Showing posts with label DS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DS. Show all posts

Monday, July 26, 2010

Sketches from my trip down to the San Dieguito Wetlands.

What, non-fanart from me?!

Anyway, last Friday I took a trip with the other interns down to the San Dieguito Wetlands restoration project down in Del Mar/San Diego.

Cool stuff man! I am glad I brought my trusty DS + Colors along for the ride.




Top is a view of the large saltwater basin.
2nd down is the (rich!) houses of Del Mar, stupidly built on sandspit...
3rd down is a view of the Wheeler North restoration kelp reef (haha, it is that darkish blob on the water).
Last is some random bit of SoCal industrial park that I passed riding the MetroLink.

(I have to say, these looked better on the teensy DS screen, but ah well. It's the speed-paint practice that counts.)

Anyway, 'twas an enlightening day for me. Helped me remember why I wanted to be an environmental engineer and all that jazz, something I lost sight of this past year through all my numerous early life crises and school-stress.

I really love the natural landscapes of Southern California. Yeah, it's dry and dessicated and brown, but powerfully so. I like stark things like rock and coast and grass sun-dried to gold. :)

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Splurging, Spending, Squeeing

So usually I'm pretty frugal... until it comes to art supplies/stationary. :( (I have a really unholy fetish for such things. Stick me in an art supply store, hell, even an Office Max! and I can wander around for hours on end.)

I finally cracked and bought an R4DS for my Nintendo DS just so I could paint on DS Colors!"

First painting, and it's a Dragon Age fanart. Figures!



Also, with Colors you can make videos of the drawing process... it's really quite cool.

And so I uploaded my first YouTube video ever...



Then I discovered this website and splurged $60 on sexy sexy sexy waterbrushes, watercolors, dip pens, waterproof ink... oh guilt! I had better actually use all this stuff instead of just packratting like I usually do...

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Anime Expo 2009 recap


Went to AX with Steffi and Eaning last Friday.
The above is an (extremely bad) picture of all the crap I bought. I won't say how much money I spent. It's embarrassing... I always thought I was relatively frugal with money. Well, I proved myself wrong.
It's always jarring meeting the creator of a work you really admire. Most of the prints I bought were done by people from deviantArt who I already stalk. When you admire their art, you put them on a weird mental pedestal... people who draw leanly muscular people seem to look like what they draw in your head. But in actuality, they don't look all that healthy, probably lack of exercise due to drawing so much. Same weird feeling as meeting Tamora Pierce at the library way back when.
It's strange. I want to see what the creators of good art look like, but at the same time I don't want to spoil the beautiful illusion of the bohemian artist I've built up in my head of them. I don't want to realize that they are (mostly) bespectacled Asian girls. Well, the ones at AX anyhow.
Maybe that's why I ended up buying so many prints of pictures I already have on my computer... pity for the poor starving artists. Haha... that doesn't explain the compulsive buying of plushies though. I'm weak to cute things.
Bought two 4x6" sketchbooks though for $2.50 each. That was something of a steal! The sketchbook that's open in the picture is Eaning's drawing of Ulquiorra for me when we were resting. That reminds me, I owe her $10 for that Ulq print.
Steffi, Eaning and I are contemplating setting up our own stand in Artists' Alley next year! Wonder if we'd sell anything... but after seeing the huge range in quality and skill this year, I think we stand a chance at least. As long as we do fanart of popular stuff.
I've just finished this DS game Lux Pain. I can't say it was a good game, but for some reason I was hooked. It's about a mental virus called Silent that infects people's brains and makes them want to commit suicide or violent crimes. I think my experience of it was 'enhanced' by the fact I was playing it in the dark at 2:00 AM. You go around poking at people's emotions that are represented by montages of text and creepy noises on the top screen. In daylight it doesn't seem like much but it's one of the few things that manages to unsettle me. There's this scene where you examine the emotions of a dead guy right before he died... I nearly wet myself.
Gameplay was horrible, but story was interesting. Worth it if you have the time, I guess. And a long attention span.

And in other news, I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my Cintiq12wx! Too bad it's only 12" wide, but hell, it's a CINTIQ. More on that when it comes.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

some thoughts on KORG DS10

I bought a new game for my DS, except it's not a game. It's a synthesizer, for me to make electronic music. It is called KORG DS-10.
It's a blast! I've been making remixes of Zelda tunes, the Pathetique symphony, Mozart requiem, and Jesus Christ Superstar. When I put it like that, it almost sounds like I know what I'm doing. But what the hell! It's all good fun. Although my remixes sound kind of like MIDI inputs... or weird waltz versions of these songs.
It's a new experience, anyway! And I like new stimulation.
Just gotta figure out a way to record the sound from my DS now... too bad I can't email it to myself.