Operation Tasty Paste

Today was such an epic day.

Well, to be fair, pretty much any day where one gets to hang out with Katie Peck and the Andy at the same time is bound to be pretty awesome. I mean, given the circumstances, it can't be helped.

But anyway. We- meaning the Andy and myself- decided a few days ago to play hookey for the day and go visit Katie. She has this awesome house on the cape she's staying at for most of the summer, but since she's there and pretty much everyone else is, well, NOT there, it gets pretty dull for her.

So we went to alleviate her boredom.

Admittedly we didn't do a whole lot, but that's fine. Hanging out with good friends doesn't have to be wild and crazy ALL the time. We went out for ice cream, went swimming, ended up taking a nap on the porch... it was a very laid back day.

For the most part.

There was one moment where I spotted some ducks a little ways off from the ship we were chilling on. I was suddenly filled with the desire to become best friends with every single one of them.

For the record: just because it happened doesn't mean I fully understand why it happened. Befriending many ducks seemed, like so many other things I do, like a good idea at the time.

Sadly it turns out that ducks can fly faster than people can swim.

On a slightly different note, I discovered (along with the Andy and Teddy) that bacon-pepperoni-sausage pizza is amazing. This revelation came about because of another Mario Kart excursion, which leads me to my final point of the night: Mario Kart is STILL the best game ever created, and there are few things this world has seen that can defeat Bowser and Donkey Kong riding together in the Bowsermobile.

That is all. Good night :)

Welcome to Medfield! ...Kinda

I'm sure it's a very nice town, and it even has some nice places to go that I personally have gone to- namely the Bubbling Brook, excellent place to get ice cream- but good lord. The pool alias sewer dump was just as bad as everyone remembered it.

To the unexperienced eye, this is what swimming there would look like:

However, this is not the case.

You see, this year I am a coach, and as such I get to talk to more of the swimmers than I would normally. Turns out that some of my instructees, the 13-14 year old swimmers, have a deep-seated fear of this dreadful little place.

So what is in reality going on actually looks much more like this:

I had one girl who almost refused to swim in any of the deep lanes because they were "too scary". I tried to convince her that the turtles were friendly, but she wasn't having any of it.

No, This One Doesn't Have A Title Either

Remember how I said I was hanging out with Nina and Teddy last night? Well, we were outside for a while, and we came to find out the hard way that Nina's mosquito repellant was... sub par.

I HATE mosquitos and their obnoxious itchy biting. Ughh. The fact that they leave these huge welts in their wake doesn't do much to endear them to me either.

Here is my artwork of the day (clearly i haven't been very diligent about doing this):

This is the "good color" picture. the rest of the pictures I took were with the flash off, since I wasn't a big fan of the weird shadows it left.

Sorry that the pictures are bad, the quality of the camera I was using was... somewhat lacking. I hope to invest in a substantially higher quality camera before I trek off to college.

So other than the fact that the color got horribly butchered by my camera, I really like how the pictures cam out! If the opportunity ever arises, I'm hoping to do a sequel to this one in college at some point. If it ever happens, which I will be sure to update you on, I'm planning on it being much bigger and much more intense.

Ugh. OK. I have to get up early tomorrow. Gnight!

zzz

I stayed out too late to blog today. Sorry. I was watching a movie with Nina and Teddy, two very chill people.

I forget exactly what the title was, but it has Sean Connery in it. Any movie with Sean Connery in it is worth it, since he was recently awarded the Highest Level Of Badassery Ever Award.

Anyway. Time for a nap.

Aw, You Really DO Care!

I was rather touched yesterday when I received an unexpected message from Emily Smith, a fellow Needham High graduate. She, upon discovering via my previous posts I was having some trouble with Adobe Illustrator, referred me to a site where they give online tutorials for such applications!

Needless to say it's EXACTLY what I needed. Thank you so much, Emily! I truly appreciate this.

Moving on.

I was going to give you all a synopsis of my day, but then I was all ehh over the idea.... the more I thought about it the more boring it seemed. So instead I'll just say this: Mario Kart is one of the best games of all time.

Even if you're the one losing.

I'm not going to be posting a whole lot of actual artwork for a little while, since I'm going to be devoting the time I normally spend drawing to the tutorials Emily so kindly got for me. That means you're going to have to put up with some of my older work, like AP art stuff and some senior studio work. Sorry. I'll try to make it interesting.

It's getting late though, so that's going to have to wait.

Ba-Dum

A little while ago, I got an idea from a character from Cali, one of my future college buddies!

I tried to fufill Cali's request for a character sketch- but, like most of my endeavors, it went pretty awry. This is her character: a normal girl.

...yeah. I know. It's pretty hard to interpret "normal" into anything particularly artsy. But that's what I have to do- a normal height, normal appearance, girl of non determined identity. What is special about her? She can stop time.

Oooo, ok. Gotcha. So now we know that she's special. But, if this is a character sketch, how am I supposed to depict her power visually? I mean, what does time look like? How can you depict-in a pencil drawing, mind you- that a girl has either stopped time or is stopping it? What is that supposed to look like? I'm trying desperately to avoid having this be just like a mental power, because not only is that incredibly cliche but in my opinion mind powers are also kind of... well, lame. If your power is as easily used as just thinking, it's a pretty obvious upper hand over most other forms of power. Also, no exertion= no effort = very boring drawings.

This mentality has of course cursed me to the insurmountable task of trying to figure out ANOTHER way for her to stop time. It's at times like this that I really despise Marvel Comics- they've already come up with so many villians and heros, it's hard to make anything that doesn't sort of parallel something they've already come up with.

Any ideas are welcome, just saying.

Also, upon the realization that this was (as of now, anyway) a dead end project, I capitulated to the desire to draw more dragons.

Yarr. Dragons are cool.

The Ultimate Attack

No one has ever survived it.

Ka... me...

ha... me...

That's right, it's the ferocious Kamehamecolor attack. If you were standing in the way, you would be extremely colorful for the brief instant you weren't being vaporized.

Goku credited to whoever thought of him first.

Oh yeah, I figured out how to color stuff in! Technically it's a cheaters method, and it's nightmarishly slow, but it's a good crutch until I can figure out the Illustrator application.

Which, by the way, I am still slowly beating a hole into my desk with my forehead because of how hard it is.

My day? Very boring. Probably the funniest thing that happened was at dinner when i said "I have a question" and Stephen said "So?"

Good to know I'm appreciated around here. :P

Alpha

Today was another one of those "good days" people talk about when they go out and enjoy some shenanigans with their friends. In my case, it was going to the beach with a good portion of my youth group! We ended up driving up to New Hampshire and going to one of the beaches there, I unfortunately can't remember what its name is. With the exception of my legs and back getting toasted due to what I am convinced is a faulty tube of sunscreen, ouch by the way, the day was a hit. Meaning success. Or good. Something like that.

I didn't find a good picture of my favorite piece, so I went and took another one. Oh snap, showing initiative during the summer? You guys should be honored, seeing as I'm doing it for the lot of you.

But anyway, here it is!

Subject: Kristie Schott

I love it I love it I love it I love it I love it soo much.

I'm not even really sure why, the composition isn't- in my humble opinion, anyway- as complete or interesting as some of my other work. But this piece has a very special place in my heart.

One of my favorite parts about this particular piece is the position and expression of the subject: it's as if the art itself is posing for the artist, WHILE it's being created. That, and judging from the expression they're wearing, you can almost feel this frustrated impatience coming from the girl as if to say, Just finish me already! The world demands to see what I will look like when finished. I wish to see it too!

I could only fully appreciate this pieces fully interpretable potential several months after its completion. It beautifully captures how the idea behind a masterpiece wants to be completed just as badly as a model wants the artist to finish.

Can you tell I like art? Just checking.

Everyone should like art. Since, after all,

AP- but just a couple

I'm not going to post everything because I'm tired and stuffed with cheeseburger. But I'll be sure to post some stuff.

I went bowling with some friends today! It was quite the enjoyable experience, although the game developed this awful habit of disintegrating into a tickle fight. With me at its epicenter. Thanks guys.

At any rate. Here's the first picture:

Subject: Me!

I really liked this one, I feel like it best portrays the feeling of intimacy between an artist and their creations. It's not like passionate love or anything, but more subdued- a kind of appreciative respect.
Most of my art for my concentration, this being one of them, had a goal: I wanted it to capture that serene feeling I mentioned. Some of the earlier ones had a different goal, but that's alright. I wish I had a high quality shot of my absolute favorite piece on hand, but I don't. So instead, here's another concentration piece:

Subject: Jackie Lusardi

This was one of the later ones, so the theme had once again changed slightly by this point, but people seem to like this one regardless.

Enjoy!

Avast, Me Stylin' Hardies

The title is way cool, none of you are allowed to judge me.

So, deviating from art for a moment, I finally finished my Eagle rank! It's such a relief/awesome feeling.

That being said, I do feel like I need to complain a LITTLE bit about the extreme pokerfaceability of some of the people who were on my board. This one guys facial expression, I'm not kidding, changed ONCE. You know the weird, very focused look guys can get when they're scrutinizing something they're working on? His face was that for almost a half hour. I felt like a circuit board or something that he was working on.

Anyway. So, at some point in the afternoon I was reading some web comics while trying to balance a stack of rulers on my head, and I got the craziest idea- what if I were to make my OWN webcomic, just for funsies? Webcomics are awesome!

Of course, right on the heels of this thought was the crushing realization that yes, I've already had this idea, and yes it did end in a particularly typical episode of failure.

Let me explain. I went through this comic-y stage at about the end of summer LAST year, and was rather hell-bent on making this awesome strip about... well, I don't know. Stuff, life, whatever seemed like a good idea at the time.

The problems started cropping up when I came to the realization that comics normally involve drawing people, and when there are people there are faces... and I have this thing against drawing faces. Check out the drawing I posted last time, the one "guy" is a robot and the other dude is wearing this face-scarf thing. Crisis averted?

Well, if further nurturing my phobia of the human face is "averting a crisis", then I suppose so.

That, in addition to my failure to make any more than one character based loosely off of some girl I know, effectively spelled disaster for my secret dream of being the Online Comic Emporer. The depression lasted for a while, but I was eventually able to suppress it with chocolate cake and cheating at card games.

I wrote that last sentence intending for it to positively laced with sarcasm, but now that I'm re-reading it I'm unfortunately coming to grips with how true it actually is.

Yeah, no art work this time. Sorry. Next time I'll post some of the stuff I sent into the AP Board, promise.

The First Time is Always the Most Annoying

So I settled down today for the first time, determined to figure out how to use all of my new and fancy Adobe stuff.

This is what ensued:

It was a good thing my mom called me to go take out the trash when she did- I was on the verge of putting something sharp through my monitor out of sheer frustration.

As you can probably tell, I can't even figure out how to color stuff in. After about ten minutes of desperately searching for the paintbucket tool I knew all too well, I ended up just making this to convey my rather horrible failure.

I might end up enrolling in that weird program Apple does to teach you how to use all of your new and fancy Adobe stuff. Apparently they have one, and it might be a good idea for me to check it out, or this blog is going to get pretty boring rather quickly.

And for all of those who are wondering about the picture, no, I don't actually wear old man slippers. They're just easier to draw.

Anyway. I found another one of those crazy pencil drawings, so I'mma gonna upload it for you.

Oooo, pointy things. Exciting. Figuring out how to draw that guys fingers was really hard.

I also figured out that scanning things is better if done wirelessly. The first time I tried to get this picture on my computer, it looked like this:

Isn't that just his hand, though? And isn't it sideways?

Yes. Which is why wireless is better, because apparently when you plug your scanner into the computer it loses about 95% of everything you put though it. Exciting, right? :D

I'll figure this all out eventually.

RRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH

Hello again :)

The title is as such because Adobe decided that it would be cool to create this horrifyingly painstaking verification process you need to suffer through before you can use anything they make. I had to suffer through a 40 minute installation, only to be sucker punched by this little window saying I'm not allowed to use anything... yet.

Oh, the indignity!! Hence the screen-shaking rage and all.

Anyway. If I'm dead before the end of this week, I am going to blame the 3- maybe 4- swim meets I have to survive. We had our first one today, which saw me frantically trying to stay on top of an ever-changing lineup of 13-14 year olds, AS WELL as swim three events myself (what? You can be a coach AND a swimmer? Well, yeah, I guess so.) which left my shattered remains crawling desperately for th- ok, it wasn't THAT bad. :P But I was beginning to look forward to when the meet would be finally over.

And then I get to do it again tomorrow!

Joyous, I know. Oh- almost forgot. Art blog. I'll put up a pencil drawing I did a couple of days ago, sorry if it's underwhelming.

Oh. That's a bummer... some of it got cut off on the right. I'll have to fix that eventually.

But yeah, dragons are cool. I can't wait to edit this one- you know, adding color and all that. Stupid Adobe and their making me wait... rrrgh.

Oh well. Hopefully the next time I post I'll have better news! And, you know, pictures. :P

And so it begins.

Yep.

So yeah, welcome to my blog. I decided to go public finally on the whole blogging thing. I'm a little frustrated about the fact that I was too lazy to install photoshop and illustrator on my computer, and so now I can't make a weird picture to greet you all with. Bummer, huh?

So a couple of things you should know about this shindig:

1. Random haters are not cool.

If you don't like the art I put up, that's cool. Constructive criticism is welcome. But people going "lollerskates yur art is crap" should just go find something else to do. Thanks.

2. Yes, I'm kind of copying another blog I saw.

There's this awesome blog out there called Hyperbole and a Half, read it, look at all of the little pictures. Yes, they are pretty awesome. Yes, I will be doing something similar, but I won't be stealing Allie's stuff or anything like that. See? Citing my sources.

3. This is going to be (mostly) an art blog.

I'm going to put up my work from time to time, and hopefully as my digital editing skills get better so will my art. That being said I'm going to post about other things too, since it's a free country etc, and yeah. Hope you all like the artwork though.

Alrighty then. Now that we all know each other, gnight! Busy day tomorrow.