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January 30, 2004
Animal Icons
Just a short entry for now... I have a lot of work to do. I'll write a longer one later. But in the meantime, here are the finals for my animal icon project.
Posted by dminky at 03:18 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 27, 2004
Wizards and Weasels
It's been a while since I wrote everything up here, but I guess it's cause I've been a little busy. As you know, my entire weekend is consumed by Gaming Club activities; Fridays are Game & Movie Nights, and Saturdays are D&D Nights, both of which continue until the wee hours of the morning. D&D went quite well... the party sacked and destroyed an enormous ghost shipped manned by a 200-strong hobgoblin crew and in the process captured the pirate Mordechai. That may have been one of the longest D&D battle's I've ever run -- approximately 3 and a half hours real time, and over 50 rounds, game time. I did lose count, but that's a pretty close guess judging by the number of hobgoblins per round and how many they killed before fighting and lighting the ship's powder magazine.
Anyway, to update you on what's been going on in *real* life... I haven't done any more work on my storyboards yet, as I have to begin re-editting my story before I start thumbnailing any more scenes. I haven't had the free time to paint on my own, but I will be starting a master copy of an N.C. Wyeth painting today. In Digital Video we're kind of doing monkey work to get the hang of the software. I'm making a text & music animation about hydrogen fuel cells (assigned subject). I've finally found a working way to transfer my Illustrator files from PC to Mac, so I can continue working on my animal icon series. And, for the same reason, I'm doing my Illustration assignment (the weasel) on Illustrator as well. The manweasel has become a girlweasel, as you can see below.
And these are the animals I am doing for my icon project:
That's it for now...
Posted by dminky at 02:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 23, 2004
A Change of Plans
It looks like Self Portrait of the Day is really impossible. I kind of thought it might be from the beginning. I had no free time on Wed. and yesterday I fell asleep all afternoon after my morning class. I would have time to do one today, but I have to go grocery shopping and do more chores that I didn't finish yesterday. So SPotD will just be whenever I have the free time. That's unfortunate because I really do need the work.
Well, like I said, I have chores to do right now so if I can't do a painting I certainly can't be wasting time online. I'll post again when I get the chance...
Posted by dminky at 03:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 21, 2004
Am I Doing Something Wrong Here?
So today thumbnails were due for our first illustration... a weasel. Basically it was supposed to be an illustration of a story that describes a weasel as a metaphor for life. Sounds great, huh? So anyway, I think and think and sketch and sketch, and I come up with some thumbnails. However I was pretty convinced I didn't have enough thumbnails... so I just sketched down some quick stupid pictures, one of them which I call "Manweasel." Now, manweasel was meant to be a joke... but instead of laughing at it and just passing over it, the class thought it was one of my strongest ideas.
Now, this may seem like an isolated fluke, but actually every time I do a stupid joke thumbnail it ends up being my best idea for the piece. That elephant on my website? That was a joke idea from sophomore year. The Paint-a-thon lizard? He's the evolution of Paint-a-saurus Rex, my rejected caricature for that project (along with Paint-o-tron).
So I guess the lesson of this story is simple: always treat your work as a joke, and you will succeed.
Posted by dminky at 06:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Self Portrait of the Day #2
Well after throwing up profusely at the sight of my previous self portrait, I began work on today's painting. I have to say, it is a tremendous improvement, although still not anything to cheer about. I'll be glad to have that hideous one off the top of this page (although I actually liked how the Operation guy turned out...) and replace it with this mediocre one. The pose is still entirely lifeless, and I didn't capture the expression too well (and let's not even begin on the neck!) but it's so much better than yesterday's. And considering it's my 2nd portrait ever in acryllic paint, I'm satisfied that I'll be better by the end of the semester.
I was going to say something here about the State of the Union Address, but I just can't anymore. Bush angers me too much, and I'm drained from leaving the news on while I did that painting. So forgive me for not inserting a long and harsh political speech here and just know that I am very disgusted with him.
Posted by dminky at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 20, 2004
Self Portrait of the Day #1
Wow, look... I actually did a painting. Hell must have frozen over! Actually, this is the first painting in my attempt to do a self portrait every day (which will probably end up being every other day, or every couple of days, due to time constraints). This is a pretty bad painting but I may as well post it anyway. Hopefully the shame of having such a lousy SP on display for everyone to see will drive me to do better next time... or something. Actually, I'm not 100% unhappy with it, but there are some *serious* problems in the face, not to mention the whole thing is pretty lifeless. But like I said when I proposed this Self-Portrait-A-Day project, I need to work on my painting skills. So hopefully there will be visible progress as I post more of these.
Oh yea, I've also uploaded a painting of my house that I did in December... Anyway, here I am:
Posted by dminky at 04:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 19, 2004
Moveable Type!
As you can see, my site looks a bit different now. I've got a Moveable Type account on Dave's space until I can scratch the money together to afford my own webspace. This'll do nicely for the time being though. I've moved the other comments from this semester on to Moveable Type too... this stuff is pretty cool.
Anyway, what have I been up to? Nothing at all... this weekend has seen little work accomplished, against my wishes. See the thing is I've been really poor since I came back, and didn't have the money to afford food until Friday. So I had been running on empty and by the end of the week I had lost all my energy. This weekend was spent sleeping and eating and refueling myself, and now finally I have enough energy to resume working. Which is good, cause I have a lot of homework...
Posted by dminky at 09:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 16, 2004
First Week in Review
So much for the first week of school. I can tell you I really am looking forward to everything this semester. It's gonna be a great one. I've been scanning in my storyboards from last semester and importing them into Premiere. I'm gonna use them to make a quick pass at animating my story. If it works well, I'm gonna be re-writing and touching up my story this semester, then storyboarding all of the scenes by the end of April. That will leave my the summer to get the timing correct and do a full story pass. Then I can get ready to animate them for my senior thesis. That's just a pipedream at the moment, since I really doubt I'll be able to do an entire 30 minute animation by myself next year, but maybe I can do a couple scenes of it and leave the rest unfinished. I'm not even sure that my teachers will let me do an animation for my thesis, but I have good confidence that it'll work out. I'm really really excited for this...
In the meantime, while all this is going on, I want to start doing a self-portrait every day. That's gonna be a hard schedule to keep, but I need to work on my painting skills pretty badly. So this will be much-needed practice.
Posted by dminky at 09:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 14, 2004
More Artchiving...
I've added some more art, I assure you there will be more to come (including more video!). I also plan on buying a domain and making a much nicer website once I get my huge money problem sorted out.
Posted by dminky at 09:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 13, 2004
Artchiving...
Well I've photographed a *lot* more of my art, most of it is from last year, a couple from this year, and one from Freshman year. What can I say, I'm slow. But there's a lot, so go check them out. Oh yeah, and I resized them all so the largest dimension of each picture should be less than 8 inches. That way they should all fit on a screen easily. Let me know what you think!
Posted by dminky at 09:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 12, 2004
Looking Forward
Holy crap... this semester is going to rock more than I expected. All of my classes today just went so awesome. My illustration teacher is extremely harsh, known for making people cry, but also known for making people so much better. Painting will continue to be excellent, as it was last semester. And holy crap! Digital Video! I knew I would enjoy this, but I didn't think I would this much! I mean, it's just brought back a whole flood of memories of working with video on the computer (the most fun part of high school, it was) and it's nearly knocked me off my feet. I completely remember why I applied for video instead of traditional art at most schools, and it almost makes me regret taking Illustration and not Video. But I don't regret it. I love both with a passion, and hopefully I will be able to find a career that involves both. Man, I'm just bursting from the seams here, so excited about this semester.
And for those of you from Collingswood who still talk to me a lot, I may have told you that I feel like I've recently come out of a four-year-long slump and put a lot of emotional baggage behind me... Well, rest assured, I was more than right. The old Matt is more than back, he is back to the n'th degree!
Posted by dminky at 09:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 10, 2004
Home Sweet Home
Well, I'm back in school now, as you can probably guess by the fact that this update is even occuring. I had a nice time at home. I hardly got anything done, but that's ok because I played a lot of computer games. And in the end isn't that what matters? The 22-hour drives both ways were both masochistically enjoyable, and vacation was really relaxing. So now I've just been organizing my room and cleaning everything up, getting ready to get back to work. Oh, and downloading on higher-than-56k-speeds, ahhh! It's gonna be great to play DDR and the school D&D game once again, as I've had a terrible lapse in the two of those. And I really can't wait for classes to start. Seriously, this semester is going to rock. After last semester, I really feel like I know where I want to go and I'm capable of going in that direction. I have so much that I am looking forward to, and I can't wait to accomplish it. I don't know what else to say at the moment, because I have a few more chores to do and I want to get them done before it gets too late and classes start...
Posted by dminky at 09:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack