Tuesday, January 26, 2010

sketchbook

First off, my website (still in the works) can be seen here

www.rajillustration.com

unfortunately it uploads the old version of my portfolio, which is not good, but I'll fix that soon.

I found this great quote today, its about writing but works for art, too:

"When a teacher (still a dear friend) of mine in graduate school suggested I ought to be a writer, I was appalled. "I don't want to add another mediocre writer to the world," I said. She helped me (it took years of nudging) to understand that if I wasn't willing to risk mediocrity, I would never accomplish anything. "

-Katherine Paterson Newberry Winner of "Bridge of Terabithia"

Speaking of Mediocrity--my sketchbook!









This is Ms. Kitty! She always steals my 'think spot' and sheds it up, but I love her anyway.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Update

Time to update this blog!

I went through my portfolio and fixed a bunch of things that were problems. Most of my stuff was just too dark and it needed extra help. Among those was fixing my nanny picture so it had more...temperature contrast, if that makes any sense. Y'all probably can't even tell the difference, but its different. I'll just put the two that were the most different.


Other than that, my more recent projects have been sent off as christmas presents before I scanned em. They weren't really portfolio peices anyway. I managed to finish my portfolio book, because I realized that I have to compete with Graphic Designers for a publisher, and Graphic Designers make sweet looking books. Who would have thought my weird Bookbinding habit would actually be worth my time one day?




The cover, for now. Its polka dots! Yay. I'm obsessed with polka dots right now and it seemed good for the demographic I'm aiming for. We'll see how long the sleeve lasts. I might just have to put something else on the front because it ended up being mighty a-lot of polka dots.

then I was looking through this portfolio magazine that had this add for cutting lasered patterns into your paper, and it was so freakin cool that I decided to copy it a few places within my portfolio. Just a few places becuase this took way longer than I thought to hand-cut, and because they tear themselves apart when they're on consecutive pages from eachother. It was a fun experiment, though. I was worried about it being too scrap-booky, but since it's all placed on white it didn't turn out that way.

there were more, but these were the biggest spots, later I got more reasonable and made the cut-outs smaller.
On another note, it is raining dogs and cats all over Northern California, so much so that it actually hailed on me! I thought I would go through this winter without hail, for a change, but o well. It turns out my sunroof leaks like mad in the rain, and I had a bucket collecting water overnight and it filled it almost completely full, and then splattered all over the rest of the car. I felt like I was trying to keep a boat afloat, taking a bucket at my flooding car, but now that its been caulked with silicone rubber, we'll see what the rain does now...

Monday, January 11, 2010

what is going on?

So I've finally stopped taking classes at any school, I've sat myself down and I've told myself, "Now you are done with school and you are not going back to school until you work on something having to do with the Degree you worked 5 years for." and for some reason that didn't have the effect I so desired of myself.

I attempted to make a portfolio, and failed a lot of times trying to use Tween Classes in Flash CS4 (shouldn't be difficult, but it is for no reason) so I went onto Wix and it sort of um...well you saw what happened in the blog entry right below this one. It's quick to make but the end result is very slow, too. Needlessly slow. I don't know how their script is writing out this type of pull menu, but the other ones I've seen are a lot quicker. How is it so slow? Why can't I just get my Tween Classes to work and make one myself half as slow!?

Look at me, now I'm turning into a Flash-snob, too? Thats the thing about art, you start doing it and then your snobbery has no bounds. Not even the internet is safe and the internet is pretty tacky by default. For now. Maybe someone can change that eventually? I mean, I appreciate what they're doing with Chrome and Bing but its still pretty much the same boring mainstream browser that everyone has. /theinternetistackyrant.

Its getting tough to work like I used to! Its an art bum-day, where I look at what I'm doing and I've said "yes this is the best that I've ever been, but I'm still at the worst of where my career is going to take me because I've just started, after all" and it is a bum-day.

So I wondered, how do other artists get a pick me up during art bum-days? I know that Rockwell and Michealangelo had seriously awful bum days but they seemed to get over it and go back to work. I looked to others who work really hard, and I think 'well a lot of them have kids relying on them' and I remind myself that Rockwell and Michealangelo aren't really the people we think of as 'fatherly.' Michealangelo was single for pretty much his whole life with only a few scattered romances here and there who's credibility is questionable, at best.

So is there a secret handshake to shake off the bumminess? Is there a special drink to--OK, there is--but is there a special boosting...non illegal...thing...that just gets other people passionately for what they're doing when they feel like its an art bum-day? Other than the obvious 'put your butt in the chair' method, which does work to an extent.