Of productivity and headaches.

I wasn't very productive over my winter break for personal reasons, but now that I'm back and comfortable in my new semester, I started to do more.

First and foremost, I started working with Maya.
And by "working with", I mean "begging the gods to have the program work properly just this once oh no not again why".

Allow me to show you what happened when I tried to create a cute little robot:

I have to redo him, because there was no salvaging him. Rest in Peace, little robot monkey.

Maya is going to be my headache for the rest of the semester.

I also started dabbling in Flash more in-depth than I used to. I seemed to have an issue with being able to vary the stroke width of the paint brush. It only changed depeding on how zoomed in/out I was. It also didn't pick up my pen pressure regardless of my settings. Is that just flash being glitchy? Input would be greatly appreciated.
Anyway, the animation I came up with is...rather dumb. I made it dumber by adding music, and I'm actually fairly content with it aside from the typical gripe that occurs when flash and quicktime are forced to share the sandbox (hint: the missile is supposed to actually look like it's moving towards you, not just be two circles of different sizes). I now share it with you for your viewing pleasure.

In my digital videos class, we also had to do a storyboard thing of a student being late for school. My friends and I did a sequence in which two girls were late for anime school. As seen here:

The eyes took the entire thing to a whole new level of creepy we didn't really anticipate. Also, the bread turned out to be stale.

Now these last two things I wasn't sure if I should include because it's "fanart", so it's going under a page break for those who don't care to see it. Also, one is kind of "graphic"...I guess. I'm feeling rather speculative.


Now, I'm a fan of Homestuck. For those who don't know what it is, it's a web epic created by Andrew Hussie. It's very long and very "wat", but totally worth the read. You can find it here.
Anyway, I used my enjoyment of Homestuck to kinda kick myself back into some sort of creative shape after a particularly draining break.
First, I have Illustrator. When I go a while without using it, I open it up and create something really simple just so I don't completely forget how to maneuver in the program. That ultimately led to this:

Now he and this next one should both have transparent backgrounds. The (admittedly slightly botched) Aquarius symbol should also be translucent.

The next thing I did was an exercise in creating nicer lineart and dabbling with clipping masks in Photoshop. It yielded a slightly more disturbing result, I guess. I imagine this is going to look really, really weird to people who haven't read Homestuck.

On the bright side, my lines are clean and lovely. On the downside, oh ew pixels where did you come from?

And yeah, that's really about it for this entry.