Magazine Dream Team/IPP Brain Wars

Hello, readers! It's been a while, but I'm back at school once again.

It's only been two days, but we have now had our two major CreComm projects thrown at us.

First  up - the magazine project.

Hearing about it in first semester, although it did seem interesting, it was also rather intimidating. Being in a group with people I don't know, having to create an entire magazine that we all should have some sort of interest in making, all in just a few months.

But after yesterday, I have to say, I'm really quite excited. I'm generally a rather shy person with people I don't know, which was why I was nervous about it being a group project in a new class. But I must admit - I don't think I could have asked for a better group. All of us contributed awesome ideas, there was no one person that just shot down others' ideas without consideration, and we all seem very passionate about our idea for our magazine. I felt very comfortable in the group, and was expressing my own ideas and opinions with great ease, which I haven't been able to do in a while.

Now, I won't reveal what our plans are yet - maybe once we get approved! But I think we'll be able to do really well with it - maybe even win an award. The concept of it is very simple, yet I think we're working well at finding a good angle for it, and it's pretty creative. It's something that I think we'll have more fun with rather than stress - or at least a good balance.

Don't get me wrong though, the project is still immensely intimidating. As one teacher said, we're hitting the ground running with this project. We only just began discussing it yesterday, and we have to propose our ideas for not only the magazine, but for our individual feature articles next Friday. The preliminary stages of the magazine are all going to be happening very quickly, which is what scares me. But I also feel that the fast pace of this project - along with the craziness that will come along with the Individual Professional Projects (IPP) - will make the rest of this first year go by pretty quickly. That's what I found happened with last semester as well - you feel like you have a lot of time to do an assignment, but suddenly the time has flown by and the deadline is smashing you in the face.

As for the IPP, I really have no idea what I'm going to do for that yet. I've been bouncing between various ideas, but have yet to really settle. The two ideas currently facing off in my brain are either something promotional for Fantasy Pole Dancing - or even just pole dancing studios in Winnipeg (sort of like raising awareness for the sport itself) - or a book. With the book idea, I'm trying to think of something that I would feel really inspired to do. I originally thought I'd do a novel, but I realised that I'm too much of a procrastinator with my writing to do that. But I also really wanted to incorporate my art somehow, so right now I'm starting to form an idea about a book that is entirely made up of pages of art, but the art tells a story. The difficulty with this will be to come up with a concept for the book which will be conveyable through art alone, and to make sure that the style I choose to draw in will match the tone of the story. I also will have to find a really good way to market this. Although I would try and contact some publishers, it's more likely that I will have to get it self published. What I would like to ideally do is to have the book available for pre-order, but I want to make it available and interesting to a larger audience (as in more than just me going on Facebook or Twitter and saying "Hey, buy my book!").

As you can see, right now I am more-so leaning to the book idea. But I think if I can come up with a good idea for the pole dancing one, that could become a good contender in my brain.



Heh.

Stressed already. But content stress.


That's all for now, readers. I'll keep you updated.

Holiday Plans

Hello readers!

So, unfortunately, I don't have a job (yet) to fill up my holidays. Not that I haven't been trying, it's just been difficult to find time to apply for jobs, seeing as I've been drowning in homework and tests from CreComm these past couple weeks.

But yesterday, I decided what I was going to do to fill up my three weeks instead.

I'm going to make cake pops.

I'm not sure where the idea came from yesterday, but I suddenly had an overwhelming urge to make cake pops.

After looking up recipes, I've found that they're actually pretty basic to make, but the number one complaint is that it is very tedious. This is due to the fact that they have to be frozen and unfrozen a number of times, on order to keep them nice and firm.

Thankfully, though, I will have a lot of time on my hands.

I plan on making my first batch early next week, and I will be picking up all my ingredients tomorrow. I have to run around to a bunch of different stores (Walmart, Bulk Barn, and possibly Michaels) in order to get all my ingredients, and as they are pretty far away from me, I figured it be best to do my shopping on a separate day. That way I can spend a whole day just happily making cake pops!

My first batch will be primarily for my boyfriend, Nic. He's had a much crazier time than I have these last few weeks. He had a number of massively massive projects due, most being at least 50 pages long, and he still has exam week. So I plan on delivering a good chunk of my first batch of cake pops to him while he is studying for his exams at school - enough for both him and his friends.

Considering one box of cake mix makes about 50 - 60 cake pops, I've decided that I'm going to make four different kinds for my first try: Plain white (with maybe some cinnamon), candy cane, lemon, and strawberry. I really wanted to make some with a chocolate base as well, but I don't feel up to making two boxes of cake for my first attempt!

I also will hopefully be making little chocolates (using molds), and putting them alongside the cake pops as gifts!


I am super, super excited for this, and have no doubt that I'll be posting like crazy about my baking adventures!


That's all for now, readers!

My Personal Brand Logo

Hey readers!

So, last night I decided to whip up a logo for myself, as part of my personal branding assignment for advertising.

After looking at a couple references, I decided to use Adobe Illustrator to make it. I've used Photoshop and inDesign, but I've never really used Illustrator - but I figured it wouldn't be too much different.

It ended up going pretty well. The program is very similar to inDesign, but it has more detailed drawing and shape functions. I didn't really do any drawing for it, but the major difference that I used is that you can make the lines from the pen tool taper off, which was awesome.

I kind of knew what I wanted to do ahead of time. My original design that I doodled out was just the side-by-side K and F, with the D and I in the middle (as they're my middle names, derp). I also wanted to have my "pop of colour" theme in the logo, and decided to do so by making the D and I different colours. But after doing so, I felt that it needed more, so I created little swirly designs coming off of the D and I, then added some happy bubbles.

I really like how it turned out, considering it's my first attempt at using Illustrator and logo design. I'll likely edit it more in the future though.

(P.S. The details are a lot more visible in the PDF and vector files, the JPEG and TIFFs just kinda butchered it. xP )

Random Drawing Moods

Hello, readers!

Every now and then, I have random days where there's only one thing I really want to do: Draw.

Yesterday was one of those days.

In my advertising class, we were given a brief assignment where we had to design a billboard advertising the (fake) end of the NHL lockout. I realized that I actually had my clipboard with blank paper on it with me, as I had brought the clipboard in order to do surveys earlier in the day.

After finishing my design a little early, I decided to do a bit of drawing until class finished. It was just a messy pen sketch of a girl, but it made me kind of happy, and it ended up getting me into a drawing mood.

Unfortunately, when I got home, I really didn't have any free time. After listening to my mom talk to me for about an hour, I went to get supper, then went back home only to have to write a 1000 word essay.

1000 words? That might seem easy, but not so much when it's a personal essay. I simply had too much to say. But I recalled my teacher telling the class that it wouldn't be a big deal if we went over the word count, as long as it wasn't obscenely long. He also said that 1000 word essay somehow amounted to a solid four pages, but even with my 1200 word essay I only had about 3 1/2.

Anyway, back to the point, this took me until about 11pm to finish - the time that I usually go to bed. But then I began staring at my desktop background:

I was suddenly overcome with a need to draw the photo.

I originally attempted to draw Cedric (on the left), thinking that it would be more challenging. But it ended up looking pretty terrible, and I didn't feel like trying to fix it anymore - so instead began to draw Omar.

I put a little bit of my own style into it, but was determined to keep the brunt of the high-contrast style of the original the same. In about 20 minutes, I ended up with what I thought was a pretty good rendition of the photo. I only did the face, as I did not feel like guessing what was going on with his clothing nor did I want to draw the full afro, but I was still really happy with it.

I began with the outline of the profile, and the line between the lips. I began my shading at the nose - I've recently started to find this a good place to begin. I spent most of my time focusing around the nose and lips. After a while of stupidly careful shading, I decided it would be easier to instead get right to the outline of the sunglasses, then draw a light outline of where my shading will be. As I finished major components of the shading, I smudged out the edges of the shading into the rest of the face just using my finger.

TIP: When doing dark shading, try to keep in mind the actual outline of things - for example the sunglasses. I am also very picky about the facial outline - I like it to be noticeable, but not too much. I like the shading right beside the facial outline to be only a shade or two lighter.

As for the hair, I worked on it whenever I came to a part where there would be hair. I was kind of lazy like that. I also made an effort to distinguish the hair from the face, without making it too separate from the body - the little hairs at the sideburns were particularely tricky, as I wanted them to be dark enough that they wouldn't just look like shading, but light enough that you could see all the individual strands in a really awkward way.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to let me know!

By for now, readers.

I promise to draw soon.

Hello, readers!

So, I realize that I've been slacking off with my drawing lately, I apologize.

I was actually planning on doing another concept sketch for another Aiko mascot entry yesterday, but I ended up spending an obscene amount of time aquiring a new laptop. I was planning on it just being a quick trip, but not only did I manage to catch the most crack-inspired, long-winded bus route ever, but the employee at Future Shop ended up telling me the entire history of IBM and Lenovo.

I'm hoping that I might be able to scrounge up some time this weekend to sketch out some ideas, which I will then post here to discuss the process I go through when doing full, detailed sketches.

Bye for now!

Things Have Been Crazy - At Least I Can Write

Hello, readers.

CreComm makes your life a little crazy.

Even when you don't have anything to work on, you're sitting there thinking, "WHY DON'T I HAVE ANYTHING TO WORK ON?"

That's exactly what I did last night. Then I realized, I do have stuff to work on. Sort of. A lot of the assignments we receive - particularly for journalism - are ones that we know are due in less than a week, but that we also know we can't work on until a certain point. At this point in time, I am referring to our Remembrance day assignments, which, obviously, we have to wait until Remembrance day to write.

By the way, this CreComm craziness is why I haven't posted anything about my art lately. Drawing is a very relaxed thing for me, so I don't like to do it when I feel like I have a million other things to do. You might think, "Well, if it's relaxing, why don't you do it to relax yourself?"

But no. I don't know why, but that's just not how I roll.

The good thing about this craziness is that in amongst it all, I've been writing, due to my creative writing class. And oh, man, do I love to write. Being a writer as I am though, I'm also extremely lazy about it. Writers and artists are probably some of the biggest procrastinators out there. And I'm both.

For example, look at the artists at conventions. Many of them will have wonderful displays and wonderful art (obviously), but what you don't know is that they more than likely did the brunt of that work in maybe a month or two - or less - before the convention. Those who do conventions professionally - as in they put buttloads of work into it and make buttloads of money - probably take more time, but casual artists, not so much.

This year I took a little bit more time to prepare - as I had 20+ masks to make - but note that by "a little more time" I mean that I started about a month to a month and a half before the convention rather than two weeks.

Anyway, sorry for the little detour there. My point today is that although things have been kind of crazy, at least I do have one little vent-box that is my writing. And, being that these are assignments, I am forced to write.

For my last assignment, I even decided to whip out my old, beloved character, Aiden. I created Aiden about four years ago now, I believe. I am very attatched to him, as he kind of represents the sort of darkness inside me. I know that sounds a little dramatic and cliche, but it's true.

You can find my most recent story, To Lucy, With Grace, on my DeviantArt.


That's all for now, Readers!

Shameful, or Shameless: Just a Kid at Heart

Good day, readers.

So, on October 30th, I turned 18 years old at last. And on October 31st, I went trick-or-treating.

I didn't go alone, mind you. I went with my friend who will be turning 18 in December, and my boyfriend who will be 19 in December (they have the same birthday, actually!).

I have never missed a Halloween. It is my absolute favourite holiday. I mean, why wouldn't it be - I get gifts one day and candy the next.

Now, ever since I was about 15, people have started saying to me "Aren't you kinda old for that?" To which I respond, "Nah, it's just fun!"

And it really is! And you know what? The only people that seem to accuse me of being too old are the people I talk to about it. When I actually go out for Halloween, honestly - no one cares. As long as you put effort into it and its obvious you're just out to have a good time, people will still give you candy.

The only thing I've had change is that people will stop me to talk to me about my awesome costume, and there might be one or two people that say that for the older ones they ask for a trick before they give out treats. So I tell them a nerdy joke, and all is well!

This Halloween though, I received a slightly hurtful comment from my aunt, who has always been very supportive of me otherwise. She posted on my Facebook, "Tricks are for kids. You're an adult now."

But you know what? Just because I'm 18, doesn't mean I can't still be a kid at heart. I like to dress up. I like to have fun, and I like to get free candy.

I will stop trick-or-treating only when I have no one to go with, people start getting crabby at me at the door, or I get bored of it.

Simple as that.