June in California

I do quite realize I haven’t updated since May, and that in and of itself is a horrendous thing, but what’s a guy to do, right? I was busy with the summer! And Animazement. Both of which are stressful and awesome at once. Oh, and before I forget, I’m PUBLISHED. http://www.enigma-comic.com. Engima Machien 1-24, up and going. I update every Thursday. It’s kind of awesome. Ish. Not to toot my own horn or anything, which sounds mildly naughty, but I’m trying to make it work so that it’s not nearly as confusing as people seem to make it out to be. It’s full of subtlety, and lots of cues for the story are visual. But I digress.

I’m currently in California, and off to see Alcatraz in about 10 minutes. But I’ll update more about it and Animazement tonight, I promise.

Quote of the Day: “A fair price.Tell me, what is your soul worth? A fair price. Take in account the girl’s whole worth. A fair price. Everyone sells out someday. What’s your price? Keep the business going and I’ll pay Name your price. A fair price.”

-Molly, in her new musical

Random Linkage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw_xyDPLFpc&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fgoma.blogsome.com%2F2009%2F06%2F13%2Ftrailer-do-game-fat-princess%2F&feature=player_embedded Games are rather interesting nowadays

Midway Through May

It’s the summer, officially. School has ended, and it ended well- 9 As and 1 B for my freshman year of college. Seems good, no?

It should be noted I need to do Runaways fanart some time, but it should also be noted I need to do a lot.

For starters, AZ is in a week. A week from today, which is memorial day weekend. I have yet to finish everything (though the art is done in and of itself), and I have yet to make my prints (where, I do not know). I need to help Paige with her jewelry-making and prints, I need to get my origional art for the auction framed, I need to design the table layout, and I need to make the filing cabinet for the table itself. The table, by the way, going to rock this year (6 sellers at it).

This, of course, is all coupled with my lack of a job, so no cash. I’ve been painting a house with my brother for oddjob money, but it won’t be a lot. That, and my body seems to be falling apart. I have to go to the cardiologist tomorrow, then I need to make another doctor’s appointment, and I think I have two cavities (or one, or none- they may be stains or fillings? My memory sucks >.o). My brain is constantly railing against being ‘defective’ and that includes health maladies, of course…so that’s a fun little internal battle right there. But I digress, for Captain Crunch is ungdly in it’s deliciousness. *noms*Still, cerial-y goodness cannot overcome my car’s front brakes not working any longer. It sounds like my car is full of gerbils constantly squeeking.

Oh, for those who have yet to see it, Star Trek was pretty much off the chain- I saw it twice in a single weekend. Just a plain brilliant movie. I had problems with the villian, Nero, but they were minor.

On that end, Enigma Machine is a month behind because I can’t manage to get a proper web server- I have precious little money, so I’m trying to find a decent one for hosting without breaking the bank. Enigmamachine.com is taken, by the way, so I was thinking EMcomic.com perhaps, or something to that effect. That and I need to design the website, which is something I’ve never done. So….*dives into the unknown*

Quote of the Day: “My head keeps turnin’ turnin’
Like Russian roulette
Thoughts are like bullets
I cannot do this”

-Moby, Alice

Random Linkage: http://open.salon.com/blog/leeandra_nolting/2009/05/13/a_guide_to_the_douchebags_who_come_into_my_gallery Guide to douchebags who come into my gallery

Concept Art and Such

First, Design School:
This is the last month of school- NC State gets out at the end of April. As is such, we have our final push for design projects. Having done movement and light, the last studio project is on weight and mass. We’re designing a chair, and then building the damned thing. This is looking like it’ll be a lot of fun, but a lot of work. Also in design this month I have to do my Design Thought Model, which is essentially my design process placed into a 3D object I make. It’s going to be an artistic’y sculpture, and I’m mulling over ideas, but It’ll probably end up being something like my head plaster-cast and painted, turned metallic, with my eyes removed and replaced with an LCD screen. Other stuff, of course, but I have no idea yet. Design History has the most “interesting” project of all, and by that I mean I have a group project that nobody understands, nor really knows what to do with. Expect it to be cobbled together in my time between the projects I care about. I was given a giant bag of random clippings, tape, a spool of thread, and soforth. I think he wants us to be Macguyver.

Secondly, I have Enigma Machine:
My little comic is a little behind schedule, alas, but not too badly. I plan on purchasing the site for the comics to be hosted on as soon as I get another job- But back to the comic: 13 strips are done, some on story, some not. It’s hard to keep up a storyline…but I plan on doing so! Somewhat. A little. But no more inking of comics, I’ve decided. Just awesome pencils. >.>; For those of you that love Simon, expect to see more of him, and more of the black/white one-shot comics sparingly called “IRL”.

Third, we have Jobs:
I’ve re-applied to Loco Pops for the summer with the hope of working at least 18 hours a week if not a lot more: and if that doesn’t work I’m currently putting in some applications to a few other places and attempting to find any art/design/media-based internship I can. If you know of one in the raleigh/durham/cary area, hook me up? Word-of-mouth is my best friend right now. And I’m also doing freelance work, so please, ask me to design things or talk about me to your friends. I’ve done T-shirt and hoodie designs for walks and bands and schools and soccer teams: why not your little organization, too? I’m pretty cheap as well XD

Next (for now) Animazement:
I have purchased an entire table for Animazement in the summer. I will be sharing the table with a number of other patrons who which to sell their wares: hopefully the different styles of art, combined with some of out crafts, will bring in some money. I’ve been focusing on more Eastern stuff, and I’m beginning to color it (Aisha was an example), and I want to sell prints of my poster again this year (hopefully on better paper- no thanks Kinkos!). If anyone has any ideas of what to sell, such as characters/anime/manga that are -really- popular and in my grasp, just let me know.

Finally, Concept Art
Although I had a thing’ lined up with Ian, I do not have any future in concept art. HA! Just kidding. Turns out there’s a big future in concept art. Here at State there’s a teacher named Tim “Booey” (sp) who is the concept art guy, and who’se studio I can take [b]three times[/b]. I need to talk to him at some point, show him my stuff, ask what he thinks (even if it isn’t the best…or technically concept art XD). I’m just SO EXCITED that I can really go far with concept art in my major and I didn’t make the wrong choice. I’m squeeing, I tell you.

Additional Notes

Short post today, nothing serious. Just enjoying life, as stressful as it’s been the past few weeks. Posters for my project for studio are due tomorrow- my presentation Thursday didn’t go to well (ouch!) with comments such as “you don’t know what you’re doing” thrown out there. Hopefully my posters will make up for it, but they needed to be visually appealing and have a “hierarchy”. I don’t know if I can do the latter, but here’s the two:

With those out of the way, I’d also like to sing the praises of AP Psychology with Mrs. Richards. Yet again, the things taught to me in that class have proven themselves worthwhile (this time in PHI240). On that note, I really need to finish my T-shirt for the MS Walk group People Taking Action (PTA) and email all my old teachers before the semester is over and tell them how much they rock’d (unless they didn’t). Whoops!

Quote of the Day:

“Procrastination often seems like an habit that just can’t be beat. As they said in art school, “God didn’t create the world in seven days… he slacked off for six and then pulled an all-nighter.”
-Lars (Least I Could Do)

Random Linkage: http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html Putting a Trillion in context

Design in Contemplation

I’m back, again! I’ve been thinking lately, and I have to say I see myself more as a designer than ever before. Less an illustrator, less an artist. Not that I’m not one, of course, just less exclusivly. I’m trying to push myself in studio currently, but it’s rather difficult with these contrived projects we have. Hernan is a decent teacher, and is nicely relaxed the majority of the time, but some of the things we have to do are extremely open initially, but he will suddenly pidgeonhold us halfway through the process. When it’s on non-ID things, it’s rather annoying. That, combined with his ESL nature and penchant to give dramatic pauses before misinterpeting everything you say and critiquing you for it, can get mighty boring.

Currently in studio, we’re working on a light project dealing with the elements and pheonoma of light- including shadow, color, reflection, and soforth. We have to make something that plays with light that is a sculputre for the Court of Carolinas. My origional idea was to make a flower form that would focus sunlight in the ‘petals’ and direct it at a center prism for the staymn, which would in turn cause a nice perismatic diffusion effect. The “flower for flower’s sake”, as Hernan put it, was turned down and as they liked the idea, they asked me to re-evaluate the form. Of course, the idea that form follows function worked with what I was doing- I needed a bowl shape with a centerpiece and adoped a flower for that, but the “over the top” ornate design was not looked well upon.

So now it’s a satellite dish/ampetheatre. It’ll probably change a few more times before the project is due Thursday, when I have to get my model critiqued, but I need to think of materials first (steel or aluminum?).

In Design in Culture, we aren’t learning anything new, like always, though we’re about to start a small assignment on an artist we admire. I plan on choosing an illustrator, since I’m not that enamored with any industrial designers, possibly [url=http://www.rkpost.net/]RK Post[/url]. We’ll see.

Deisng Thinking has been fun, though, currently thinking about my design thought model. We have an evaluation in March 31 in Leazar, where we need to deliver sketches for our idea. I have none, at the moment, but a blog [url=http://youknow4kids.com/samblog/2008/04/29/design-thougt-model-finished/]Walking with Christopher Walken[/url] from a NCSU ID student has really been some help.

More to come.

James Joyce Poem

So I can find this for -all time-:

JAMES JOYCE

He was stupid
He didn’t know as much as me
I’d rather throw dead batteries at cows than read him
Everything was going fine before he came along
He started the Civil War
He tried to get the French involved, but they wouldn’t listen
They filled him up with desserts
He talked about all the great boxers that came from Ireland
Like he trained them or something
Then he started reading some of his stuff
Right as we told him to get lost
He brought up the potato famine
We said “Your potatoes are plenty good”
“Deal with it”
“Work it out somehow”
Then he said “America must adopt the metric system, it’s much more logical”
We said “No! We like our rulers, go away”
Thomas Jefferson said you always get the rulers you deserve

–Matt Cook

Still Searching

Have you ever been unsure of what you wanted to do? Not be unable to think of something, but be so bombarded with choices you didn’t know which option to choose? I’m there right about now. As I am, currently, I fuel my own creative process and for the most part, improve by my own willpower. I get assignments, learn techniques, and soforth in College, which is wonderful, but it’s the practice on my own that makes improvement truly possible. But, as it turns out, there is more than one thing I’m decent at that I enjoy, and I’m torn. I want to draw- both traditional and digital. I want to make people and robots and animals and monsters. I want to do anime, realism, cartoon, and many other styles. I literally want to be and be able to make anything I see that I enjoy. For the most part, I’m a decent imitator, but I want to be more than that and I want to be able to sit down and truly make what I enjoy looking at- and hopefully will have others enjoy it, too. Plus, I want to design machines, and I want to be able to work in a forge and make simple tools, weapons, costumes. It’s all rather overwhelming, you know: being ripped in so many directions.

With that out of the way: “9″ looks awesome, check out the trailer. Also I saw Outlander, which was another awesome movie with Space-Viking Jesus and Hellboy in it: so quite enjoyable, really. I’ve been involved with Savannah and Paige with the making of some Animazement costumes- ones from the show Avatar: the Last Airbender. I’m going as Sokka, so that should be fun.

Finally, I’ve joined the Koala Wallop forums from Dresden Codak, and they’re rather awesome. I go by Pschovore there, so *shrug*. Check them out, I guess. Lots of transhumanists that are a bit sticky here and there, but decent folk who like a good joke and an intellectual romp around the block now and then.I’ve been posting my art, so here’s a few (plus my mech. lobster).

More to come, when I feel like updating o.O

Quote of the Day: “Ceiling River sees what you did there” -Savannah, on the last scene of Serenity

Random Linkage: http://www.reddit.com (how did I not know about this place?)

Aztec Cannibal Aliens

So I’ve been plodding along, and Enigma Machine has just come out with page #8! I say page, because I’ve decided to keep all my comics 8.5×11 for printability purposes and just for formatting sake. I’ve also decided to make the entire comic on one page, unless I mess up in which case I’ll make it on two and trace to merge them to one.

Simply put, when I scan a comic, I need to scan only one page. It makes detail oh so difficult, but *shrug*. I’ll get used to it.In the meantime, almost half done! Oh, and Paige and Savannah have jumped on the webcomic bandwagon. We’ll probably have a triple-comic site. Antics will ensue. As will pageviews. *competative*

School is going good- I hope I’m looked well upon in studio. I just designed and built my prototype mechanical trilobite/lobster tail. It works pretty well, but I need to re-design it with a pully internally for motion instead of the wire I have now. Sadness ensues in a number of forms. Also I’ll need to work with wood. Bugger on a cracker.

As for now: Comic!

[img]http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3471/3250299339_bd13a5b835.jpg?v=0[/img]

Quote of the day: “Aztec cannibal aliens? In my dimensional portal? It’s more likely than you think.”
-Nick, making a meme of his own comic

Random Linkage: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/human-clones-ap.html Human cloning!

Enigma Machine

So I now have a name for my comic. Can you guess what it is? No? Here’s a hint: it’s the title of this post.

ENIGMA MACHINE

Wonder what an “Engima machine” is? Well, here’s two ways to look at it. On one hand, you have the literal definition, that is a machine that either makes or is full of enigmas. Enigmas as:

1. One that is puzzling, ambiguous, or inexplicable.

2. A perplexing speech or text; a riddle.

Or you can take the historical definition, which is an electro-mechanical rotor machine used to generate ciphers for secret message encryption during the world wars. Either way, I think it’s a cool name and rather telling of my odd little brain.

To some degree.

Anyways, I made comic #4 today, and my style is still changing and settling into where it wants to be: I’m getting it down better, along with how I want my characters to look and how I want to color. That’s pretty good. I have more ideas, but it’ll be a while till I get that all down. OH, and also, I went to Georgia this weekend with my friends Dax, David, and John Pickett. We saw Streetlight Manifesto, Reel Big Fish, and Tip the Van in concert. We went to Fuddruckers, The Varsity, skanked and moshed for hours on end, and into a 23 minute encore. John Pickett peed in public we paid $4 for bottled water, obsessed over Tip the Van’s major selling point (hint: begins with B and rhymes with “oobies”), and made a fake, ghetto-ass parking pass in order to park on Georgia Tech campus. Also David can open doors with a penis implant.

…

Don’t ask.

Quote of the Day: “Guys, we just passed  an -Outdoor World- and it was entirely indoors”

-John Pickett

Random Linkage: http://www.paleofuture.com/2007/09/french-prints-show-year-2000-1910.html The future (2000) according to the French painters of the 1900’s

A-Boof: an Adventure in Comic’ing

A quick recap:

So I once, long ago, took a comic class. It was only a week long, and I was in middle school. I designed some characters: a turtle and a bat with nothing connecting his head to his bottom jaw, and then had nothing to do with them. So I stuck them in a Dilbert comic strip; nearly word-for-word.

Then, come High school, I made a comic strip. Ramblings of a Madman. It was more of me spilling random thoughts into quick image form on the gimp, and was essentially wiggly stick figures either being totally random (Trans-Cheese-Formers), or essentially paraphrasing the work of a comedian I had heard about in image form (pierced livers!) I churned out 21 in all, though one saved weird and I only have the top half of each panel. It was printed, distributed to a small, small ring of friends at lunch, and discontinued after two years.

So here comes college. I’ve learned a bit from my past comic experience, but not a lot. I read webcomics, certainly, and normal comics, but when it came down to -making- a comic up to this point, I was torn between a lighthearted story (ala Dresden Codak), a banter 3-panel comic (ala Penny Arcade), or a more serious well-drawn comic (ala Pheonix Requiem). In the end, I settled on the Penny Arcade style, though after making two comics in that style, I’m actually leaning towards the Dresden Codak road. Which will I take? Both? Neither? Will I create a brand new comic form? Who knows. But what I do know is I’ve got a style down (ish) and got some characters and 2 and a half comics done.

So ha. A-Boof (as it is tentativly called) will  happen!

Quote of the Day: “I think Nick is a pretty cool guy. eh messes up internet memes and doest afraid of phail.” -Ginny

Random Linkage: http://frostedonyx.wordpress.com/ Blog of a Monster