8(... or 8D

I was reading another miserable freshman post on reddit, and then I remembered... I'm going to college this Saturday! Holy Shit! This is awesome/terrifying!

The freshman in question was lamenting the state of his long distance relationship, and denying the fact that he should move on even as he pointed out all the red flags.

I don't have to worry about breaking off any romantic ties. I do have a minor crush now, but now was way less than the right time for that to happen. I should just be happy that I'm not more attached; it'll be way easier to forget about, or to simply dispell the wishy-washy crush feeling while forging a decent friendship.

Holy. Crap. I've barely started packing.

I need to scan sketches. And make sketches to begin with.

This week began with little to-do and lots of me sitting around the house, shirtless, sweaty, and listening to indecent amounts of public radio, but exponentially improved... from a social life perspective, anyway.

On Wednesday, Lee and I schlepped over to Katie's house (a mutual friend of ours with whom we had both become estranged) and it turned out that, actually, she lives kind of ridiculously close to us. Anyway, we crashed, fried up concoctions of egg and vegetable, walked to the park, where I was brutally raped by an Ent I mean tried to climb a tree and failed. We met one of Katie's friends James, who has a penchant for tree climbing and an uncommonly friendly nature. We proceeded to paint the town in a way that mainly involved painting our faces with ice cream, as well as visit a local art gallery, in which Katie conversed with the owner about karma and philosophy while I wandered around screeching OOH, PRETTY THINGS.

Then we parted with James, went to Katie's and made DELICIOS PASTA, and listened to music for hours on end.

But then it got late, and I found that mere wheat and grain was no match for my 's demanding digestive system, so we went down stairs to curb our munchies. Yeah, that's right. We don't need to get high to get hungry.

It's probably the most slap happy I've been in recent times. I was sitting on the floor with Katie's monstrous dog Sasha and kept noticing the differences between dogs and cats. For instance, when you lay a hand on a dog and just leave it there, they're totally cool with that. And when they're wagging their tails, it's fine to stop the wagging and hold their tail.

Cats on the end, are paranoid little bastards. It is never cool for one to simply rest one's hand on a cat. They get suspicious. They start to wonder whether or not you're a host for some insidious parasite and are using the ritual of petting as a means of spreading their fiendish kind. That must be it.

Also, I'm pretty sure that night was the first time I ever made a taco on two slices of rye bread. With salami. It was glorious.

On Thursday, Judo and I walked to Lee's house unexpectedly, and went on an unexpected slacking expedition to the nearby park. We were surprisingly competent on the line. What was less surprising was the mass of mosquitoes that fell upon us and eventually drove us to flee to Lee's safe, kinda blood-thirsty insect-less apartment. At least we could watch the fishes.

The rest of the weekend involved seeing a play, failing at going to an art show, eating MOAR ICE CREAM, and watching Rushmore.

aswds

Hokay guaiz, all none of you... by blog post next I WILL have started the sketchbook challenge. I can always use another excuse to draw something.

It's already almost Wednesday :P Dang sauce, the time it sure does fly. In less than a fortnight I'll be off to Eastern. It won't be long after that I'll be needing to apply to art schools and busting my bum trying to perfect my portfolio.

In the meantime I need to hang out with some friends, stat; in a couple of weeks I'm gonna be pressed to start hardcore thinking about the future, and I could do for some mindless shenanigans.

Until then... bitch gotta slumber.

BOOBLY

She knows what's up.

Sketchbook challenge

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF2EtFDSoYcmqA4LP38Qlfj4MFfHSTq2-uS6CCR_hMdOFwdUrBAmJB9g2K4dvRTR3Vtu0w9-Yt1qjeLJbSwFis-w6BUi6GfqTOeSkfRDbHtHHVpQfC_43tbiIutmpKuJISA3CZg6Lhe-HG/s1600/tumblr_l5ge0efLyK1qax2aqo1_500.jpg

I should do this.

"That's to lock transparent pixels, actually. In your layers tab, click on 'channels' at the top, and drag the blue channel to the perforated circle icon at the bottom of the box. Then go to select>inverse, move back to your layers tab, create a new layer, and fill."

That's right, I copy/paste snippets of facebook conversation for future reference.

NO CRAPPIN' WAY

IT'S OVER. IT'S OVER, AND ALL I CAN DO IS EAT MORE CREAM TO TRY TO FILL IN THE GAPING CHASM THAT IS MY SOUL WITH SOMETHING OTHER THAN HEARTBREAK AND SORROW.

Yeah, camp ended. I can finally relate to those summer camp stories I heard on This American Life. While art camp didn't have any long lived traditions that went back for decades, we still created our own traditions and our own memes and our own world. Every thing about camp is so intense because it's so short, so you try and become as close as you can to your new friends. I think it's all the more beautiful because your camp friends are the new best friends that you almost know. Any more time and everyone would learn who everyone really was. Still, there are several people who I WANT to to really know, and want to stay in touch with.

I cried. It's not just the ending of camp and the separation anxiety, but also the feeling that now that I'm out of camp there's no turning back from my inevitable adult life and my new responsibilities, and new pressures not to be a kid anymore. And now that I'm away from art camp, I increasingly wonder if I'll really be able to go back to art school and actually, maybe, learn skills to make a living. With art. College time at Eastern is creeping up closer and closer, and I'm wondering if, should I decide to transfer, I'll be able to keep some of Eastern's scholarship money, or if upon leaving they'll ask for me to pay everything back.

I've never fully considered going into art as a real possibility, but going to art camp made it seem slightly less unlikely.

I've always known that I'm super critical of myself, but the gallery show made me feel... empty? Disappointed in myself? I tried to gauge my parents' reactions, and couldn't tell if they were entirely pleased with my stuff. My parents' opinions are painfully important to me; I'm almost never sure of myself, and it helps when I have some good feed back and guidance. I doubt my parents are disappointed; in fact, I'm pretty sure they aren't, but my own worries and insecurities taint my perception so much sometimes that I doubt everything I see and hear.

I liked all of my teachers; however, there were only a couple whose opinions I could trust. Meaning, some of them were so nice to everyone that they wouldn't give more harsh criticisms. The only teachers who I thought genuinely thought I was any good were my animation and figure drawing teachers. I can't make a decent looking finished piece for beans, but apparently I'm good at gesture drawing. And the animation teacher did actually seem to like my work.

GOSH DARNIT, WHY ARE YOU SO INSECURE. AND WHY DOES IT MATTER WHETHER OR NOT SOMEONE LIKES YOUR WORK. Because it means everything.

I dunno. I wish final critiques had been more in depth. We were critiqued in front of each other, so no one could say anything too harsh. I would have felt better knowing what people really thought rather than having to guess everything.

Of course, what's more important is what I learned... value grouping. Repetition. Command-z. Even if everything I made at camp wasn't stellar, I'll be able to take what I've learned and make something better.

One small consolation of being back home? I get to listen to Wiretap again. Hot box.

I LOVE YOU ALL

And by that I mean I hate everything.

JUSSSST KIDDINGGGG. This is the "finished" piece for our digital painting class. By finished, I mean I finally reached a point where it just had to end, that point being the rapidly approaching due date. It's not a fantastic piece, but it's my first digital piece where I used an extensive amount of layers. At any given time I had around twenty or thirty. IT'S A STEPPING STONE PIECE. MEANING THAT I'LL NOW BE ABLE TO WORK UP TO MORE THOUGHTFUL DIGITAL WORKS WITH RELEVANT ENVIRONMENTS AND ATMOSPHERIC QUALITY. That, or I'll realize that there's no stone after the first and I'll plunge into a morass of muddy looking mud.

On a less self-mutilating note I MADE ME AN ANIMATION! I'll post that later, SO I DON'T OVERWHELM THE FEW PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW THIS. I think, out of all the work I've generated during camp I am most proud of the stuff I made in our hilariously short animation class. We had a mere two class periods and whatever time in between to do a transitional animation; considering the minuscule amount of time I think I did an admirable job.

In terms of sheer frustration, I finally found Z-Brush's equal in After Effects. However, i have no tears left after Z-Brush, so all I could do was laugh hysterically.

We pinned our "best" works up for Final Critique tomorrow. I feel inadequate, looking at some of the other student's work. My figure drawings are all, not refined, and my posters are all, not very well arranged. Apparently I'm good at gestures, though; Mr. Keller, our figure drawing teacher said my gestures were good, and a heck of a lot stronger than my long drawings. I can get down a gesture, but I seem to cock things up when it comes to making things look finished. I got a little offended, too, when one class mate referred to someone else as the best one in the class; there's definitely some disparity in ability among us, however, the generality of the statement offended me. First, we don't all have the same strengths, and some artists were better at some things and less at others. Also, not gonna lie, I felt kind of threatened. Whoo, insecurity! I has it. Besides, if the girl who was supposed to get into Illustration had gotten in instead of me, she would have been the best one in the class, hands down. It's funny, because I've become good friends with her, but I she doesn't know that I unintentionally usurped her place in the program. She ended up in Graphic design, which is what I would have had to do had she been told a deadline and turned in her acceptance letter then. I think she did better in graphic design than I ever would have, though.

I went back up to the display, after an expedition to the crepe place, because I wanted to tack up some frames from my animation. I think I may be more proud of it than my Z-Brush renderings, even though I suffered a lot more for those. I basically spent hours in a row drawing on my makeshift lightboard, a.k.a the window in my dorm. And the sequence that I thought would have the most bugs (because I didn't have a lightboard) turned out to be the best, or rather, didn't need any further editing when I DID return to the lightboard. But I think that assignment reaffirmed my love of animation. I flirted with it in fifth grade by making these really tight sequential drawings... they were NOT comics, because the actions and timing in each frame were equally spaced apart. Then I just stuck with making comics every once in awhile for the next, what, seven years? Shit, son. Now I really want to learn flash. I would just stick to drawing on windows, but I don't know how I would shoot the frames afterwords.

It bums me out a bit, because we only dedicated two days to solid animation classes, which isn't nearly enough time. Ideally we should have had half illustration and half animation. Still, I think my other classes were worth it.

As for going back home, I can't say that I'm looking forward to it. While I'm not in love with Detroit necessarily, I love the classes here, and a lot of the people as well. It's so refreshing to be surrounded by other artists. I even loved the worst times, when everyone in the class is on the edge of punching someone in the face. Commiseration is a beautiful, beautiful thing. Also, it's great to know that other people have good taste. Seriously, like Wes Anderson films seems to be a prerequisite for going to art school.

I have so many quotations and notes written down in the sketchbook I was given, and I doubt that any of it is going to make sense later on. I felt like my sketch book for camp was really terrible. I decided to take David Chow's advice and not care about what I drew in it, but still.

Going to art camp has made me want to go to art school intensely. I can hardly believe that last year I wasn't really considering art school at all, while all the kids who are becoming seniors this year are adamant about going to art school. If they're so sure about doing it, why the crap aren't I? Probably because I'm insecure as all get out.

Annnyway... I'm being super anti social, and this my longest blog post ever. Also, it's my second to last night here, and I need to be in the common room for it to be worthwhile. Down and up, everyone.