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...

MS Paint hijinx...

Wow, haven't been here in a while! how I have neglected blogspot.

Been drawing in MS Paint on the shit computer here... haven't tried mouse art seriously since about the seventh grade (!) Drawing with a mouse... sucks.






But in a way, there is a kind of weird patient OCD enjoyment derived from paintbucketing everything in once I finish the linearts... kind of like building with Legos or something.

All this MS Painting made me nostalgic for the stuff I used to do in 7th/8th grade (5-6 years ago!) so I dug it up and conveniently put it side by side for comparison. Granted, I probably spent like 30+ hours on the larger two pictures while I spent like 30 minutes on each of the newer ones.

hmm, it's funny to see how far (or not!) I have come in 5 years...

My brain is itchin'

I spent almost 7 hours Sunday afternoon working on the following piece of evilness...
Here's a lame bad lighting cell phone picture that inexplicably turned out pink.
For those of you (do you even exist?) who read the previous post, I've been doing value collages in my painting class where I rip up bits of grayscale paper and glue them in a primitive analog for painting. Last week was 3 value collages; this was a 5 value collage. It was a study after the Titian painting Diana and Actaeon (below).
...see any resemblance...? I was quite numb in my brain after the first hour or so (that was pretty much just Actaeon). It's quite a frustrating exercise, but in a way I think it'll help with the painting.

And this is just something I doodled in EGR 191 class today... for some reason my brain was more interested in drawing Lanat as the Jedi Exile from KotOR 2 than paying attention to the velocity of a rail car a passenger is throwing metal balls off of. I like this doodle - maybe because of the blank expression in his eyes that reflects my state of mind in 9:00 class - I might color it sometime.

Speaking of KotOR 2, if you have any interest in the game whatsoever, here is an amazing restoration project! If you know anything about KotOR 2, you know it was rushed onto the market before it was finished, causing the programmers to leave huge chunks of the game out. It was really criminal, considering the half-written code for the unfinished goodies were sold with the game... and even the unused voice files!! Anyway, some insanely dedicated noble and great fans managed to restore this lost content and make the game what it should have been.
I have no time to play it at the moment, but...

I'm really learning to love Shakespeare. And not just because Rufus Sewell was Fortinbras in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.

Is it a bad thing that the classes I enjoy most are Shakespeare and painting? I think I fail as an engineer...

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.

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.