Posts have been scarce, I know. I've been on Twitter a looot, since most things are just fleeting little thoughts. But in other news, there has been:
- A walk through town (where I bought an old book on the Johnstown flood! woo!).
- Lots of cooking (macaroni salad = awesome, potato salad still kind of a fail, no idea why).
- Paper Factory picnic, where everyone brought food, Tom kicked total ass at croquet, and a good time was had by all despite drizzy weather
- Lots of banners and invitations and things (some headaches, some awesome).
- Saw Iron Man 2 - though the highlight of that trip was probably DJ's usual insanity as we (Tom, me, DJ and his gf) had burgers at Red Robin afterwards.
- Mom's graduation from MCC up in Rochester - we made a day of it, tried out the Ethiopian place, finally made it to Niblack where I got spices, hung out with family. I worked on a pretty blue doily all through the usual ceremony speeches.
- Dad and Mel came down for a visit on the fourth, we wandered around town, I introduced them to Campi's pizza (which is amazing), hit up a farm stand, and ate whoopie pies in the town commons.

Finished a few crochet things - I have a new shirt, a new pull-over tank top, and several new doilies. Making a giant insane doily for Tom's grandma, who he'll visit soon. Worried about finishing a mobius wrap (in yummy bamboo yarn) because I'm not sure I have enough yarn left, aaand I was sent the wrong yarn twice before I got that one. Yarn! I won free yarn from Phat Fiber! I have no idea what I'm going to do with it yet, and since it's 99% wool I hardly want to even touch it right now, pretty as it is.

My coworkers are all having Tupperware parties - I was stuck working for the first two, but the third I get to go to, that'll be this Tuesday at Sam's. Sam's making food plans and I suspect it is going to be a very fun evening, despite Tom's comments. A coworker is also an Avon lady now, I just placed my first order through her last night. I love Avon's stuff, and I'm glad to help Ashley out while getting stuff I want. ;) (Plus, catalogs mean I can at least sort of trust color swatches, and better define exactly what shade of pale my skin is.)

I'm trying to do more art, because I feel twitchy when I don't, and depression sneaks up on me. (I had a very, very rough night earlier this week. Rationality never can overcome 1am insomniac insecurities.) I did some actual physical sketches last week while enjoying the summer sun... and wound up with a pretty little flower sketch I really like, as well as a ridiculous sunburn on my legs. ;p

It has been insaaaaanely hot this past week. 90s most days, and I live in a brick oven that does noooot cool down. Heat finally broke today, it's been raining and was supposed to only hit 77. (10am in the bedroom? still something like 88. blehhhh.) Humidity makes a cranky Melissa. And there have been far more migraines than I've had in awhile. Heat has also thrown a serious monkeywrench into my newly-attempted exercise routine.

My plants keep dying and I don't know why. (This was before the heat wave.) Some kind of little gnat-like bug got into them, and when I took my mint outside to attempt some resuscitation, I found there were little cobwebs all around the stem! booo. My passion flower and sugar plant are still doing amazing though, and what I assume is a forget-me-not (it's a very different flower from the one I'd expected, but still similar) is blooming away happily.

Tom has all kinds of vacation time he needs to take asap, so he'll be off for nearly two weeks starting... sometime next week. He's planning on some serious immersion-time in his 3D modeling... and I'm hoping he sticks with it, because if he paws at me for attention all morning every morning before I go in to work, I am never going to get anything done.

Counting down the days 'til our trip to Florida for the Star Wars convention! woo! (Though this also means Tom has been on my back for a week and a half about making ABSOLUTELY OH GOD CERTAIN that our hotel reservations are, in fact, reservations, even though they haven't charged me any money yet. They have my credit card number on hold as a deposit, if I cancel I will be charged $70-something. The actual bill is paid at the end of your hotel stay. I know this. Tom is not reassured because he's convinced that, because I'm a scatterbrain about a lot of things, I'm a scatterbrain about EVERYTHING. Sooo, I have sent emails to three places now, trying to get 100% confirmation that will satisfy even Mr. Travelling Paranoid.)

...I did not mean for that to be a mini-rant, but, really, it feels damn good to get that off my chest. ha.

Next post: new wallpaper!

Labels: being social, cooking, crochet, drawing, family, friends, griping, life in general, navelgaze, plants, travel, work

 
Once again, Tom asked me to draw him something, to use as a base for a 3D model. He wanted a four-legged something, that he could try to animate.

I've spent the last hour sketching in Photoshop, and it was crappy to start, but then I wound up with this little fox thing. It was cute. I made it stick out its tongue and gave it foofy ears. It made me smile. I found some reference shots of foxes to get the legs right, and some reference shots of Arabian horses for the tail I had in mind.

Tom wandered downstairs just now, and took a look.

"...it's the same problem as when you drew me a person. Everyone knows what a person is *supposed* to look like." Thus, the animator's dilemma - if you're doing something people are already familiar with, they won't like it unless it's identical. It's really, really hard to give people a model of, for example, a person with an extra-long torso or something. It looks "wrong". This gets even worse when you go to try and animate the thing.

"This is a dog."
"I knooowwww, it's really hard to invent an animal! But that's why I started making it a little different..."
"You added fur." Which is notoriously hard to not only model in 3d, but also animate. And isn't an actual body structure anyway.
"... ..yeahhh..."
"You're useless to me."
"...isn't this what happened the last three times we tried this?"

As exciting as the idea of Tom'n'Melissa art collaboration is, I cannot do basic blueprint sketches of things to save my life. It's insanely hard for me. Doable if I have some actual object in front of me, but, honestly, doing a head-on shot of anything with a face and limbs and things is crazy hard. Plus it looks unnatural and unemotional and thus just doesn't interest me to draw. bleh.

Also, I do not do "manly" drawings. ever.

But my little fox is still cute! so there.

Labels: art, drawing, life in general

 
Photoshop day!

I happened across White Flower Farm's website during NaNoNovember, looking for reference pictures for something or another, and remembered how much I'd always loved their catalog. Mom had lots of plant catalogs always around the house, but White Flower Farm always had the best selection of oriental lilies. :) Flipping through their online catalog, I was happily surprised by the quality of their photos, and mentioned to Mom that if she had any old catalogs laying around, I'd love to snag them for reference.



Lo and behold, a few weeks later, a copy of the catalog lands in my mailbox. Thank you, Mom! The spring catalog just arrived, and I spent a good long time pawing through it. They do some gorgeous arrangements of flowers, which are sototally going to influence my own drawings/writing. The catalog is full of unusual and incredibly striking plants, everything is just *really* *freaking* *pretty*. But what really grabbed me were some of the foliage plants and things... and the second I saw the hellebore flowers, I was dying to draw one.



I almost did late last night... I went downtown with a coworker, and while it wasn't a particularly exciting evening, we talked a lot. I haven't had a chance to really talk with her much, but she's one of my favorite people, so I was happy to have the chance to. Unfortunately, she's going through a rough patch - almost done with college, no idea what she wants to do with her life, things at home going downhill, boys being..well, boys, which is to say, emotionally distant and ridiculous. But I'm good at listening, and while I doubt I was able to contribute much help, I know sometimes just having a sympathetic ear and some company helps.

It made me realize though... I've been so insanely lucky in my life. Like, really. Hearing Tom's stories of his high school, hearing stories from my friend and a friend of hers about failed and troubled relationships, all these countless stories around me... and my life sounds suddenly boring next to all of theirs. But while it means I don't have a particularly captivating repertoire of life stories to share... it means I haven't had to deal with all the troubles they have. My home life had its dramas, everyone's does, but really, mine was pretty darn calm. My last couple years of high school were an emotional roller coaster, but whose weren't? I still have no idea what I'm doing with my life, but, y'know, I have a job I don't totally hate - it even sometimes gives me the chance to do what I love. I have a place of my own - even if I can't keep it clean, and doing dishes and laundry drives me bananas some days. And I have the most supportive boy ever, who keeps me grounded and largely sane, and knows I'm crazy but somehow doesn't entirely mind.

So I came in somewhere around midnight last night, all of this filtering through my mind. I was pretty tipsy still, and my mind was too awake to let me sleep for awhile, so I turned on the computer when I came in, planning to try my hand at a hellebore flower. I went upstairs to the bathroom while the computer was booting, and before I came back down, I peeked in to check on Tom.

And he was curled up on my side of the bed, half under the sheets, just, *curled*, his hands tucked up by his chin, sleeping so sweetly and beautifully...

I turned the computer back off, and came upstairs to bed. Didn't sleep for crap last night, but, you know, I didn't entirely mind.

Today, I took him out to breakfast, picked up some veggies to make a nice slow-cooker curry today, and spent the day in Photoshop. Tom's out with DJ, I told him they're welcome to come by around 7 when the curry will be ready, there'll be plenty to go around. I might do some laundry, or might wait until tomorrow. I have Labyrinth on Blu-Ray. (I also have Rattle & Hum on Blu-Ray, and I've had an awful lot of U2 dreams out of nowhere lately.) I have Guitar Hero. I have crochet projects and new Sigur Rós cds. In an hour or two, I'll have some of the promising-looking curry. I'm a pretty darn content little thing. (I also can't stop looking at my drawing. so pretty!!!)

Labels: art, being social, cooking, drawing, friends, life in general, navelgaze, storytime, wallpaper

 
Life is, as ever, superbusy. Being summertime, there's all kinds of things I want to go out and do, and Tom has been incredibly indulgent to my out-and-about whims lately. I dragged him out to the Charcoal Corral, where we had a quite nice afternoon (after he stopped being angry about my bad direction-giving...oops). Last week, I dragged him to the county fair, where I had wine ice cream (AMAZING) and bought some handmade glass necklace pendants. And there were mohair goats! They're the scruffliest looking things I have ever seen (Tom called them hobo-goats), but... well let's just say I was haaard-pressed to not go see what was going on at the hand-spinning booth. My yarn addiction is bad enough as it is, I do NOT need to let myself get into hand-dying and spinning and everything else.

The store is only now starting to slow down a bit, it's been the busiest summer there. Yesterday was the first day in probably two months I didn't have any printwork waiting for me when I got there. (So I cranked out like eight new banner template layouts - one of these days I need to post them here, because some are seriously awesome.)

Crocheting like a madwoman still: blanket for a (slightly belated) wedding gift, blanket for Tom's birthday, my half-finished skirt, and whatever random little bracelets necklaces hairthings caught my eye that day.

Cooking lots: Heidi's Marathon Cookies (anise and lemon and sesame seeds what?) are my current spazz. Also Mom visited me and brought a toooooon of spice-store goodies. I now have three different kinds of couscous! Awesome. I kind of hashed two recipes together to get a fantastic summer lunchfood, couscous with olive oil, lemon juice, lots of cucumber, and some mix of parsley and dill and things, that sort of thing. Keeps beautifully in the fridge for like a week. (I have learned that tomatoes, sadly, do not keep for crap once they've been cut up. boo.)

And! I have, randomly, been drawing! It's been ages. But there's now a big official super-thorough Lynda.com tutorial for Blender - which is the open-source (and FREE) 3D modeling program. Thus, Tom has been completely absorbed for close to a week, trying to learn this beast of a program. However, he wanted to try modeling something other than the examples included - which means he needed a drawing to work from.

...so I've learned loads already about the modeling process, and what exactly is needed in a t-pose sketch. It is FREAKING HARD, mainly because it involves a lot of things like lining things up straight, using grids, and making definite lines - y'know, all the kinds of things I'm usually awful at.

But while making myself a new shopping list notepad last week (I threw together some simple designs in Photoshop, picked up some pretty paper at work, printed, cut, glued, voila! adorable little notepad!), I drew the cutest little fairy in like ten, fifteen minutes.

Just a sketch, but despite how rough I kept it, she had a bit of personality. So, going off of that, I made up a character for Tom. That character is no longer a fairy, she's somewhere between an ancient Greek chick and a gypsy, but she's cute.

Tom, on seeing the character, was not as horrified as I'd feared. (She wasn't really what I'd had in mind to make him, but, she's what happened.) In giving me some pointers on what changes to make in future, telling me what would work best for him...I realized that what he was talking about was that he, like me, needed the girl's actual body, to layer the clothes onto, to make things work nicely. "Wait... I have that! Hang on, it's in one of these layers..."

The first couple of layers I did, my little chick was naked, so I could get proportions right and things. Being the layer psychopath that I am, they were still in there. A bit of clean-up work, and Tom had his sketches! (So I'll go back and refine the clothes when he's nearer to needing them.)

Teasers:
   
(I was focusing on the elements I figured Tom would need the most, and sketched in a few contour lines that I think might help. Also: it took me FOREVER to get that girl's profile right! ugh that was awful. I had to go search the interwebs for pictures, and then tweak the hell out of what I was looking at to fit the character I was trying to draw... but I'm REALLY psyched about the results.)

...it's a very strange, and somewhat amazing, thing, seeing what someone else does with what you've started. He's gotten as far as a semi-refined model of the body (not the head, I had to re-draw that in more detail today), and it is seriously freaking cool, recognizing the particular curves I drew in this grey stack of polygons.


Rambling aside! After putting in some more work on my girl's face, I decided to go back to my original rough little fairy sketch. Somehow or another, she got super-colorful (probably due to the style of the t-shirts I'm dying to buy)...and I am SO happy with the way the coloring worked out. I'm totally in love. It's very freeing, letting things keep some rough edges. And I actually think it adds a lot, I like this much better than the exacting sort of detailing I've done in the past, there's more motion to it, it's a lot lighter. (Also, I can actually FINISH a drawing, instead of letting it sit around half-finished because I'm too intimidated by it.)

No I have no idea why she's blue-green. I just liked the color. ;)

Full-drawing, and also a desktop-size cropped version.

   

Labels: art, cooking, crochet, drawing, printshop, work