Slime Mansion

Not actually a real book cover though; this was a project done back in Spring '08 in my Illustration class. The assignment was to pick a book and create a new book cover for it using illustration techniques and mediums we learned in the class. I asked my professor if I could use my own book (so that way it's more relevant to the rest of my gallery 8D()) and she OK'd it, so this was what came out of it!

The whole thing was done in gouache on a big 18"x24" piece of I think watercolor paper that my professor gave to me, and one of the most distressing aspects about the project was finding a scanner for this thing! XO Originally it was scanned in pieces and put together on the computer, except the colors were totally crappy when I did that. Eventually we found a Kinko's with a large-scale scanner which I had to pay like $10 to use, but at least it gave me an image that was actually presentable! @_@

Incidentally, I did some more work on my Art Archives from Wednesday and now I have an automated script set up to thumbnail anything I upload and display onto the server on the fly. ;D This'll give me more motivation to upload my sketches cause I won't have to worry about thumbnailing them all the time now!! Woooo @_@

Spent a bit of time today revising the main index for the Art Archive on this site so that it's a little more attractive. Before it was just some bulleted links that took up maybe 5% of the total space on the page, aheheh. Unfortunately the actual contents of the folders are still plain ol' text links, so I'm lookin' into fixing that up so that I can get it to easily generate thumbnails whenever I upload stuff onto my server. I know there are a few PHP scripts that can do that out there, but they're a little too complicated for my needs, which is basically to just chuck my files into the archive, let it display as a thumbnail (without me having to manually make each file into a thumbnail), and be done with it. XO

(yeah sry, I'm not witty enough to come up with some elaborate April Fool's hoax. ...or more like I'm just too lazy to. >_>)

For our first real project in my Digital Illustration class, we were to choose a subject and create a circular emblem of sorts for it in black and white using Illustrator. Examples for subjects included things like sports, dance, hobbies, people, etc. etc. I chose to do mine on dairy products. :B

This was pretty much my first serious attempt at doing stuff in Illustrator outside of the Slime Mansion logo I did before, so a lot of time was spent fudging around, but basically I became very familiar with the Blend Tool while working with this project @_@ Although I haven't really used it again; it's good for black-and-white stuff, but the next project we did was in color, so I became best friends with a different tool for that one, which I'll post here eeeveentuaallyyyy!

December saw the end of my class in Elements of Sequential Art with Christian Hill, and all in all I think I learned a lot! :B If anything it's gotten me to think more critically about more aspects of my comic, as well as looking at the comic as a whole to see the bigger picture. It was a hectic semester though because we spent the bulk of the semester with the Herakles project, leaving just a few weeks for our final project. Shamefully, I had to turn my project a few weeks after the semester was over, but I had fun doing it nonetheless?

Anyway, once again the comic is about my cat Rupert, this time setting off into the outside world on an adventure! More than anything I wanted to play around with actually using color in comics and seeing how that's like. It definitely adds a different dimension to the work process compared to working in black and white, and I'd definitely like to do more! :B ONTO THE COMIC!

H-he actually didn't used to do this kind of stuff, but lately he takes every opportunity he can to slip by us into the backyard to play. XO He hasn't figured out how to jump the walls yet, but aahhhh I'll die if he ever does. @__@

Oh, and there's a new Comics box on the front page now which contains some of my old short comic work, including "The Little Match Girl" which was published in TokyoPop's first Rising Stars of Manga anthology, and "Raven" which was published in an independent anthology of comics about robots! Check them out if you'd like, even though I'm severely embarrassed by them now. >_>

This was a picture done back in July 2008 which I finally got around to putting up on the site. :B It's the Star Fox gang as seen in Smash Bros. Brawl. I was always a fan of playing as Falco in Melee (even though I'm kind of terrible at it), but I'm finding that I like playing Wolf a lot better this time around??

In hindsight there's maybe a little too much purple going on in this picture. owell :X