Tale #53 - The Tale Of Kam the Konquerer

Hi, all!

Anyways, I've just finished up my first round of my Civ game. I won this one based on a culture victory. It's as I say (in game), "If you can't kill them in general and you can't kill them with kindness, kill them with culture." It's an interesting strategy, but I happen to like this one. Anyways, I'm starting up a second round. But to those of you our there who are also Civ fans with time on their hands (of varying degree), feel free to give me a shout to play a multiplayer game with you. I'll probably show up as France and my name would probably be "Kam _______" .... fill in a French last name. Most likely "LaForge," "Lavoie," or "LaRoche" or something.

But anyways, moving on. Today, I've got some sketches and art to post to show you guys!

Since I finally got my cell phone working, here's a few images I took!



This was done when I had a little time to kill before class started. I was waiting for people to show up and well... I was a little bored, so I started doodling on the chalkboard near my desk. As to how I got some of those pastel-styled effects with the chalk, I just used my fingers. What I discovered was that each different finger size could acheieve different effects. For example, my little finger can do fine details while my thumb can tackle large stuff in a hurry. I've done stuff like this with pastels but I haven't really done chalks before and I haven't done something like this on a chalkboard before. So it was a major opportunity to experiment!

Anyways, here's some of the close up details of my adventure in chalks:






Now here's a picture I took in a nearby cemetary with my cell. I wanted to see if I can at least take some decent photography with it. In case you're wondering... yes, you CAN take some decent photography with it. However, it relies very heavily on how you frame up your shot. A badly framed shot will likely get you an ugly result. So anyways, here's my decent cell phone photograpy:



And there you have it! How to kick some ass with just your cell phone's camera!


But that's not all for today's art-a-thon, folks! There's one more!



Anyone remember "Mar" the monster from a few months back? Well.... I finally gave in and decided to colour him and make him look all spiffy. It was really hard to pick colours for him, but I think I'm pretty satified with the outcome.


In other random news, I also finally gave in to one more thing - storm chasing! I finally decided to go out and do it! It was one of the craziest things I've done but by far one of the most funnest things I've done. I didn't get any pictures of lightening (unfortunately). I was too slow. But I did gets some other interesting weather related phenomina that day. I will post the picture to that another post at another time. But I will say, it was a lot of fun and I think I'm going to do it again when the next big one hits.

Tale #35 - The Tale of Several Stories (Pixar, Hummingbirds, and books)

Hi, all!

Anyways, today's post comes with a story or two. So here's the stories:

Story #1:

I did a little shopping this weekend with a giftcard I got from a friend. With it, I went to Chapters (AKA: A Canadianized Barns & Noble if you get my drift) and picked up a really nifty book. It was called "Developing Digital Short Films" by Sherri Sheridon. It makes for a really great beginner's guide to story telling and all out referance for experianced writters. While the artwork inside is really nothing special, the text however, was really good. So I'm glad I picked this up. I seriously recomend this book to you. You won't be disappointed.

Story #2:

Also on the weekend, I noticed that we had some hummingbirds comming to one of my hummingbird feeders I set up. Now usually, they're quite rare to my area; but this weekend, there were lots of them. So I decided to set my camera and tripod up to see if I can get a shot of them. So I pretty much camped myself out at about 5 feet away from the feeder to see if I could catch them on digital-film. One of the things I did to avoid scaring them away was to stand extremely still and to stay down wind a little bit. I held the same position for 45 minutes until I was rewarded with one stopping by the feeder. I had my camera on sports photography mode and jammed the shutter release down with my thumb in hopes of getting lots of shots. So what I'm going to do is actually post one of these shots I took. FYI, I never did any image corrections to this one (which I'm going to do later) so that's why it still looks quite dark and stuff:



What I liked about this one is that you can actually see the feathers in his wings which is just super cool. But the story continues! Just after I shot this one, the hummingbird saw me and my camera sitting there and decided to come along to check me out. I could see it in my periferal vision hovering there looking me over before in moved in to full vision and was pretty much eyeing me and getting closer. It got about 18 inches away from my head ready to land on me before it took off! It was just amazing! I could hear its' wings and it sounded like one of those giant water beetles that we get around here. But it was the most amazing thing to have something like that happen.

However, this photography adventure did have a downside to it. The bugs (who normally just ignore me and want nothing to do with me) must have been super bored or desperate that evening because they pretty much ate me alive. Good lord! They got me everywhere and I do mean EVERYWHERE. So as you can imagine, I'm extremely itchy right about now. I had to coat myself in various combinations of anti-itch creams plus allergy tabs just to keep the itching down to tolerable levels. I couldn't believe how bad they were! I guess it was because I wasn't moving around and was standing extremely still that made me such an easy target. So I pretty much learned my lesson here - when doing nature photography of any sort, bring lots and lots of bug spray.... even if bugs normally ignore you.

Story #3:

As you know, I do freelance work quite often to try and keep my "in" on the industry. So I go from client to client doing different media jobs. From time to time, it can also get a little slow and a little rough. So my most recent client is actually my best friend. I know it sounds a little off, but he always gets my back when I'm in a bad spot. This time, it's with my freelancing. So he gets me to create various media projects for a course he runs for the local University. So he's seen a lot of my work. He's also seen even the stuff that I don't post up here (If I tried posting EVERYTHING I've done, that would take a VERY long time!) So he's very familiar with it. Anyways, just the other day, he supprised me with a few things. The first thing was that he said that what he was going to do on my birthday (Sept. 19th) is that on that day, we're going to start building our own computer from scratch. This is one of those things I always wanted to do but never had the money for. He said that he'd be setting aside 1,000$ CAN for me to get the parts I need to build it. As you can imagine, I was pretty happy about this.

But that wasn't the only thing he said that day. The other thing really caught me off guard. He said that I had extremely awesome skills and that I should apply to a position at Pixar. At that point, I just froze. In my mind, I wondered in that moment if I heard that right. Surely, Pixar would be a great place to work because I would be collaborating with other storytellers and other artists everyday which is something I always wanted to be around (and something my city doesn't have. Yeah... we really don't have much in the ways of artists or storytellers here.) I mean being around and working with other people who shair a similar thought process that I do, I'd be very happy. For once could I speak to someone (beyond my best friend and my imediate family) who could actually understand what I said and what I was getting at. I wouldn't want to work there just because of the name or anything like that (Although, that doesn't mean to say that I don't like their films because I actually do. But that's not the point here). I'd like to work there because of the people.... the other storytellers and to be able to collaborate with them on a daily basis. But I usually hit myself with a dose of reality here. I usually don't think that I would even stand a chance of getting in. Yeah.... sure, I'm always trying to improve my skills and I've always got room to improve no matter how good I could ever get. But I didn't think it was possible for me. It seems like an impossible dream. One I would reach for and always have my hand brush passed it as it glided out of reach. But when my best friend told me that day, I guess it made me think that I may have a remote chance.

But the question here is this: Based on what you've all seen me produce here so far (bearing in mind I have other stuff that you don't see), do I actually stand a chance of getting in? Do I really? Can someone tell me?

Anyways, I forgot how I replied to that one. But still, it seriously caught me off guard.



Well.... on to the daily sketches:



Remember that ad-poster I was working on and had the art-block on? Well... I was thinking of putting a cleaned up version of this sketch in there, but I'm not sure. Anyways, I decided to add a little background and colour to this one just to make it look better.



And here's the details of that sketch. I wanted to show off the details of her face because it's hard to see from a distance. So here's a close up of her face.

Anyways, see you all later!