out. Any suggestions for a name for him? Maybe a name for his species?