Sculptris

A program for sculpting heads!! Or other stuff, I guess, but it all stars with a sphere. This makes me ridiculously happy. I KNOW it's not a great head or anything, but it's my first (all right, second) try! Hee hee! So happy!

Independence Day Kit!

OK, now I know a couple of people have asked me about digital scrapbooking - where do I get stuff, how to start, etc. Here is a HUGE free kit you can get from the wonderful Ahhh Scrap design team.

Isn't it GORGEOUS? I'm super excited about it myself!! It's a blog hop, but it's a small one - only about a dozen places to go, and you get this ENORMOUS kit from it! If you've been wanting to start digscrapping, now is the perfect time! Just start at the Ahhh Scrap Blog for the list of designers. I just finished hopping and I can't wait to start playing with the kit!!

New Silly Fun

How often do you look at something in a store and proclaim that you could do it yourself and therefore don't need it? I do that all the time, and sometimes I followthrough and sometimes not. This is one of those followthrough times!

I took this picture at Home Goods (same thing as TJ Maxx, but no clothes, just stuff):

And so I've been playing with pictures of buildings and turning them into these:

I have several more done, and am going to try a few more with more famous places - the White House, memorials, Empire State Building, stuff like that. Then I'm going to try and do more than one building/color at a time. Fun, right?

Hybrid art?

In digital scrapbooking, they consider it "hybrid" if you print what you've made. This is the reverse of that, I guess. Here is a journal page that I sprayed and painted and scanned:

And I trimmed it a little and then put on the tree and the bird and tried to find a quote that fit "flying" or "dawn" because I had it in my head that these are the colors of dawn, even though they're more sunset, but none of them were great. Then I found this one:

Just in case anyone out there doesn't already know, my friend Suzi Blu is coming to Minnesota. She's staying with Kelly for the summer and we're going to look for a house for us to live in. People keep telling both of us that it's not a good idea, that living with friends is bad, and blah, blah, blah. But I think people have these thoughts because they don't know how to be themselves around other people. My mom won't get the mail (which is in a box at the end of her driveway) without putting lipstick on. Some people don't have what I would consider "real" friends. After I had Liam, my friend Shanti did my laundry. She did dishes, went to the grocery store, watched him so I could run errands. Not to mention she was IN the delivery room with me. If you don't have a friend who would watch you squeeze a person into the world, then wash your stinky socks and stuff them in your dresser for you, that makes me sad. Maybe I have more amazing friends than my share.

Unit 8 Lab

I don't know why, but I am completely in love with this project I made yesterday in design class. It's not one of the "big" ones or anything, we do some kind of lab every week. But they're usually sort of lame.  not useless, it's always to teach us something. This one was working with layers and blend modes. Usually we just randomly take pictures from the Internet (I got the brick walls from photobucket) but I absolutely hate using other people's pictures in my work. I just hate it. So I emailed this pic of me (that I took yesterday on my phone) to myself and downloaded it. I upsized it AND all the brick walls so they would print OK...you don't want to hear ALL the details but I LOVE that the bricks on me are a different size than the brick wall, and I totally love the graffiti font I found for the quote! I think I'm going to put this in my portfolio. 

Scared...

So, I do some art. As you all know. And I do some digital scrapbooking - again, you know this. I sometimes combine the two. I take hi-res pics of my journal pages before they're complete and then use them in photoshop as digital journaling pages. So for a few months now, the store owner at Ahhh Scrap (my first digiscrapping home!) has been asking me if I'd like to create digital art journaling stuff for the store. Of course, I like the IDEA of that. Being a designer, making something that people like, it sounds REALLY fun. However...I'm hesitant for the same reason I don't try to sell art work. Having all your friends tell you it's awesome and wonderful is one thing. Putting it out there for the general public to see and perhaps want but most likely NOT want - that's different. It's like saying "My work only have value if you not only LIKE it, but if you choose to PAY FOR IT." And then the little critic starts. Who the hell am I to think my digital stuff is good enough for someone to want?

ALL of that being said - I committed. I said I would make a mini digital journaling kit for Digital Scrapbooking Day (November 5). We (I hesitate to say "we" because I'm not really part of the design team...or am I?) have a color palette, everyone is to choose a color and make a mini kit. That means 3-5 papers and 5-7 embellishments. Mine is four papers and 6 embellishments - I like to be average. I'm excited about this kit. I LOVE it. It's really, really awesome. All of the embellishments are digital forms of things I've drawn or painted, the colors are great. It rocks. But what if I put it out there and no one ELSE thinks it rocks? What if it's only amazing in my head? Don't get me wrong - I don't think that someone not liking my work makes it LESS amazing...right now. You could hate all my work (why would you follow my blog if you did??) and it doesn't make it less valuable to me. But once it has a price tag on it, is that different? If I'm making things to sell them and no one wants to buy them, does it devalue them? I know I'm overthinking it - it's a free mini kit and most people who journal do NOT do so digitally. But this is how my brain works and my blog is a lot like a digital journal for me.

Here is a page I made with one of the papers and the alpha from the kit:

I'm calling it "Silhouettes and Shadows" or "Shadows and Silhouettes", I'm not sure which one. I've given the kit to two people, and it will be checked by someone who specializes in Quality Control. I'm terrified of failure AND of success. What the F is wrong with me?? Maybe I should journal about that!

First Design Project

Stan (my VC100 teacher) said this project should be "portfolio ready" AND that I had to buy a portfolio. The project was to create a sports poster with implied motion (something blurry that conveys movement).

I'm EXTREMELY paranoid, so if you hate it, don't tell me, OK? I'm completely stressed about getting a good grade on my first project. Stan is very knowledgeable but he doesn't really "teach" us. He even saw this tonight when I was printing it on the plotter (that's a printer that can print enormous things like blueprints) and he didn't say it was terrible, so I have to assume it doesn't suck horribly. Oh, and I made twelve versions before deciding on this one!! Some of the rejects: