Also ouija finished

BTW
--------------

More Gym Leaders

FINISHED. APH x Poke crossover?

HRM actually the lines took insanely long on it... and so did the colours (went through 4 color refs to find a good one)... and the filter party afterwards.... I'm kind of honoured that people like it, but I spent AAaaaages with it, always stopping to think, "Do I give up at 'okay' or keep going till I find 'good'?" So I kinda feel it deserves love. Though, you can see signs of my struggles in the messy colours, lol.
------------------

A seedy lookin' morty. HURHUR. Takes you back to the teenage years doesn't it?
------------

After sleeping in till midday (like I always do these days), I dropped friends AND work just to have some private time with my graphic tablet. Finally.
Head buzzing with ideas, and there's only so much time before you die to get them all onto paper, dopey though they might be. It's scary and sobering, really.

ALSO Terry Pratchett is awesome, and owns pretty much my entire adolescence AND English education.

hisashiburi

Weegee willies! (OUIJA..... don't mess with it!)
-------------
Hoy polloy!

After a nearly month-long hiatus (1.5 month general illustration hiatus...) what is this? I feel like I might be back on track....

don't worry bout a thing

Des studio 4: catalogue...
-------------------------


Erm yeah. My head hurts, I'm goina bed.

maketa tokoro de yaruki wo dasu no ga....

For Halloween.
-------
Argh. 2 days of reckoning, followed by 4 days of delectable enjoyment... if I could just get my wires uncrossed...

saraba seishun

Goodbye Reality
------------------------

I love and respect the real world, and sometimes I will come close within its gravitational pull, but we don't often get along. I don't think I could ever live there.

Kids With Guns

Another FB Profile, w. the susukino maid dress.
---------------------------------

WIP that shouldn't have happened with my todo pile, but... did.
-------------------------------------------

HURM waiting for my finger to dry so that i can keep typing. I wish I could just throw some crap together but I can't. Call me a perfectionist... and masochistic... at least class starts at 1 tomorrow!

Doctor Doctor

ACID COLOURS
------------------

Yaknow sometimes when you look at a screen long enough and keep raising the contrast, you kind of don't realise how bright stuff is getting?

Aaaanyway. Too much Red Bull & Sabori.



Favourite line:
hope you die hope you die love from me

HAHahahahaha rock on. :D

Concentration

New profile. For Fb.
----------------------
That's how itchy my butt gets (pardon expression) when it rains and there's no plans on. I  know I should be reading 5-line paragraphs full of 5-syllabic words by French theorists on what's wrong with our society today but I keep distracting myself & missing hanging out with people. Lately I just want life to happen faster and faster, lol... I feel like I'm 12, but I really enjoy just doing not much in particular with fun people.

SO! Deep question... should you go for it and do whatever makes you happy, or are you responsible for the happiness of others too? Family and friends, yes, but people you don't really know? Are the young allowed to make mistakes or should you avoid hurting/inconveniencing other people to the best of your ability? Should you listen to your heart, even if it tells you it LOVES someone one week and is over it by the next? Or should you listen to your head and bind your unbridled happiness for the sake of everybody's sanity?

I'm thinking about this coz I've been reading a lot of bullshit girly manga and if you've never touched the stuff, it's like a terminal sugar high. As heavily manufactured over the decades as a chocolate bar or mackers burger, as calculated to keep you hungry and addicted enough to look past the sheer plasticity of it all.

We Sleep Inside of This Machine

Too Late to be an Emo?
----------------------

Music Being Emo
How do you make a song sad? Bit of piano, down tempo, warbling strings if you're really in the mood? Or angry guitar and screaming, raging, PAINED falsetto? It depends on the artist, audience and style. Lyrics also have a lot to do with it.

At worst these emotional cues, simple enough to trace back to the messages that our minds infer in them, can just be pulled out of a hat to throw together a "sad enough" song and sell some records. Coz every pop singer tends to stick to a ratio of one ballad every couple of upbeat songs in releases. Kind of run-of-the-mill, right? At best though, they can really be moving, and all the more so when it's not a pile of cues you already know but a song that could be about something else... but isn't. And some of the best emotional touches in songs are ones where it's pared back and withheld somewhat, so you feel the punch in this vocal struggle between saying and not saying.

Well, some awesomely sad (or pretty powerful, anyway) moments follow:

Ani Difranco - Dilate
Ani's lyrics are pretty amazing pretty much all of the time... when I first heard her I was amazed, coz here I was having grown up in late-90s creative ghettos where the nearest thing to her sound was Alanis Morisette, and girls with guitars was a bit of a cliche by then. And her lyrics were so much more of that, but pared down, and so much stronger. It's like poetry, spot on and evocative like words in songs oughtn't ever be, lest our brains either explode completely or just grow apathetic.

Dilate has so much in it as a song, that the only expression and image that it brings to my mind is a deadpan stare, full of despair, resignation, snarky black-humoured burnt pride. The look of one who knows enough to expect shitcakes from the world and yet always manages to be a little more disappointed. And when this person who's responsible for all that looks her in the eyes he knows all this, and she knows all this, you just have this look. LOOooove it.


Brand New - Jesus Christ
I'm not religious in the traditional sense, I don't really like the heavier rock sound that Brand New do. I heard this song on t61 and it was really quiet, and kind of builds this momentum of a conversation that's scarily honest, of the lost at 3 am on a cold night unable to sleep kind. And the beat travels more like harder rock songs do, which gives it something an alt-indie-folk-hipster band more at home in mellow sounds probably couldn't do. For a punk-pop act their voices are hushed till the end and that also kind of rocks... the punch is delicate, and that makes it all the more furious. Pretty much the first verse gets me, and it's a heckuva struggle even if like some suggest it's not his. These lines come back and back and keep this song on my lil' mp3:

Jesus Christ, I'm alone again
So what did you do those three days you were dead?
Because this problem is going to last
More than the weekend



Bump of Chicken - Taiyou
Under the guise of uptempo interesting-ish alt-rock tunes these guys plummet listeners to surprising depths and then drag us back out again. They are usually angrily, passionately willing to hope in the face of a faceless, meaningless reality and that strikes right close to home for a lot of people. Their stories are mostly full of heart and their message, usually to themselves as much as others, is to keep going somehow. To be real, to find meaning, realise your truth and forgive yourself your own shortfalls, in a world that offers you none of that.
Why I have apprehensions about this song is because I'd taken to the idea that it was another help-you-out song... that it was way bleaker and darker than the music promised (as usual), yes, but that they sang hopeful words of advice to an un-named other that they themselves wished fervently to believe. This is the standard BOC song; this is why they warm the cockles of a lot of disenfranchised, lost and searching hearts. Japanese is vague like that, and a few crucial cues can change the subject / narrator / object completely.

So actually, Taiyou is a song about the narrator that, trapped in his vague dark world, destroys the one thing that had any promise of helping him out. But it's more than that... because every line of meaning is a metaphor one step away from one or another telling detail of a chilling reality. Another evocative story, but instead of giving hope to a past self or chasing a best friend's train on bike promising to see each other again, it's a mute bleakness that seeps out and penetrates everything. I don't know how this song can be sung with a straight face or straight voice.

It really worries me that people say their next album's dark bits are even darker. Because if BOC can't keep hopeful, how on earth are we supposed to?

Project & Internet

There's a project at work, that put itself together partly after my workmates stumbled upon my DeviantArt account. Not that snooping is the right word, because the internet is the ultimate public domain, but it still feels strange somehow when your relatives/people you know exclusively IRL intervene in the usual running of an online identity.

I don't know why, but it feels saner to keep those identities separate.

Apparently this is a big thing to Japanese net users, who treasure the anonymity (or more the disattachment from any face, body, geographical location / etc) that various social media / self-publishing sites grant them. Whereas in the west net identity seems more a matter of self-expression and broadcasting... every Gen-Y kid's grown up with a myspace/livejournal/facebook nowadays (and I'm in the top end of that grouping apparently), and the first thing you learn when you DO pour your soul out onto the internet is that by and large nobody listens.

But for the west, constructs like 4Chan that force (or at least enable) anonymity are an endless source of novelty. It's both a big deal and in and of itself the reason for acting as (self-consciously) disturbed as possible. On Japan's 2Chan people still seem to "behave" somehow, there are a lot of unwritten manners and culture involved there. Same as on 4chan, but it's like they don't have this pressing urge to make a spectacle of themselves.

Something else to add to my list of things that people have said are Japanese about me. Like cringing when I meet someone that's K.Y. (look it up!) and never being able to tell someone when I like them. Source of endless grief because Japanese people have this crazy idea that western girls are assertive and forward and stuff. PSH

Anyway, I don't know that I can share project bits with you but once it comes online I'll share a link. :>


Lots of remeniscing recently. Otaru (1 hour from Sapporo), 2 winters ago.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

ARUE

Past weeks' stuff: Atlantis / AMERIBROS
-----------------

Poster Final (almost)
--------------

The text was better laid out in the final, but I don't have a JPEG handy of it.

URGH some stuff is just so annoying. I think I'm impatient with life... on the one hand so many awesome things happened this week, but on the other so many GREAT things were just snatched away, and fell flat around me. I feel like I've become a little bit psycho recently.... I know good things are supposed to bring out the good side in you, but IDK that I HAVE that much of a good side. lol.

If it sounds cryptic, it FEELS even more cryptic. I guess like all good amateur soulful-hipster-creatives I'll channel my no-word-to-describedness into some vaguely life-affirming artwork.

To stick on other people's walls.

And become famous, rich and be able to publish wanky art books and travel the world airing my dirty laundry in delicate pen-and-ink renders of furry monsters and other calculatedly naive, wistful things.

Date Night

Things never go the way you plan them to, do they?
-------------

A little something to get off my chest. This is why I don't do romance... too many extraneous circumstances, lol.

URHM BACK TO WORK.

poster project

dareka tasukete kure yo!

Beached Whales

T

Beached whale on a cliff.
-------------------------------

We had to scan whole objects and make a digital collage out of them for one class. '__' I know it's a bit nineties but I'm still a fan of the screening-dark-things-together look, getting that writing glowing there.... hmmm maybe I never even left the 90s?

yaruki

One of 4 book covers for old Illustration brief, and...
---------------------

Who doesn't love a little Sadako?
------------------------

A lot of my illustration homework seems to drift towards horror these days...

yosh! やるきまっまで宿題をし続けましょう！

In Lieu of Proper Work

I had a neat little 5-day weekend full of awesomeness that included, among other things:

• An hour of impromptu (and epic) campfire-worthy storytime with a uni lecturer after class
• 3 hours wasted in the uni pub talking about a lot of fun nothing
• People-watching in QV while getting weird stares for my ski jacket & giant snowboard case
• A road trip in which lovely company had to substitute for the broken radio
• Sleeping with a giant hairy teadybear
• 15+ runs at Buller, including a miniature ravine effort, moguls, 45 degree slopes and a lot more Goofy confidence
• Moonlight road trips to the cinema (an hour away) and an altogether not disappointing showing of Tomorrow When the War Began 
• A 7 am bus back from mansfield that took me to Melb in time for 7 hours at the office
• A good night's sleep, cake & coffee followed by doing good friendship deeds
• taking ESL kids out to see Crocodile Dundee at ACMI (their viewing rooms = free, and awesome!)
• Tim Burton, 1000 pound cafe nihongo meetup, followed by
• Busking Strategy 101, bogan dinner hour at Crown Casino, height competitions @ the Lounge, a weird korean hangout joint and the mother of all competitions of anti-skill at the pool table
• Joints cut with Earl Grey tea? Epic and painful kpop karaoke, guitar sessions on the State Library steps and the most disgusting Hungry Jacks I've ever seen
• A collection of sleepers curled into the glass windows near platform escalators at Flinders St, a long D&M with near-perfect strangers and snooze on the benches while waiting for trains to start running
• a LONG sleep, comfortable afternoon reading with soup, the induction of our new coffee plunger and 2+ hours of TinTin DVDs!

PHEW. This one's for the records.

And speaking of lists...

Did anyone else have to read that strange book "The Listmaker" in year 7 English? We all unanimously decided (in our herd mentality wisdom)that it was a terrible book, on account of it being almost a centimeter thick. (YEAR 7!!)
Despite this it wasn't entirely a bad book. I felt my first pangs of intimidated, all-pervasive inferiority when a friend of mine at that time said that she actually enjoyed the book. I was intimidated because everyone else had decided they wouldn't, and yet she was sure about her honest feelings towards it, and comfortable with those differing from the majority of the 12 year olds around her. It was kind of awesome, in the traditional sense, like amazing and scary and profound all at the same time.

Anyway, SPEAKING OF LISTS:

How to Find out a Classmate's Name

1. Ask a Friend
2. Ask someone you've seen talking to them
3. Listen when the roll is called
4. Check the roll to narrow down possibilities
   (If roll is illustrated, +10 points)
   (if roll is out of students' hands, -10 points. check Unit Mailing System for names)
5. Facebook search the possibilities
6. If profile picture is ambiguous, double-check against count of friendly mutuals
7. Friend friendly mutuals
8. Google possibilities
9. Listen out for name in conversation (auxiliaries can be a boon in this)
10. Just admit you don't know, and ask them.

Procrastination Techniques, August 2010

1. Dinner
2. Pretzels
3. Mundane Facebook posts
4. Rewatching of youtube links you've been sent
5. Personal Hygiene (ie. Shower)
6. Vacuuming
7. Pondering whether socks feel dirty enough to be changed
8. Checking email, FB, every website you're a member of for messages to reply to
9. Pondering deep & meaningfuls like life, career, and why your mother never taught you to sit still & work for hours at a time
10. UPDATING YOUR BLOG

ideas

Woooo OC PARTY!
----------------------------

Some ideas I've been having.

Superfast Jellyfish

Illustration HW, reinterpreted...
----------

I don't quite think that's what we were supposed to do.

SIGH so far off the bandwagon that I can no longer see it on the horizon.

Tired :/

Succint summary of my life at this juncture?
--------------

haha not really. Had a homework project for Illustration class to uh... depict our "changes of state" at each part of the day. 7.30 AM, 12 noon, 7.30 pm and midnight. I've literally forgotten this assignment 4+ times after having it succinctly explained by classmates on 4+ separate occasions, that's how much its potential bores me.

Does anyone else get embarrassed in telling their housemates/familymembers what their teachers are asking them to do in Design/arts subjects?

For the record, my last Sunday:

• 7.30 am: Hit the snooze for another bit of shut-eye because my dreams are more awesome than IRL.
• 12 Noon: Eat a can of soup, doodle on my tablet some and ponder absently about the state of the world. 
• 7.30 pm: Walking and wanting to be anywhere but here. IRL is boring :/
• 12 Midnight: Sleeping? :/

Yeah it's not really wow, so I guess I'll try and depict mental states? I go up and down during the course of the day...  :/ :/ the blue was meant to be my dream. There was this person in my dream... aahh it's too hard to explain '_';

Sunday Work

US & Canada, of APH, and a skit from Colbert Report.
------------------

| Julia, Tony & Enough Rope from the Aus electorate.
----------------------

Errr re-levelled this & added texture coz it looked a bit washed out...
--------------------

HRM been feeling very political this weekend. Finishing the last work on Adamo while eating chocolate, watching back episodes of Gruen and Chaser, unwinding from the spin with some Daily Show & Colbert Report. Thankyou IVIEW for making it all available at my fingertips!
I used to prefer John Stewart but Steven Colbert's done a few really good ones recently. They're both lovely, really. John should watch his weight.

HMM so I'm gonna teach myself to draw things that aren't cute, spongy cartoons at some point. Again. From scratch. Look forward to it!

Leaders of the Free World

New page of Visual Diary... mix of uni notes, ideas & fanarts. :>
-----------------------


Collaboration! Vera, Marijka, Virginia & me.
--------------------------

So I'm collecting albums these days. It's part of my post-splendour new music kick, though not all of it is new.

Right now: Grabbing Angus & Julia Stone's Down the Way and A Book Like This.

Most Recent: Brand New's The Devil & God Are Raging Inside Me, basically got because I found myself falling for their track "Jesus", and so I expected the rest of it to be that mellow... and it wasn't.

Just Worn In: Elbow Discography. I really loved Elbow's Seldom Seen Kid, which I'd discovered on the plane back from Queenstown a year ago. Finally I got to grabbing all of their stuff. Just now, just today (well last time I was all-nighting a project), I finally wore all these songs in like a new shoe and now I really, wholeheartedly enjoy all of them. Which makes me a fully-versed Elbow fan, I guess.

A discography by an artist is a big gamble, and undertaking it depends on your willingness to still love that artist after hearing tens of hours of material that might span decades. Even if you love one album cover to cover and want to hear more, getting the entire catalogue of their work is a BIG step, and it usually shatters your preconceptions of what they're about. No matter how much I loved the Pillows while I was at RMIT, I've still to get through their entire 15-year back-catalogue, and the old stuff sounds REALLY aged (1990 for god's sake!).

It's a gamble, because sometimes you WILL hate an artist you're meant to love, not for lack of trying.

It's like that if you decide to try out an artist, too. Do you go for the newest album? The best-selling? The most acclaimed? What's a good "in", after you've heard a song or two or just read a review that tickled your fancy?

Well I can't say that I'm any better at the game after a few weeks of heavy collecting. But it's still fun, and I'll stick with it until it stops being so. And hey, you can just delete stuff that you don't like. :>

So anyway (while I'm procrastinating), here's a list of my inbox atm:

• Tame Impala - Innerspeaker (A bit cool, better live)
• Angus & Julia Stone - A Book Like This, Down The Way
• Arcade Fire - Neon Bible, Funeral (heard someone raving about them across the room, grabbed 2 albums from either end of the career I think? still undecided :/)
• Arctic Monkeys Discography (Retrospectively realised these guys are awesome.. but... I'm still a little overwhelmed with a wall of rock-sound after all this indie tripping.)
• Bliss & Eso - Running on Air (I really enjoyed Flying Colours, rhymes are a bit juvenile sometimes but that's part of the FUN. And their samples are wicked, and include Kasey Chambers....WAITWHAT?)
• Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago (You gotta expect something awesome from a guy who locks himself up in a cabin in the wintery woods and, while hibernating, puts together a soulful healing album. It's lovely, even the tinniness of homebrew recording is.)
• Brand New - The Devil & God Are Raging Inside Me (I thought I'd like the later album better, but the song that got me interested was my "in" on this album. Like a few tracks now, not sure I'll ever like some others. Heavy rock sound, I'm just not in the mood for it)
• Elbow Discography (love it! Covers the same ground as Coldplay but not radioplay-murdered, and his voice is LOVELY.)
• Gorillaz - Plastic Beach (I liked Demon Days once I wore it in, and a lot of people didn't... I think less people will like Plastic Beach, but I've kind of been on an electro-kick. It hit the spot for me. These cartoons are friggin' COOL.)
• Jamie T - Kings & Queens (He sang that Sticks & Stones song, ya remember? One of my first albums after Splendour and every minute hit the spot, esp. in contrast to Tame Impala. I've overheard it now, and his slummy brit-rap is really hard to understand sometimes, but it's kinda more poetic than just rap about being young and getting drunk/high a lot (looking at you Eso).)
• MGMT - Congratulations, Oracular Spectacular, Climbing to New Lows (HMM I was really into MGMT for a week there, and Congratulation's hard to hear if you like OS a lot. I got sucked into thinking about it as a Take That Stupid Fans album, like a lot of ppl did, but reading some heartfelt interviews kind of warmed me to it. And by that point I'd worn all the songs in. I've got some ANCIENT tracks from their uni days, too. Heheheheh...)
• Mumford And Sons - Sigh No More (I think everyone has to have this album, if they're into indie music in 2010? Like Angus & Julia Stone? I really like it, some of the lyrics are a bit hmmm for me, but their raw energy and passion is lovely. But uh, really..."folky".)
• Passion Pit - Manners (Another post-splendour one. Seeing them live was fun as... they kind of filled the hole that Congratulations didn't)
• Philadelphia Slick - Culture Industry (Heard some of their raps on T61 and really enjoyed them... looking forward to this)
• School of Seven Bells - Disconnect from Desire (They had 2 albums, not sure if I got the right one? Love the atmosphericness of it, but some tracks are hard to tell apart. Not worn in yet)
• We Are Scientists - With Love & Squalor (HAHAHaha IDK if you should invest in music just because you like the videos. I like a few tracks, but it's that harder rock sound that I'm not feeling atm, and kinda simple.)

I really, really need to clean out my inbox.

HAHHAHAHAHAHAaaaa time to get back to work! '_'

jabjab

B

Book Cover Design - Two jacket flaps on left and rightmost, back cover, spine then front cover in that order.
----------

Final result will be vaguely like this, x4. THIS IS PROGRESSING while Adamo is ticking precariously close to due dates.

Will I manage all of this while still taking time off to board?

ONLY TIME WILL TELL.

10 things

10 things that I would rather be doing than designing letterheads:

1. Drinking
2. drinking for free
3. eating cheesecake
4. Dancing
5. getting high
6. yakiniku party
7. getting paid
8. making comixxx
9. snowboarding
10. correcting people on the internet

Phew!

10 things I would rather not be doing, than designing letterheads:

1. cleaning bathroom scum
2. listening to annoying people
3. going through chemotherapy
4. studying for Japanese test
5. trying to get somewhere on public transport
6. getting centrelink to pay me money
7. dying in a vat of acid
8. haering my first Justin Bieber song
9. listening to my employers argue
10. having to pay for things

10 things I did today instead of designing letterheads:

1. pet the cats
2. look up music videos on youtube
3. look around facebook for something to comment on
4. bit of inking on illustration project
5. think about my new haircut
6. eat orange cake
7. refill my teapot
8. braid my hair
9. tell the cat to get stuffed coz i needed my lap to work
10. ponder deeply about what to have for lunch & when to have it

I GOT ALL THE PAGES

& I'm really really excited.... :>>>>>>

Now to find time to do them all between uni work, HMMM.

I'm like a husband, finding things to do at work to avoid going home. *SIGH* I need 5 canned soups for every week day in the week I think.

siberian breaks

zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

crying lightning

We Are Scientists - After Hours.
----------------------

:>

Collecting Input / doodles

An update about all the stuff that I've been doing the last couple of days, besides running around after deadlines...

Pretty much all of it can be summed up by listening to lots of new music, feelin' the CRAZY BUZZ and.... MGMT.

I am unrepentant, or at least not COMPLETELY repentant. Also more of the boys from That Oneshot that is still in inking progress as we speak (tab on the LEFT actually tells you how far I've gone with it, and helps bring me a sense of achievement!).

I've started up a secondary blog, because we had to for school. This is pretty much the INPUT, or a link log for everything I find (usually on the internet and atm, music vids) that inspires me.
So I will put all my OUTPUT on this one, namely illustrations, designs, etc etc etc.
Ima give the link on my sidepanel for my own reference.

Come to think of it I might make a list for my school projects too, and make me stay on top of it...

Man my scarf smells like I've been to yakiniku, and I don't know why, because I was eating vegetarian last night. :/

SOOooo anyway

Quotes/drawing during a design talk | Flash Delirium Video dudes, from when I first saw it | They're just so young, angry and shirtless, yaknow??
-----------------

URF I'm too lazy to de-line them. Should I get a planner with no lines? I probably should.

School stuff:


Thumbnails for bookcover series where a HAND represents fear. Somehow.
---------------


THAT"S IT.

INPUT BLOG: Minty Xylitol

blindsided

Museum of Modern Oddities - the logo monstrosity
------------
A bit of a monstrous logo. Catching up on design projects after my recovery... taken a page from Nick from PP's book (I keep seeing him everywhere it seems...) to go wild with my projects while I have the chance. He had some awesome advice for us kids.
Do I really want to be a Designer?

HMMMMM *shrug* IDK

3 big ones and a test next week! Wish me luck, and 26 hours in a day.

Time to Pretend

SOoo... PFWOAH. Got back from 3 days attending Splendour in the Grass, which is a big musical festival. I was gonna really think about something to say about it, but then I didn't. I spent 6 days in QLD overall, driving around (sitting in the back seat while somebody else drove around) looking at beaches and enjoying the balmy weather and searching for crocodile burgers, which are a local delicacy.

Yes. In Australia, we EAT CROCODILES.

It was a discovering journey. I'll leave it at that until my brain recovers, lol... so I fell straight into the lap of four separate deadlines, looming up beyond the crest of next weekend in what promises to be a mad rush among mad rushes... and it doesn't help that I simply don't care anymore.

It's hard, when your life's just been about sitting in a car, squeezing through festival crowds and finding a not-too-dirty t-shirt in your suitcase. To put all those heaving weights back on your shoulders, pick up the trailing strings of all those things you're trying to follow up and make happen, all those things you owe people and all those things just beyond your reach. To get back into the gravity of it all.

And I got all these great ideas, on the buzz of extraordinariness, that I don't want to just stew there to oblivion like they usually do. A few nice chances and things that for a change I don't really want to let slip by.

I'm keeping myself in a flurry of activity that'll hopefully stave off the real comedown, when that shadow catches up with me.

SOOOoo, pictures!


What would happen when two OCs meet?
----------------

Two people I saw on a plane... with an Iphone and what should have been a LOMO camera, lol.
------


Also I got kind of a (maybe?) chance of being published in a tiny mag and I don't really know what to send them. I'll let that one stew away as well.

packing night

Yesterday I filed an application for subject overload, and today (after attending my new class) I'm packing for an early plane ride to Brisbane!
That's right, the HEIGHT of irresponsibility. I think I'll take my computer with me and try (to pretend to) stay on top of my work.
3-4 projects due the week after I get back, a few homework assignments & progress reports...

AYEIGH.

TIRED
--------------------
My head doesn't think straight after this much running around. Need to be up at 5 tomorrow, out of the house by 5.50 am all to make a 9 am flight out of Avalon airport. HMMMM

I'm gonna take my pc and a bunch of stuff with me that might enable a bit of HW progress while I'm up and about. Yeah. I guess. :/

cutting paper

heheheheheheheh
------------

Saturday was lots of fun, and now I know how to knit!

So now it's Sunday... collaging a bit to get the creative juices flowing in regards to one project I'm meandering about. It's about time I did this. My scraps box is overflowing and my vis diary is over a year old now, meaning i just haven't been using it enough to fill it in the first year of Design. And I want a new one, for all the notes n things that I need to do.... hmmmmmmmmm


collaging in vis diary
---------------

End of a long week!

I'm a bit of a cartoon.
-----------------------------------

Yaknow, I'm kinda happy that way! :> But I do need a haircut. I promise you next time me and the last Miyazaki heroine will be INDISTINGUISHABLE.


While I work on toning the pages of the one-shot for Adamo, which is what's taken up my time recently, I can't help but get carried away in the back stories for these characters who appear for maybe 2 or 3 frames.
This must happen a lot to people... I spend a lot of time on it or thinking about it, so it sticks in my head.

Then, while I'm slacking off at work, stuff like this happens. *LOL*


Actually, it's really NOT...
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I kind of thought of Mr. Emohair confiding in possibly his only friend about his lovelife. In my mind, she somehow misinterprets that Emohair is sleeping with a HIPPIE STONER. Because she's a sassy little cat, she would probably say something like, "Oh you don't know where those girls have been. You might catch something."

PFFFFF

YEA I KNOW! X> I really really wish I could do the deadpan Too Cool face that they all have. I can't draw ppl without personalities. XD XD

HERE HAVE AN IGGY!

HYEAHHH
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I was so tired the other morning in class that I couldn't stop drawing bags under eyes. But somehow his face grew into this weird sleazy smile... enjoy your free cartoon cigarette, mr. Featherweight Champ!

Damien Rice - Delicate

Back from the Snow

And it was FUNNNnnn now back to work...



HFFFffff weird, ambiguous things are happening!
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This page was released as a preview, so I guess I can share it here too.

I wish it didn't take me embarrassingly long to tone/text arrange.

But it does.

I guess it's taught me a good work ethic?

Sleeping At Last - Porcelain

Coin Game

That's not where the coin is!
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Heh heh heh heh heh. Wait does that count as thin lines..? Trying to reclaim my Visual Diary & get through the MOUNTAIN of scavenged stuff before uni restarts...

PSYCHED about ski holiday & Splendour.

Not so about the state of my bank account :/

Wins & Losses

Win: Got me a 3-day study week at uni! 4 units in 3 days, more intense but more time to manage on my own to get study etc done. I find I work better when classes don't get in my way, especially studio sessions where you sit for a few hours just waiting for a chat with your lecturer. More days for work, too, and more for leisure (Cheaparse Tuesdays at Mt. Buller ski resort come to mind).

Loss: UUUNNGGHHH. THIS feeling, possibly due to PMS, when what propelled me through weeks of sporadic long-haul, serious scores of hours of effort has dried up. Amidst finding myself in a blue-moon scenario of disparate powers converging into making my life suddenly and very intricately busy, I see that the kind of exertion that was necessary to progress thus far is going to be impossible to achieve with everything else on my plate in the next 2-3 weeks, and this is going to be detrimental to an ungaugeable degree to the success of the project. And going out means money gone, just when student support payments had finally figured themselves out.

SIGH. I want to do well, and be on time and up to standard and all those other good things that propel us to ungodly hours and prolonged caffeine habits. I don't like things that weren't there when work wasn't urgent, that suddenly are there when work pace needs to continue, and when those things are chockablock for the foreseeable future.

I always have a fear, when I spend hours upon hours retoning and retoning same corners of page, that just one option untried would keep the page from looking its best, would be the one thing to bring it down. That because things need to happen fast, standard is secondary to speed, and that I'm the only thing standing in the way of slipshod work going under the radar.

You know when your Winamp (or other media player) is strangely prophetic, in the dead of night, with its random song choices?

The Panics - Don't Fight It
Advice much? :/

Some strangeness before shower & bed

"MY WIG IS SLIPPING"
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Laughing through my nose goes here. I'm such an alien... I want to go away but IDK if Canada is far enough.

Boxes

I'm in a bit of a box. This is something I'm usually comfortable with.

But every now and then, I'll feel the irrepressible urge to exit this box, go outside it, see beyond it and be and do ALL that I am capable of doing. To be limitless, to be truly free, and express as honestly as humanly possible!

But each time I drag myself kicking and screaming out of it, after a novelty or two, I'll find myself crawling back into the comfort zone tail squarely between legs. Yes newness is all good but I have oldness to be getting on with... there's things people expect of me, have grown accustomed to seeing from me, and I don't want to disappoint them. I don't want to lose the warmth of their appreciation and sit there, all alone; just me, a pen and the endless abyss. I want eyes, you know, anyone that creates anything does. You do it because you can't help it, because you need to; but also because you want to be understood when every other medium of communication fails you. And because you want to be loved for what you do, of course.

And so before I know it, I'm once again locked in to these old ways. On the good days I am warm in the knowledge that I know exactly what I am doing, I bask in the adoration of people to whose faces I can bring a smile or a tear, I am confident that I know that little bit more, that my taste is that little bit more refined, and can undercut my rivals. But on the bad days I can hardly recognise myself for all the rules holding me in place. I can see myself pandering to something that I know is half unreal, a construct of the logic of my twisted preemption of what the world seems to want out of me. Yet I pander away, until all confidence and will to do anything at ALL leaves me paralysed.

Well, that's alright, we all have bad days, right?

But the problem is, egoist that I am, I KNOW I can do more, and do it better. I know in theory I should be capable of a lot of different things, and the only thing REALLY holding me back is the time and effort that I need to give these things. Time and Effort being prioritised towards activities that earn me recognition and love enough to keep trying every day. So while doing what I do, this bitterness permeates me. After hours and hours of work I refuse to own up to my own produce, and though so many wonderful people have given me so much of their love and their time and their respect I take it in my stead and I want constantly more, because I am dissatisfied, because I'm not being all that I COULD be if those rules catering to them weren't holding me back.

And this is unfair, to all those wonderful people, to my work, to my efforts, to the fields in which I wish to excel, to my ambitions most of all. Torn between the known that imprisons me and the unknown in which I fear to abandon myself, between a comfortable niche to the left of trendy and the risks in trusting an inner vision, I find myself divided to cater to each bracket of output. They are mutually exclusive and separate, or I make them that way, because in any one bracket I see every other type of endeavour as irrelevant and unapplicable. I can't draw for a design project; I can't paint the way I draw, I can't write lyrically anywhere within my design briefs, and I can't then bring what I learn behind a shutter to my sketchpad.

And so long as I keep these skills secret from each other and separate as possible, so that within the context of Design I can be JUST a Designer, and within the context of illustration I can be JUST an Illustrator and so forth, I'll always be uncomfortable because no single one of those REALLY encompasses everything. In each one I always feel a little like I'm lying, like this thing can't REALLY say everything I have to say. Like the me that I'm portraying is edited to fit the context of its presentation, at the expense of true honesty. And like I'm losing, and failing myself, by not giving my all because there's only a fraction of me left to give.


Which means, really, that I divide my skill up and stretch myself across different things. Where I really SHOULD be bringing it all together, embracing all of it and with the power of each of these disparate skill sets and aesthetics, should be making something new and wonderful that encompasses EVERYTHING.

If I were able to do this, what I make would be a sum of all parts, and completely honest to me and what I can do. It would be a more honest expression, a more cathartic expression to cover point one. For point two, it would be a truer communication, a conversation that didn't involve this self-conscious habit of mine of pre-editing output to match the perceived audience, of pre-empting as much as possible what could be implied about ME out of my work. I have enough confidence in each of my developed strengths, but to bring together to really speak... just how far could that take me?

And for the last point, well, audiences come and go and to be loved for a truly HONEST expression would surely fill me with nothing but honest gratefulness. And if there's one shortcut to happiness, it's to feel grateful for and amazed by everything around you.

:>

And no you can't have my number, coz i lost my phone

Two different texture renders. 
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PHEW. Well there were a few things that I struggled with with this... actually, IDK, I feel like pictures aren't taking me nearly as long now (must be all my slave work toning, which I've selfishly done with the same splodgy style as I do everything else). Which is good! I make snappier choices faster & have a faster turnaround.

I decided to make that picture above mostly Green & Brown. That's the colour scheme of our family house (plus white) and I thought it'd be a nice change. I don't ever use green much, really... had about 3 pics in a row that were all blue-yellow? HYEAH.

Anyway I finished them in two ways, one with a halftone filter applied to a flattened version of the whole image, at 70% transparency or so, the other with the usual paper texture that I've been using lots of lately.
Problem with the paper is it just looks good multiplied, you don't want to use it any other way... and that means the colours get darker.
Not a problem with most pictures as my colours tend to be pretty light & vibrant (I err on the pastelly side if anything... coz my screen is quite dark.) But this one lost some of the whites that it needed, like around the lightbulb... so I did the halftone thing.

I really like the poster feel of old paper texture, but, idk, halftone filter is so much more vibrant. I was gonna switch the DA edition to paper just a moment ago but stopped myself.

HNMMMMM


What's been taking up 80% of my time? This. 
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Although, now that I know it's all that urgent, I'm open to not spending 5+ hours every day working away at it... work ethic! Don't abandon me now!

Now that the story is written, I keep having these ideas about how to expand/explore the characters and this is also bad. It gets to where you see more there than there actually is, and can't look at something fresh.

 ALSO! Sigur Ros is awesome.

ALSO! Hanna Is Not A Boy's Name is doubly awesome!

Leaving you with a quote from Dylan Moran...

Lady: Oh look at those men. One of them is trying to DOsomething...