Been A While

A whole year, actually! Ahaha.

I apologize for my absence. Senior year was stressful, but now that I've graduated and spent some time figuring myself out, I'm making another move to be active on social media again. With any luck, I'll be half-way successful.

I'll be going through this blog and cleaning it out shortly. Start fresh and new and stuff. :)

#FiftyFiftyMe 2014

• Currently listening to: "Ghosting" by Freelance Whales

Hey, guys! Been a while since I last posted anything, I know, and I deeply apologize for that. Been pretty busy and generally stressed out with my senior year down here at SCAD. But I'm trying to get a better hold on things and get a grip on time management and all that beautiful adult stuff.

With that being said, there may not be a lot of art on here for a little while, seeing as a lot of my artistic attention is going to be directed towards classes and my film; not sure how much recreational time I'll have between that, but! To keep this blog alive, I'm going to attempt the FiftyFiftyMe challenge for 2014!

I'm still working on building my list of 50 books and 50 movies, but I'll be posting little reviews for them as I go. Nothing too thorough or fancy--especially for the books as I'll probably be reading them over long stretches of time for the first half of the year--but yes. c: I'm really excited about this.

My list so far is as follows! An * next to a book title indicates I'm currently reading it.

Books:

1. Lockdown: Escape from Furnace, by Alexander Gordon Smith
2. Solitary: Escape from Furnace, by Alexander Gordon Smith
3. Death Sentence: Escape from Furnace, by Alexander Gordon Smith
4. The House of Scorpion, by Nancy Farmer
5. Revolution, by Jennifer Donnelly
6. Incarceron, by Catherine Fisher
7. The Christopher Killer, by Alane Furguson
8. If I Stay, by Gayle Forman
9. On the Jellicoe Road, by Melina Marchetta
10. Thief's Covenant, by Ari Marmell
11. The Named, by Marianne Curley
12. Hit List, by Darcia Helle
13. Stitch, by Samantha Durante
14. Visions, by Lauren Klever
15. The Tea Rose, by Jennifer Donnelly
16. Prince of Thorns, by Mark Lawrence
17. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
18. Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke
19. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
20. A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
21. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
22. Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson*

Movies:

1. The Graduate
2. Iron Man
3. The Avengers
4. 2001: A Space Odyssey
5. Blood & Chocolate
6. The Others
7. The Woman in Black
8. A Time to Kill
9. Psycho (1960)
10. Lucas
11. Silent Hill: Revelations (I just want to see how bad it really is)
12. The Haunting (the 1963 film, not the remake)
13. Pacific Rim
14. The Day the Earth Stood Still ( the 1951 film, not the remake)
15. The Birds (1963)
16. Young Frankenstein (1974)
17. Gone with the Wind
18. Tombstone
19. La Dolce Vita (1960; Italian, directed by Frederico Fellini)
20. My Dinner with Andre
21. Tree of Life (directed by Terrance Malick)
22. A Serious Man
23. Crimes and Misdemeanors
24. Babette's Feast
25. Donnie Darko
26. 12 Angry Men
27. Pan's Labrynth
28. Chinatown
29. The Godfather
30. Amadeus
31. School of Rock
32. The Intouchables
33. Dr. Strangelove: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
34. Amelie
35. Village of the Damned (1960)
36. The Croods
37. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
38. Silence of the Lambs
39. Paranorman 
40. The Unusual Suspects
41. The Blair Witch Project

Obviously, I need more movies on my list, but since I'm not expecting to really check any of those off until I'm either on a break or graduated, I'm willing to kind of let that one grow slowly. 

If you have any suggestions, books but especially movies, just throw me a tweet or comment here maybe? With movies, I'm trying to find older ones that might be considered classics, even though quite a few of the ones I have listed aren't. So suggestions towards those would be awesome. Romances and romantic comedies aren't really my thing, but if it's a good solid one, why not?

I think that's all I got for now. Hope you've all had a good start to your year and hopefully you'll hear from me again soon! 

More Ib RP related things

Just finished this about 30 minutes ago. More art for the Ib roleplay I'm currently derping around in.

but you're here... that gives me hope..

The female character (Bridgette) belongs to my friend, Kayla.

This took about a week to complete, but that's mostly because I work during the week and I would poke at this thing between other projects. I finished the details on Abner, Dol and the background shadow all today and finished the details on Bridgette last night. That's about as much of a time...lapse? ...stamp? ...that I can give you, haha.

Fabulously Fancy Okapi [wip]

To start off this update with something entirely unrelated to the title, I have recently discovered Welcome to Night Vale, a podcast that can be downloaded/subscribed to entirely for free through iTunes (and some other site I can't remember off the top of my head). I've just finished episode 10 and it's only been two days, hahahaa. It's a good thing it's a podcast so I can work on stuff without being distracted.

That being said, though, now that these things have been posted in the Magic Box centrifuge, I decided to go ahead and store them here, as well. A few Okapi studies, the painting I'm using as a reference and my color comp for my fancy animal painting.

Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets, by Edouard Manet

I'm hoping to finish it within the next week, but, knowing how busy I am DURING the week with work, we'll just have to see if that actually works out or not. 

Semi-related, I'm also trying to find a decent sketchbook to use as my "professional" sketchbook. I really like how sketchbooks were 'organized' in this tutorial I found on DeviantArt and, although I'm waiting until I get back to Georgia to shop for one, it'd be nice if I had a pretty good idea of what I was looking for. So if anyone knows of a specific sketchbook that sounds like 'The Legit Shit', please pass it on. c: I would very much appreciate it. 

I think that's all for this go-around. 

Side note: If you're looking for a feel-good book, I would highly recommend My Most Excellent Year by Steve Kluger. I've just finished it within the past week and I would definitely store it somewhere in my top-ten books. It's also put me in a determined state of mind to find Mary Poppins uploaded somewhere on the internet, but I have had no such luck thus far. Ah, well. It'll turn up somewhere. 

Until next time!

August Update Thingamagoop

Sorry for the severe lack of updates this summer. Things have been a bit weird and I've been pretty busy and exhausted with my job. I've been struggling with, of all things, a fear of drawing or something. I don't know, I guess just a severe lack of confidence. But, here're a few things I've doodled over the past 2 weeks or so.

Real quick sketch for some pals who were blue one evening

Sketch for a friend because it was her character's birthday

Pencil sketch of Rose (Fullmetal Alchemist)

Another pencil of Rose

Drawing for an Ib-themed AU roleplay I'm doing; not my character

Detail shot since on tumblr it wouldn't resize correctly

Hopefully I'll finish some more things before the summer's over. DeviantArt doesn't appear to be letting me upload anything no matter what I do with Chrome (weird), so, this and tumblr seems to be my only means of posting art. I'll probably keep things over here.

Also I've started watching Attack on Titan, so, that's been slaughtering me emotionally. I'd draw things for it, but the fandom is so full of talented artists, I just... don't know what I'd do. <xD Ahgh.

Color Comps - Naomi

Woo! Sorry about my lack of updates lately. Junior quarter at SCAD ended and since then I've been busy between work and two new video games (Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us). I did just finish the latter of the two, so, I should have less distractions now.

In the mean time between playing, I did finish the first of my color comps for the first assignment in Chris Oatley's The Magic Box.

Moving onto the second lesson sometime later tonight. 

But for now I need to wind down emotionally. The Last of Us has been pretty extreme, haha. ..haaa.

Quick painting - Rose Thomas

Sorry about the lack of update last week! With crunch and finals week coming up for this quarter, I've been a bit of a busy bee.

This afternoon, however, I found myself doing a quick painting of Rose Thomas, a character from Fullmetal Alchemist. This was my first time drawing her and also my first time using some painting techniques I've learned from Chris Oatley's "The Magic Box".

Spent maybe an hour and a half on it? Not quite sure. Just wanted to mess around with the tools and stuff.

I also sketched this a few nights ago for no reason.

More of a 10 to 15 minute thing. If even that. I just wanted to mess with the half-tones tool.

That's all I got for now! More things to come once the school quarter's over.

5 minute figures and 30 second gestures

Not much of an update this week, either, I'm afraid. Haven't been that good with keeping up with The Ring studies as it seems I've had to rush out of the dorm earlier in the day than expected each day this week. I have, however, done a few more figures and attended an animal sketching workshop on Thursday night. So I'll go ahead and throw those down, too.

First, the 5 minute figures.

And now the 30 second gestures and the animal gestures.

Ballerina Scribbles

Augh. Today's update isn't going to be as nice as I'd hoped. I had the misfortune of deciding to pick Supernatural back up today and ended up spending most of my afternoon flailing at the computer screen.

But! I had promised an update involving my soon to come senior film for next year, so, I'll at least give you what I have. I was going to post some marker tests, too, but my scanner totally ate the colors. If it wasn't so late I'd fidget with it some more, but, I'm exhausted. Until then, have a few scribbles towards working out my protagonist's design.

More as far as story coming soon. And there will definitely be more elaborate concept art as well. But for now, it's just been a bunch of pencil doodles and scribbles in my portable sketchbook.

Sorry about the lack luster update! Hopefully next weekend I'll have a bit more substance.

Film Study: The Ring 0:00:00 to 0:07:36

Last quarter I made an attempt to start an exercise I found on Emma Coats' blog. I've had to drop it due to college workloads picking up, but I'm going to start making an effort as of tomorrow to try to spend at least an hour on it every morning while I have breakfast and coffee.

Anywho, the film I chose to study first is "The Ring". A film that will always be a personal favorite of mine for a variety of reasons.

Each of my panels is 1" in height and 2" in width. This post covers the first 7 and a half minutes of the film. More to come next week, hopefully. Here are the whole pages:

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

And here they are broken into "halves" if you wanted to see the detail, as well as notes I've taken along the way (click on them for their close ups). 

Page 1a (detail)

Page 1b (detail)

Page 2a (detail)

Page 2b (detail)

Page 3a (detail)

Page 3b (detail)

And that's all for today! If all goes according to plan tonight as well as tomorrow afternoon, I should have another post up sometime tomorrow night. This time regarding my senior film that's currently undergoing concept development in preparation for next year.