Green

I dyed my hair green

                                      

I like it.

Giraffa Aquatica

it's finals week! and here's my Bio final!

Bio was a fantastic class, and I'm going to be TAing for the professor next semester as he teachers the freshmen human anatomy. I'm super excited!

Anyway, for my final, I had to come up with an imaginary animal, write an abstract on it, draw orthographics of its skeleton, and make a final illustration. I chose to create a semi-aquatic water giraffe (a giraffe-opotamus?) 

I'm pretty pleased with the background too; it could be better, of course, but looking back at the first background I painted in photoshop this last semester, I'm glad to see improvement.

I haven't gotten a grade for it yet, but my professor pulled it out of the submission pile in class and made some very nice comments, so I'm crossing my fingers! 

The Diggs

I'm sorry it took me so long to put this up; it's been a few months. 

I still love my new apartment and my roommates are still pretty enjoyable (I don't think I'm still in the honeymoon phase yet? but they're cool)

The only downside is that the walk to school, I have to pass a fish processing plant, and on hot days, you can definitely smell all of it haha

Nighttime

this post is going to be extra dumb and fluffy, but I have so many good pictures

It's kind of weird that I don't see much sunlight anymore. By the time I get out of class, it's always dark, but I like it. When it rains, everything reflects off of the roads

and the overcast usually makes the horizon glow orange

and the fog is so thick, you usually can't see past your hand - the perks of living right next to a river. I'm always frustrated I can't capture it via photos.

bonus picture of my friend and I at 2 am

...

Feelings

POMM4

This was the last People On My Mind of the summer

(me i guess, some boy i used to know, someone who used to be my best friend, someone who seems out of place, and someone who's really special)

Black and White

Sleepy Lemurs

I acknowledge that digital backgrounds are one of my major weaknesses.
For my Biology class, we have to study an animal that fits our current unit, draw orthographics of its skeleton, and do an illustration of said animal.

We can use any medium we want, but my Bio teacher warns us not to do digital because we haven't finished out first photoshop class yet, and if our photoshop teacher were to see them, they 'wouldn't get a passing grade'.

I got a pretty low grade on this, but that's partly because a series of unfortunate events made me turn it in late (my computer at school blue screened as I was submitting it and by the time it booted back up again, I was five minutes late).

I took it to my photoshop teacher after though, kind of disappointed. I asked how I could become a better environment artist and had a good long talk; I haven't had the chance to use what he taught me yet, but I'm excited anyway.

(and for the record, my photoshop teacher said, "if I were your Bio teacher, I would get this a professional grade" so... cool.)

Rotisseries

Okay, and an assignment I didn't care for.

Advanced figure drawing again - the same week as our sequential drawings, we had to draw a figure drawing model in a rotisserie. Wasn't my favorite. Wasn't my week. 

Sequential Drawings

More advanced figure drawing homework! 

We had to pick two actions and do sequential drawings for them. I chose a diver and a girl doing a handstand. 

Got a 90%

Cafe Drawings

The first week of the semester, my advanced figure drawing teacher sent us out to do 50 cafe drawings in a week. It was super fun!

It helped me get back into the habit of carrying my sketchbook everywhere and seeing opportunities of drawing people/things. My friends and I took some time everyday to just sit in the school cafe or to go to the mall to draw people.

I feel like this assignment really pushed me, but I don't know what I got on it. My figure drawing teacher is new and doesn't know all of the policies yet (which includes giving us our grades after so many days of turning it in). Regardless, here are some of the 'best of's

Master Copy

This was our first assignment in my Photoshop class. We had to recreate a traditional piece of artwork digitally, trying to match textures and mediums. 

My professor told me it looked very professional and gave me a 96%

(original on left, mine on right)

Hey, it's me

Oh boy, I haven't written in so long that I've kind of been lost. I don't really remember the semester?? My school is such a time vacuum. Even though it feels like summer was just a few weeks ago, it also feels like I've been stuck in semester three for as long as I can remember.

Anyway, this year is focused on digital art and 3D modelling. It's hard. At last, 3D modelling is hard. Digital art is fine, and I love it and I feel totally 100% in my element.

My photoshop class has been going just fine, and here is one of my prouder accomplishments so far:

It's me! yee

Took me about 6 hours of sitting on my living room floor to paint, got 93%.

How to stomach stress:

School's finally picked up the pace, which? You know. It feels comfortable because that's what I've gotten used to, but at the same time, I realized it's kind of weird to feel so grateful to be back in a position where I am constantly trying to calculate how I'm going to get everything done when I don't have enough hours (even minutes or seconds) in a day.

When do you go to bed? When do you eat? Can you honestly risk going to the bathroom right now? Can you???

Just the other day, I was in a deadline crunch and spent five hours holding in my own pee because I couldn't spare a single second. (Did I turn my assignment in on time? Yes. By 5 seconds.)

I'm at school from 8am-midnight again, which is just back to the same routine as last semester. That means eating is weird; I don't think I've had a home cooked meal in month. I live off of large bags of nuts and jerky, Japanese pastries from a nearby bakery, and the salad bar at school. It's amazing how you can live off of bought lunches for less than you'd spend on groceries. I don't know if that's a good thing though, as much as I love red bean and green tea buns or ham and corn hum bows.

Current outrages of this week at school include: the cafe raising the pizza price by $0.25 ($0.50 for specialty, aka the only pizza worth getting)

Mmm, that's about it. I'll post some art once I have more assignments to post.

Moving In

My new apartment is super nice. I mentioned in the last post how my summer apartment was REALLY FAR AWAY from EVERYTHING, but my new apartment is absolutely ideal. It's across the street from the grocery store I use and a whole strip mall of good eats (froyo, pho, bubble tea, an asian bakery, gyros, sandwiches, cheap conveyor belt sushi, pizza, and etc), it's on the same street as the library and my bank, and it's just down the street from downtown.

More importantly, I guess, it's the second closest apartment complex to my school, so I can walk there in about 20 minutes.

I'm hoping this will my be 'forever apartment' while I finish up school, because finding housing here is hard enough as is; it took my roommates and I a good five months to even get this place because every other apartments would be taken within moments of being put back up for rent. 

BUT HEY, this is my first real apartment! No more school housing or temporary summer squats. 

Moving Out!

I finally moved out of my summer apartment and hopefully into my permanent apartment for the next few years. 

My summer apartment was alright, but it was far away from everything. It was about a 30-40 minute walk to downtown and an hour and a half walk to school (uphill both ways haha). The only plus side was that the first things you got to during that 30-40 minute walk was the one main fast food pocket in my city.

I had really rad upperclassmen roommates though who gave me a lot of advice in the time I stayed with them, so it'll be sad to leave them, but besides that, it'll be nice to finally have a place to call my own. They had lived in that same apartment for a few years, so I never really felt like I had a place there; everything already had a place, so I honestly never really unpacked.

My roommates also gave me a bed frame and mattress, a desk, and a nice, leather desk chair, so that's a huge plus.

Illustration Dump 8/1/14

This is the final REAL art dump from the past few months. 

some artist dude I dated for like a month

a twenty minute warm-up 

People on My Mind

Along the lines of trying to practice diversity, I've been trying to get away from "same face syndrome" where if you take away the hair of all the people you draw, you'll get the same person. It's a nasty habit to have as an artist.

I do things called "People on My Mind" about once a week where I draw the first couple of people who come to mind as I'm drawing. I feel weird sharing them in case anyone recognizes who I'm drawing, but they really are just 'people who pop into mind' as I'm drawing.

Some of my friends have fun guessing who's who, at least.

ft. some boy I used to know, a boy from a party, a pretty cool tall guy, and a girl everyone talks about 

ft. a guy who doesn't fit in, a friend I miss, another friend I miss, some boy I used to know, and an ex of an ex

OC swaps

I'm in the facebook group for the incoming BFA's. They had an OC (original character) swap one night, and I decided to join in. It was really fun! I really needed an excuse to practice full body poses!

Each character belongs to their respectful creator

Art dump 7/30/14

I've been really trying to practice diversity and personality in my drawings this summer. I've been doing a lot of gestures and model sheets to try and achieve that.

Dog Path

One of my good friends had a birthday party. The plan was to have a BBQ at the big park down the street, but none of the grills were open. Instead, we opted out for pizza and costco cheesecake while the boys played football (at Digipen?? who knew.)

My friend and I honestly didn't really know anyone; we were the only two girls out of A LOT of guys, so we sat and drew a giant group of LARPers who showed up at the table next to us.

But, the park also is known for having the largest off-leash dog park in the pacific northwest, so we decided to check it out and to pet some cool dogs, but we had no idea the park was actually that big. It was a huge path along the Sammamish River and had a bunch of paths that branched off, and eventually, we were in the middle of a forest (?????) where we didn't run into anyone else for maybe two more miles when we finally found a path that lead back to the park. 

Besides feeling kind of lost and isolated, it was a really neat path. 

There are lots of frogs?? I had never seen a real wild frog before coming to Washington.

but the river was very pretty! Once we got away from all the dogs, we found lots of little paths to the actual river bank where you could find little fish and lily pads (who knew lily pads were a real thing too!)

Except as we were talking about how we didn't think lily pads were real, the path took us to Sammamish Lake where there were LOTS of lily pads.

There was part of the path that lead out over the water, and it was actually really creepy how many lily pads there were! You couldn't even see the water! Thinking about falling in and having to fight them all just made me anxious.

Washington is pretty anyway, I guess.

After we FINALLY got back (and everyone had texted us asking if we were okay/if we went home), the BBQ migrated to the pool. My complex has three pools though, so my friend and I ended up waiting at one of them for a good hour before realizing we went to the wrong one.

I got some nice pictures though, right? Good aesthetics.