half of an eventuous year, with a bit of time travel mixed in.

This last year, but mainly this last semester, have been life-course changing, not only in my work ethic, but also my drawing skills and most importantly, my patience when it comes to drawing.

Most of the time, I can be impatient when I'm drawing.  It's not that I have somewhere to go at the moment, but I just want it to be done when I first put the pen on the page.  That is bad.  So very bad.  Here is what results from that:

Not good, but not the worst, but actually yes from my current view, it is the worst.  But also to be fair I think that the example on the right is from a page done on the light rail, so there's the jarring of the light rail carriage to blame partially, but not really.

So those most likely, judging from the sketchbooks, were from before my first semester in design school.  Now lets look at during 1st semester:

 



better,  a lot better.  My main help in achieving this was not my classes, but from switching from ballpoint pens to felt tip.  Helped bunches and bunches, but still there is not much felt tips can do about unsteady hands.

So now I started 2nd semester, where our first and main project was making pages and pages of this:

Then as I got better, pages and pages of this:

So that is fun, but the fun had yet to begin.  I'm 40% sarcastic right now, but as the semester goes on, my sarcasm drops to zero whenever I say "fun" when describing my projects.  

So back to stuff.  As "practice" for my projects in studio, I drew during other classes.  But in all honesty I would have done this regardless of my projects.  But one thing started to change.  As a result of always having to do a FULL page of lines, and doing them semi consistently, I got better and more patient with my drawing.  I don't really have an example of this, but here is a drawing with a funny story behind it.  Or more like in front of it.  Whatever.

So my graphic design teacher always put music on before class that went with the era we were talking about.  Well the era somehow related to Little Richard, so Little Richard was playing.  I was trying to imitate Little Richard's trademark "wooooooo!!!" and my friend told me to stop immediately.  That led me to draw this somehow, but then later after class I went against her orders as if she didn't already know that when you tell me to not do something that is fun to do, I will intentionally do it later to annoy you.  So for most of the day, I did my best Little Richard "woooooo!" and this drawing will serve as a memorial to the day when I randomly did a Little Richard impression to annoy my friend.  Oh and the robot part doesn't play out into real life, I just drew it that way because I didn't remember how Little Richard looked like and I do remember how to draw robots.   

Back to the thing that was the original thing I was talking about.  

Ok, so I guess I'll do time travelling, fast forward to this:

This photo was taken after I had completed all four of the pencil pages.  This is roughly 200 pages of those lines I showed above, with circles then letter-forms added later, but still a rough 60% of that 200 is straight lines.

 This is where I was having a lot of fun. 

But back in time a bit to how I got to that photo. After a less than stellar midterms, I buckled down and did at least a few pages a day as compared to a few every other day, with frequent gaps.  I was at one point where I felt bad even taking one day off of doing a page of pencil lines.  As another result of my work, I began to be more patient in my drawing that wasn't for school.  Example 1:

This is literally one of the first pages I ever drew that looked like this. I would sometimes draw something with the same style, but not with the same patience and it would show majorly.  

Now whenever I draw, I can slow down and think about what I put down, and also being much better at straight lines is a huge plus.  I know I jump around with the timeline but who cares I'm just going to post more stuff including stuff I'm really proud of.  

Oh and one last PSA: use a felt tip pen and not a ballpoint.  Ballpoint is only good for writing and maybe drawing super curvy stuff.  If you want to have straight lines, no ballpoint.  Learned this after years and years of using ballpoint.  I now can say that I have at least one regret.

Ampersands, because they're fun to draw during class and the teacher wouldn't be that mad at me for this

Drew this during art history, and I think we were talking about the Romantic period, but I don't remember because I didn't let the content of the class influence the drawing in this instance. I had a vision of how this would end up, and I did that

DID THIS OUTSIDE OF CLASS!

This is my final page for the second project.  

Final page for the 4th project. In between this and the second were roman letters, and the first one was just straight lines and was a little boring.  Luckily it was also the easiest to do.

ALSO DID THIS ONE ENTIRELY OUTSIDE OF CLASS. I've entered an era where I will seldomly say "drew this during class" and say more art language stuff like "this evokes..." and "the purpose of this piece..."  ...no I won't say that stuff just kidding.

This one I gave a title for the first time.  It's called "42 ________"  and don't mind the weirdness in one section. I had to splice this from two scans and I couldn't get them to exactly line up.

here is the end result

After a trip to audacity and MS paint, here is the end result.  I even gave it a title, but then that would make things lame, so I put that title through google translate a few times, then converted that into a simple number code, and then threw in a few random characters so no one can ever possibly translate it, and here it is:

↕┐¶♣┌♫‼♪█ƃ*/‼○■

Fun fact about alt codes: alt+32 is a space. so if you're tired of pushing the space bar all the time, just use alt+32!!

gifday is back!

So finals are over and such, and I aced them all like I should, and now I can go back to messing around with images so they glitch out, whether by my own hand or by a computers hand.

This week I made this thing. Warning if you haven't already noticed, this one is flashy. It is also a visual representation of my brain in the midst of finals.

















I will post some of the last few images because they are, in my opinion, masterpieces of glitchery.  I first ran the source image through a pixel sorter, then I put that into Photoshop, then after some layering, I put that image into Audacity, and cut and paste the raw data a few 20 ish times, exporting after each cut and paste to make sure the data wasn't corrupted, then back to MS paint, for old fashioned copy and pasting, but with sections of one image pasted onto an earlier pixel sorted image. So then after lots and lots of copy and pasting and inverting colors, I put the image back into photoshop as a layer, and worked around with it along with a few of its cousins worked in as layers also.

The final product came out awesome and I made a few variations and I love them all.  One I decided would be a teaser poster for the latest non-existent Matrix movie.

ok, I'm gonna go back and put my finished product back into the pixel sorter, and maybe after that audacity.  I'm gonna glitch this photo to the max.  I'll post the end result.

Gifday post

Super late and I'm not sorry. I needed a break from finals, and once I hit publish on this post, it is back to the business of sorta stressing out about finals because I have managed to keep ahead of my own schedule and I might very well finish with all my final projects a week before they're due. 

added note: I like this idea, and I might change parts of my animated short in this same manner, by putting an image behind the frame and using a masking layer or whatever this is called.

not gifday, but the founder gives an exception

I am super late for Gifday because I went into studio today and on the way back I thought that the ironman race was over, but it wasn't so I was stuck in traffic on a SUNDAY and from then on I have been off kilter but hey, here is color.  I don't like using it, but I have to.

This gif is based off of my second project for my studio, and it's an abstract project so.....

Ok, so we were told to choose a line width from 4 variations, and the lines had to fit within a 15 cm square and there were to be 12 of them.  aside from that, we were told to run wild, woo.

So I chose a 7 cm black line with a 6 cm spacing, and from there, we had to choose a verb and then represent that verb in 4 steps which you will see.

I chose glitch, and I regretted that decision because at the last step, I had a billion different little nubs that we poking through the different lines, and I had to adjust the lines to both get rid of the nubs and still represent my verb.

and then to make this gif I just traced over a less than perfect printout of my steps, and such and so forth.

I'm sorry if I am boring, but my brain is in finals mode, and is barely capable of creating thoughts that don't relate to my projects, all 19 of them due in 3 weeks.  Don't worry, I have about 6 of those complete, and the rest save a few are close to being done.  The real balancing act is to get certain ones done and printed out before finals week, when all the printers plan on dying. I can hear them planning their funerals and writing out their wills:

  "for a musical piece, I want a chorus of freshmen wailing, with sophomores adding screaming harmony and the juniors accompanying with sobs. oh, and make sure that the printer in the computing commons gets my errors when I die."

Heh, I might write a short play base on this idea.  I'm sure the theater department will shred it after reading the first page, but if they can't find the humanity in printers planning out their own deaths, then I pity them greatly.

Oh yeah hey here is my gif it's not much but I don't care and after that is my actual project.

gifday

happy late Gifday!!!

This guy is supposed to be going down stairs, and I was going to add stairs, but I was taking too long with this one, so I said "good enough" and here it is.

It's a slightly exaggerated representation of how I descend stairs,

a happy Gifday to all!!