Crashing through the vault of heaven with my determination.

           During last semester there was an idea that had stricken me as I was driving back to Indy after a weekend up in Muncie, make a crossover of two of my favorite animated series, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. The thought had struck me that many of the characters from Gurren Lagann had personality traits almost entirely in line with characters from My Little Pony, both canon and fanon. When I’d gotten back to my apartment I feverishly wrote down the characters that were most like each other from the respective series and realized that I could do an entire cast substitution with ponies in a giant mecha anime. Driving from that I spent many all-nighters screen-capping, drawing and coloring a scene from Gurren Lagann substituted with ponies and eventually this was created, signed, and finished.

            Originally I had thought I lacked the artistic ability to make such a thing a reality, merely postulating with friends how cool the crossover would be and hoping someone else in the vast world of the internet would do it. It wasn’t until that drive home I’d decided I’d take the idea upon myself to do. Despite family emergencies and crappy pencils, I doodled it out on paper over a sleepless weekend and posted my results on the internet, and got a decent review, and thought myself done. Later on I had gotten the urge to dust off my tablet and go add some color and fix all the minor line errors that require finer erasers than I have on hand.

            When I was working on the emblem during break time in a class, a rather eccentric gentleman of 35 looked at my progress so far and commented that my design looked “Damn sexy.” I later learned that this man had done a brief stint drawing for Marvel Comics, so regardless of how little he was to them, that meant a lot to me. When I was finished fully I was getting comments from everyone who’d seen me feverishly coloring over those previous weeks and even thought they may have liked only one or even none of the shows I put together, they did complement me on the effort I poured into it. In the end, I suppose, it was an exercise in getting back into drawing as a whole and learning the various ins and outs of being an artsy type like know full well most people won’t notice those tiny details that you mess up and getting the same amount of congrats overall.

            Seeing as I had not imagined making that project two moths earlier when it was proposed, I have no idea how it may have turned out in the hands of more capable artists. The first limitation was the fact I don’t like making things from scratch on computers, I like having pencil and paper to work on and the freedom of workspace that it allows for, since I’m a fidgety individual I don’t like sitting in a chair for several hours while my ideas come to life. Ever tried spinning a laptop around for a better view on what you’re drawing? Though so. As you look at that image I linked you to, keep in mind I’ve never drawn a mecha that well, if ever, in my life. I like straight lines, but I can’t draw them to save my life, and I never had a sense for where all the little doodlebopers would go on the robot. Over that weekend that I had physically drawn it, my brother had had his first (and hopefully last) seizure, leaving that night to be somewhat unproductive due to the trauma of the whole thing. Next limitation came from the fact I had never really gotten used to Photoshop and my tablet, yet I felt I could do so much more with what I had made, I later manned up and did it anyway once I found a scanner.  And lastly, I did the unthinkable, I posted it on the internet hoping it would do well. Granted the My Little Pony board on Reddit is self-advertised as the friendliest place next to it’s stoner board, it’s very nerve wracking when you don’t know if you posted at the ideal time to get it noticed, nor if you’re going to get anything more constructive than “I leik dis art.”

     In the very least, I hope me and the electronics can get over out various issues, because I feel that if we can set out differences aside we can create much good art. I've expressed this to my computer while simultaneously testing out my new tablet.

Group One and its various doings.

Group One was mostly myself and another member talking back and forth with each other, she'd propose an idea and I'd suggest a spin on the idea and see what the reaction was. From what I gathered from Group Two, many similar ideas were tossed around such as "Other group does the proposed activity first" or "Simply do nothing for 15 minutes" On our side of things we had come to these conclusions, but wanted to try to make the other group DO something because we felt those options were a bit of a cop-out.

What we settled on, and personally I'd have preferred the idea of making karaoke videos, was having everyone listing their favorite movie quote and making it into a relevant script. What we ended up settling on was dramatically reading those quotes that we wrote down.

I feel now that the goggles are going to be a new look for me, even taking Jacques' likelihood to exaggerate  that SOMEONE was curious as to why I wore goggles today. It started out as a mix of my birthday being this week, and the fact they can make a bad hair day actually work, but now I think I'm going to wear the goggles to Seeing Sideways just to serve as way of being unique. It's not often you're in a group of people that know nothing about you, so I'm taking advantage of that to be me as I am currently rather than having to stick to a two-to-three year rut of expectations the group I normally hang out with has subject me to.

Reflections of the Class 1/23

Well, today was certainly interesting in regards to fishbowls. That is to say, rather,  that someone(Jacques, I think, nobody's really been on a first name basis so far) was attempting to force a meme, but all in all not a terrible one.

What I really took away from the class was a reaffirming of what I had already discovered as far as excess of choices leading to an increase in self-depreciative behavior, thought I probably would not have worded my conclusion as eloquently. Especially on the bead assignment, I had come up with what I thought was a nifty little idea, only to have someone show off their assignment in Intro to Sound that was a well-produced video. I would have been distraught over the difference in perceived quality of our two projects had it been only six months ago, but recently I've developed the confidence to say that my projects aren't the best, but that's no reason to not be happy with the end result as well as having faith that Beth meant what she said of anything goes.

Ponies Play Beadball

     So here I was, day before the assignment was due, thinking that I would cop out with a silly comic telling of the bead's loneliness staying in a pocket of my backpack for the past week. When I got about halfway through the rough draft, I looked up at my toy adorned entertainment system and realized that the bead was about the size of smaller volleyball for my pony figurines. So in true MacGyver fashion I took some paperclips and tape and set up a volleyball net for my ponies to play with.

Rarity's about to return a serve.

    This was certainly an interesting feat to color balance in Photoshop while one of my eyes was out of commission due to allergies.

Initial Hopes and Expectations

           Today (yesterday) we went over the syllabus for the class, pretty standard. What wasn’t standard was how informal and laid back the class was. I’ve had Beth for a class before, and despite her insisting it was strict it seemed very lenient and allowed for creativity, so I have high hopes for a more fun and enjoyable class in Seeing Sideways because of it’s sole purpose being dedicated to fostering that creativity.

            I’d found the drive to get in touch with my artistic side over the summer, found almost entirely in the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Laugh if you will, but given the fact that I had not wanted to pick up a pencil or pen for two years until then, I took the opportunity and ran with it. What kept me going up to this point was the community based around that show, getting praise and constructive criticism on your work, even anonymously, really helped me believe in my ability as an artist and has created a loop of wanting to give back to these people via art to keep me going for these past eight months.

            Even so, I’ve found myself either bogged down with too many ideas or burning myself out on a project I dumped 40 hours into. All the same, I also realize the pony kick will most likely die out, which would leave me dormant again unless I'm able to adapt to a wider variety of material to art. That being said, I'd like to develop my own style of doing things so my creativity can be self sustaining. I’d also like to learn how to manage that creative impulse and keep my work flowing in a more steady instead of having it come out in spurts, that’s my hopes of things to take away from this class. 

Okay, so to start things off, massive dumping of images and calling it a final.

Vectoring, Gods I love vectoring. 90% of this final was done with Illustrator and the faithful Pen Tool over scanned drawings.

#1 The Re-Do:
I re-did the Mome Rath picture, reigned in the text and re-colored it to be more visible, and for the background I enlarged and focused on the path in the woods and vectored that whole background. Rather happy with the results.

Before
After

#2 The Adjective:
Couldn't think of a good adjective off the top of my head, so I looked up a random word generator and got the word "Quadruped" so I drew a pony. The style itself is based off of the art style of the recent show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a new and loud muse to me, so a lot of pony-related materials have been cranked out of late


#3 Da Musics:
Was listening to this hoping to draw inspiration from it. I originally thought that I would do a DJ manning her stand about to drop a bass, but my thoughts drifted to the speakers that make that bass happen. Also got some work in on the perspective tool, and I must say it's a temperamental little so-and-so.

#4 Typography:
Octavia was a character in a show I once saw, her theme distinctly musical. I like making things like these, and I tried my hand at merging writing with music. Rather happy with the results.

#5 No Words:
I'll be honest, this started as a freebie image, but when I was drawing balls in a bowl I saw what looked like two eyes peering off to the side. I couldn't decide if they were being sneaky, accusatory, or otherwise so it seemed a nifty idea to let that be open to interpretation.

 #6 Scratch Image:
Made this start to finish in Photoshop. I wondered how the meeting of the nature-loving pony Fluttershy from aforementioned cartoon would react to the plant-animal hybrid Pikmin from the game of the same name. The mental image seemed too adorable to pass up.

#7 Based on a Photo:
I felt that I was a bit to new at things to do an earlier image I had justice so I redid it. It's a skeletal creature creeping in the depths of a forest, with a trail of corruption in its wake. Results turned out much cleaner and overall nicer than the original.
Before
After

#8 Color:
I like the color blue, blue is somehow an invigorating color for me. I drew inspiration for this from an artist I'm following on deviantArt who does minimalist styled pony wallpapers.

#9 Based Off a TV Show:
I liked My Little Pony, I liked the anime Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, the mash-up that spawned therein was a glorious sight to behold. The image itself is an equine styling of Team Gurren's emblem.

#10 Based on a Famous Work:
I hand-vectored one of Piet Mondrian's works ("Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black" I think, internet had issue pegging which of his many similar works it was) and noticed the spiral tool in the toolbar. When I overlayed it I was surprised how well a perfect spiral nestled itself into the work, almost like it was intentionally a fractal. I went back and make the spiral negative to the fields it overlapped.

#11 Something Masculine:
I don't really have a solid definition of either masculinity or femininity, they can be both and the same for all I know. What I made the image after was more towards how you see toys marketed towards boys and girls respectively. Here, the boys take, I usually see sharp, pointed, hard painted plastics such as with Transformers or Lego. Next we have...

#12 Something Feminine:
Avoiding the obvious Barbie pitch, I see a lot of softer materials and edges, but in contrast bright colors. Plushies seem to be universal barring 'boy' and 'girl' colors, but there always seems to be that awkward period in a boy's life where all things even remotely not manly are shunned. Admittedly it could be the exact same for girls, but plushies still strike me as feminine-neutral.

#13 Aimed at Children
Brightly colored cereal boxes, what else to cause a major scene in a grocery rivaled only by the toys and electronics aisle? The color and the title is what's aimed at children, the subtitles read more as a parent would see them.

#14 Vector
Did I mention I love vectoring? Dug through my wares and found this beauty of a mech that I'd recently done in Photoshop and went over it in Illustrator. I suppose that it's only fair seeing as I used PS's pen tool to keep my lines straight, I just did the next step.

#15 Something that Sells Something
In a few ways it seems that Mr. Mays had never left late night television. All the same, though, it seems that this was the general message those infomercials were giving me in the wee hours of the morning as I scramble to adjust the volume. Pinkie, the pony pushing the product (say that 5x fast) seems like the kind of pony to have the voice to do Mr. Mays some justice.

#16 Freebie 1
Cats wearing food as a costume, it works with cats and pop-tarts, why not comically elongated cats and a burrito wrap?

#17 Freebie 2
F-Zero, wonderful non-euclidean racing game. Racing in vehicles that can break mach 2 while going upside down and sideways being held to the track buy this wishful thought called 'magnets.' Made a generic vehicle build, made more after the style than a particular vehicle. First brush with gradients on this one, the Tron-esque contrail was fun to make thought.

#18 Freebie 3
Toyed around with the path alterations, squiggly, slanty, so forth. I imagined a simple-minded Transformer named Grimlock trying to draw a picture of himself. He has this verbal tick so his sentences flow like "Me, Grimlock, no like you." but he does have a wit about him. Drawing with T-Rex arms limit artistic ability, though.

#19 Freebie 4
Legend of Zelda had a game come out recently, I'm unable to play until Christmas, but I drew one of the universe's many interesting creatures to pass the time. Deku Scrubs are a plant species, for some reason their recent appearances have made them seem adorable, despite being a frequently annoying enemy until lately.

#20 Freebie 5
A band I listen to, called The Megas, takes music from the Megaman games and puts lyrics to the stage themes. For Topman, the robot master with the top motif, the title they gave the song was "Can't Stop the Top" Didn't quite feel that it was worthy of "Music Inspired" but at the very least I got to fiddle with making text go along a path. Not as easy as initially expected.