Thing-a-day.com

I really enjoyed Thing-A-Day. It kept me from realizing it was cold and wintery outside and got me rolling creatively once again after feeling a little burnt out the past couple of seasons. Thing-A-Day reminded me to do something little everyday for myself, even if it doesn’t seem that important.
Although I didn’t post it, yesterday I continued knitting my never-ending scarf and also thought about some long term goals. I plan to keep creatively posting on my own blog here. Although probably every two or three days as I feel posting everyday would lead to repetitive content as I work on my lengthier projects. I guess we’ll see how it goes. I still plan to do something everyday especially when spring kicks in here and my energy levels come back up. (Sometimes I’m convinced I photosynthesize at least some of my energy. Winter has been dragging here thus I’ve been dragging too these past couple of weeks.)

I want to thank everyone for sharing their creativity with me! This has been really inspirational and fun 29 days! I hope to see everyone again next year! Peace out!

I was playing around with ideas for a thank-you card. The colors turned out darker when i saved the image. I think it has something to do with my workspace/color swatches, but i’m too tired to fix it right now.

I really ran out of steam this past week. Lol. But I’m still trying to post despite my sleeping ridiculous amounts of time lately. I think my body is trying to tell me I should be hibernating through winter.

As far as my website goes, its still a work in progress. I feel as though it’s missing a little something. My process lately has been *open file/stare/change something/stare/close/unsatisfied sigh* But admittedly, previous website designs  of mine have been a little elaborate, so recently I’ve been trying to simplify. I believe I will be able to launch it at the end of February though, so that makes me happy. Hopefully with my new blog and some business cards to boot.

Yesterday I made more curry–this time with lamb. I added in potatos, carrots, peas and corn–all served on top of Nishiki sushi style rice because its the best! And this time I remembered to take a picture before it disappeared.

My next goal is to make curry not from a box, hopefully something like this coconut chicken curry.

And speaking of cooking… my boyfriend made these the other day:

Poor little gummy bears trapped in cookies. What a delicious way to go, though.

I fell off track a little bit. Sorry no pictures for this post.
Thing #22 for me was Japanese style curry served over rice. I did make it from a box… but I chopped all my vegetables and even conquered(somewhat) my fear of handling raw meat. I decided to use a cornish hen I already had instead of buying pre-cubed chicken, but I hate touching raw meat–so much that it affects my cooking habits, and people tend to think I’m a vegetarian at times. I forgot to take a picture before it was eaten, but it was yummy!

Thing #23… totally skipped out. I don’t think I was creative at all on Saturday unless you count picking out an outfit to wear and go see Avenue Q. I also cleaned a little.

Thing #24 .. I did some mechanical work. Although it really doesn’t seem like it could’ve been that long, I feel like I  spent most of the day today trying to tune my scooter. I put in a new battery, and then had help (a lot of help) adjusting the clutch cable and trying to find the short in my headlight. Not necessarily creative, but I was working with my hands!

There’s still time today. Maybe I’ll draw or something later. Winter blues has me in its grips… death grips maybe. If spring doesn’t come at the end of February I propose another round of Thing-A-Day… otherwise I’m not sure I’ll make it ’til Spring!

Today I was feeling a little worn down, so I just did a little bit of knitting. I think I added about ten rows onto what I already had. I’m making another knitted kitty, but this one I’m planning to add some catnip to the stuffing and turn it into a playmate for my sister’s cat. It’s cotton yarn which I think I’ll stuff with more cottonballs again.

I’m still putting my portfolio site together, however I did adapt the design to use as a template for my blog. There’s still a few kinks that need to be worked out, but for now I like it better than the generic template I was using.

See my blog here.

I am still working on my website. Browser cross testing frustrates me so. I didn’t get a chance to do any sketching today either. But I am determined to get this site done!

I did this sketch all with copic multiliners instead of my usual pencil inked over with the multiliners. It’s good to force yourself to ignore erasers sometimes.

The word of the day today was sine qua non.

sine qua non \sin-ih-kwah-NON; -NOHN; sy-nih-kway-\, noun:
An essential condition or element; an indispensable thing.

The internet has become disturbingly indispensable to me.  On that note, I still need to work on my website layout. My marathon plans for the weekend got disrupted by one nap too many.

My drawing of the dogwood flowers inked with japanese sumi-ink (it’s the stuff used in calligraphy and brush drawings). I went in later with a copic multiliner marker to touch up some shaky lines and add in fine details.

A pencil drawing of the photograph I used in the previous layout mock-up for my website. I’m planning on inking this in sumi-ink, similar to a couple of other illustrations I have done to get a more graphic quality.

Why dogwood flowers? They’ve always been a favorite blossom of mine, and I think they’re also the flower of my state, so i think they’re fitting. The form of the branches reminds me of cherry blossoms, too, so it ties in with my Japanese theme hopefully without being too overt.

I feel I have a solid design concept for my website now, so I hope to push on and have all the graphics knocked out by Monday and start throwing it together into actual pages over the course of the week. I’m really excited, I might have a marathon working on it the rest of the weekend!

Sometimes I think I’m thinking too hard about this. I was surfing about and found this quote that really struck a chord with me:

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

–Sylvia Plath

Up until about four years ago, I was pretty confident in my creative abilities. But an important thing you learn in school is to critique your own work. I think I’ve been over critiquing myself too much since then. Oh to find a happy balance!

Here is one of my latest layout mock-ups for my website/blog. I only did it in red because I was already messing around with that color and didn’t feel like converting everything to black and white. Lazy, I know, but tonight is Friday! I was thinking of having it straight black and white, or having small color details that would change between pages. I like the boldness of it, but I’m not sure how I feel about the flowers–I’d probably like them better if I actually drew them rather than messing around with a photoshop image. I like to make things difficult for myself.

Posted a day late so as not to ruin the surprise… I made a valentine for my valentine, including a card and a heart shaped cherry cake. Cherries was actually the theme of the day as maraschino cherries are one of his favorites.

Aww… sadly, my post last night didn’t make it, so here it is again, a day late:

A love-themed sketch I finished today.

A proper scan of my first Word of the Day sketch:

And because I really wish I had more time in a day or a time machine or something, I present this crazy doodle.

oops….  I totally missed this day. Unfortunately, it was a busy day at work and by the time I got home I was exhausted. I think this week is the cursed week. Almost half the people I work with are sick with the flu or some such other ailment. I hope I’m not catching anything–I’ve been sleeping more than usual. Maybe that’s a good thing.

I did start to make something early Wednesday morning. It’s not finished yet, but I promise to post some pictures of that this weekend.

I got home from work today, excited about working on some drawings from doodles I did at work, when suddenly it hit me. I was very tired. I ate, took a nap, got up around 7pm and ate again and then took another nap, only to wake up at about 2 am. Oops. And I’m too lazy to move from the couch to use my scanner, so I took a picture of the sketch I was inking on my breaks at work today.

I used to suscribe to dictionary.com’s word of the day, and I was thinking recently that it might be fun to suscribe again and illustrate words that interested me. So here’s my first illustration sketch. I’m planning to turn this into a digital drawing, so I’ll probably be posting that later on much less fuzzy. My goal is to do at least ten of these and then put them together in a book, because I haven’t made a book in over a year.

Extempore Flying Lessons

ex·tem·po·re / [ik-stem-puh-ree] –adverb

–adjective

I’m also still knitting. The never-ending scarf. Lol. Suddenly the month of February seems extremely short.

I’m still working on knitting my scarf. I think I’m halfway there, so I might actually be able to wear it before the weather turns for spring. I’ve also started knitting another one of those kitties, this time I’m planning to stuff it with cotton and a little bit of catnip to sent to my sister as a little toy for her cat. I’ve also been attempting to learn how to crochet–its not that its hard to learn, but controlling the tension for me is almost impossible. Even knitting I have a little trouble with yarn tension, too.

Tonight I hope I can make up some cute valentine cards, but I know I’ll be too tired to post them afterward, so they may be part of tomorrow’s post.

Well the post I made is somewhere in limbo, but I wasn’t very satisfied with the final project, so I’m going to try again later, because I really wanted to make something cool to burn little tea lights in. But this was my little candle holder:

Its a canning jar that previously held some spaghetti sauce. I wrapped the outside in translucent paper, although after burning it for a while I became a bit more paranoid about how warm the sides of the jar were becoming.  I might try painting the outside of the jar instead, acrylic perhaps? I’m not sure what would be best just yet. I also have some wire I might play around with too.

Bunniken’s knitted bunny was too just too cute, so I followed the “bunny-trail” as it were to get to the original pattern by geobabe. This is the first knitted project I have ever completed! I think I’ll call him Mocha. It took me some time on Wednesday and Thursday to knit the body and I finished the head, tail and assembly all today. He’s stuffed with some cotton balls I found laying around.

I thought I’d also show my mini-munny that i started working on today. I only put the base paint coat on, but I’m modeling it after one of my favorite bands these days.

If you’ve never gotten a Munny doll, I recommend it highly! I don’t do a lot of 3dimensional work, so for me its a kind of nice, easy way to think about design in the round. Also the local shop that sells Kidrobot gear has annual shows–its awesome to see what people do with Munnys and other DIY vinyl dolls.

I want to start making note cards. It’d come in handy for keeping in touch with people. Since Valentine’s Day is in a week, I thought I’d try to come up with a few ideas for that. Being the closet code geek that I am…

I found a translator and then just put this all together in Illustrator.