The Glass Urchin

Running Pains

Auilix — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:17:13 +0000

Despite my aforementioned general clumsiness and penchant for falling down all over the place, I actually do exercise pretty often. Mostly it’s indoors things with weights and cardio or Pilates. But about a month ago, I started running twice or three times a week, building up each day on my times and speed and then, one night, my knees just start aching a lot. And since I have no insurance, I had to self-diagnose with the help of the super trusty Yahoo! Answers (-_-) and I think it’s Runner’s Knee. Bah! It’s painful enough to keep me up at nights when it does happen, but mysteriously it feels fine when I run. But still, continued lack of healthcare means I should probably just keep away from the running for now. *sigh*

Back to boring, memorized exercise DVDs.

Cereal Stock

Auilix — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:43:58 +0000

My one major eating vice… Cereal alchemy is so much easier at home!

Over the Ocean

Auilix — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 12:11:24 +0000

Whoa! More mondegreens!

Loomis Story

Auilix — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:02:23 +0000

So I haven’t yet gotten too far in Andrew Loomis’ Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth yet, but the intro is enough to make me stick with it. Especially since it came in the mail at a sorta hard time, but I suspect that jobseeking is difficult to anyone, not just artists nowadays. Let’s all keep on keeping on! All of us working hard to get that chance!

The Art of Visual Storytelling

Auilix — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:11:20 +0000

So in order to improve my storytelling abilities, I started taking one of those Skillshare classes (the only time I’ve ever actually clicked on (and purchased!) from a FB ad) – The Art of Visual Storytelling. It was only $10, so I figured I could do with some lessons from a Disney Animator on how to effectively tell a story in a single image. For our first project I did a couple of images, and the instructor said he liked mine a close second (in a class of over 700 students)! Yay. His critique was encouraging. Anyhow, to show you that I’m not (yet) dead, here’s what I submitted:

And you can see more on my project’s submission page here, because I also did another image and some thumbnails.

Clever Girl

Auilix — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:29:12 +0000

As a sort of break from the madcap daily schedule of tutorials tutorials rendering rendering modelling modelling tutorials tutorials that entails working on my portfolio, I decided to do one of Emma Coats‘ drawing exercises “Drawing from Film,” in which you take a film that you like and draw every single cut. She recommended Spielberg or any movie you know by heart, and the only Spielbergs I know near by heart are Jurassic Park and Last Crusade, so I chose JP since I haven’t seen it in a while. I know she recommends not doing too much detail, and I haven’t really, but I wanted to at least also try to get the mood of the actors or the scene as well. I’m also trying to kick my bad drawing habits, and hopefully over the film’s however-many-hundreds of cuts I’ll be able to: my need to erase everything a hundred times, my attention to details that don’t matter, my poor ability to draw hats. Jurassic Park has a lot of hats.

I’ve never studied film and I am horrible at noticing things like direction in films, nor do I want to go into such a field. However I think all art can tell a story and the storytelling aspects of each shot or composition is really helpful to see from such a master’s perspective. For example, take a look at the very first scene in Jurassic Park. Spielberg allows for several closeups of unimportant background characters (whom he largely ignores in the following four or five scenes) to underline the nervous apprehension of the people in the opening crowd, and to better juxtapose humanity versus nature. The raptor cage comes seemingly right out of the forest and he keeps the left side (humans, the cage, bright lights, technology) and the right side (raptor, wilderness, forest, violence) very well separated in the ensuing shots, even when the cage comes into the human territory and the characters should be all turned around – the humans still face towards the right and the raptor to the left.

Of course, maybe he didn’t mean all that, but it’s still fun to think about! Anyway, you can check out my sketches of the first 20 minutes of Jurassic Park here. A great activity while you’re waiting for scenes to render!

Miles to go…

Auilix — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:55:14 +0000

So here we are! I shan’t be making excuses for lack of updates, merely I’ll explain what’s happening in my life thus far. It’s been nothing exciting, nothing especially comic worthy in any case, but it’s been hard work. For the past couple of months, I’ve been working as hard as I can updating my portfolio and demo reel and working on new projects and burning through as many tutorials and books as I can get my hands on and my mind around. The job-hunt-of-sorts has really been consuming almost everything I have. Every time I take a break, I berate myself for not going down the list of things that I need to do: why haven’t I written that new cover letter? Why haven’t I started that tutorial on nHair driven joints in Maya? Why haven’t I perfected the shading group of my character’s render in mental ray on the background I made? My resume is a month old, why haven’t I updated the format?

Yeah. I don’t think this will ever be done until I get a job, and I feel guilty working on things that won’t eventually get into the portfolio. So until then, which for my mental sake I hope is soon, expect to see sporadic updates as in the past couple of months on GU.

Thanks as always for reading!

A Good Hiding Spot

Auilix — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 12:00:42 +0000

Actually, Colin is so tall and skinny, it’s not hard to see how a drunk Bree can mistake her own boyfriend for a pole. Drunken times with Bree and Colin usually result in muddled hungover mornings wondering exactly what the details were of the night before.

Bed Mate

Auilix — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 18:41:25 +0000

Yup. Cats.

Happy Valentine’s Day all!

Big Game Food

Auilix — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 03:55:27 +0000

Mom doesn’t really know anything about the super bowl, like probably half of my American friends (judging from my facebook). She even went to the grocery store on Superbowl Sunday at noon and wondered why it was so crowded.

This year’s Superbowl was such a huge difference from last years for me – I’m not an American football fan unless New York has to beat some snobby New Englanders, so, in Scotland, I stayed up until 3am watching it in the student bar on a Sunday night when I had work the next day. This year I chilled at home with kitties and pretty much watched the Puppy Bowl the whole time. I guess homesickness and general love of all things American usually hits you the hardest the longer you’re abroad.