Assignment: Button MANIA

ma·ni·a (mā'nē-ə, mān'yə) n.

1. An excessively intense enthusiasm, interest, or desire; acraze: a mania for neatness.
2. Psychiatry  A manifestation of bipolar disorder, characterizedby profuse and rapidly changing ideas, exaggerated sexuality,gaiety, or irritability, and decreased sleep.
3. Violent abnormal behavior. See Synonyms at insanity.

In my last post I said I finished my buttons project but didn't go into it much since it's much better to have a separate post detailing such projects. Okay, so the assignment was to make buttons for our site using Fireworks. 

It's not tremendously difficult in process. The hardest thing was just to figure out what to make buttons of. They had to have one look when just on the page, when moused over, and when clicked. For me, I made the images in Illustrator and then pulled them over to Fireworks to get them into an animated gif sort of form. 

I like how they came out for the most part but I wish I wasn't so rusty with Illustrator so they could have looked better. 

Messin' around with Corel Painter

Wooo... I got my button mania work done last class mostly so I've had some time to mess around with other computer programs. I've always had an interest in painting but found that I'm really no good at it. Also, that it's tremendously messy when I get to it.

With nothing much else on my plate I decided to try out a digital painting program. I'm not suddenly a master artist, but it takes away the mess aspect (which can be fun though, I admit). There were three programs really catching my attention: ArtRage, Sai, and Painter. I went with the last one because I have to start somewhere. Later I'll get to the others. It's always best to do test runs with multiple programs before settling on one.

Yay my first messy attempt! I can only practice and start to get somewhere eventually. 

Makin' a costume

This week I started up working on my first costume of the year. I don't really want to disclose much about it yet because if I fail horribly at creating it then... well, at least nobody will really know what I had been intending to begin with. Strange, but it works.

Either way, it's probably the toughest costume I've tried to tackle. There's never been a time where I've needed to work with plastic mesh, much less FOAM, and this project has both. Thus far things are coming along decently and there have been mistakes made (mostly fixed!). If another similar costume comes up in the future it'll work out much better. No matter what I'm doing I seem to make every mistake possible the first - and sometimes second - time around.

Hopefully it all turns out well because then I'll probably bombard everyone with pictures of it.

This image is a hint. Somehow.

Left 4 Dead 2

Hey guys, if any of you play Left 4 Dead 2 and have, I don't know, been away from the internet for the past month you'll be happy to know some new DLC just came out! It's called The Passing and has your L4D2 cast of characters meeting up with the survivors from the original game. I was excited to be able to play it through today and see what all it had to offer. It's a lot of fun, and the finale is probably one of the toughest in the game. At least, that's how I felt when going through it.

And if by chance you have a 360 or PC and love zombies but DON'T have these games you really should consider picking them up (L4D1). There's tons of fun to be had fighting hordes of zombies with your friends. 

How I'll spend my weekend

May is quickly approaching and in my world the summertime is filled with lots of fan conventions. From games to anime and a whole slew of other things I'll be flitting around for the next few months. I make costumes from time to time and I've always got something ready if need be... but this would be a good time to make some new stuff! 


I'm looking at making two costumes that I can wear at multiple conventions. The first one is a character from the video game Rival Schools. 

I'm also looking at trying something completely new to me, which would be making a "mascot" type of costume head or a reptilian mask. Either of these options seems overwhelming because I just don't even know where to start. Regardless, if I make either of those heads I can put them on in place of the motorcycle helmet and have an amusing variation on the character. That is if I went with some sort of cute bunny head. If I went with a dragon-type head that would just be badass. 

Either way, looking to pick up my supplies this weekend and then getting started. 

Assignment: Project 3

Well, this is probably the easiest project to describe for it's plainly... my blog! As you can see, you're on it right now. It's not the most interesting thing at the moment but that's mostly because I'm just not quite sure what to say aside from writing up little summaries on the classwork.

I maintain a few other blogs on Blogger and one on LiveJournal but the material posted to them isn't exactly classroom friendly. Well, I guess we're all adults here but I'm still unsure about cross posting. We'll see.

Blogger is very nice and I hope to mess around with the sidebar gadgets a little more, but there is such a variety of them it'll take a while to look through them all. Some problems I have with my blog right now is that the section for text is so thin... I don't know if that makes any sense but there's a ton of space on the sides of the page that could be used. The other main problem is lack of content but that's all on me...

Assignment: Project 2

Awwright project 2 was basically the second part of project 1. What we had to do was take those pictures that we had optimized for web and, well, put them on the web. This was to be achieved by creating three different web gallery pages for our images.

It was pretty drat easy and kinda fun to look at all the options offered. I always find it cool how all the code that goes into these things is hidden by the GUI. I'm glad that people make such easy to use programs like that because it speeds the process up tremendously.

I'd link to a webgallery but since they're not actually online that wouldn't exactly work. Rest assured they were awesome.

Assignment: Project 1

So, in this totally awesome graphic design for the web class the first project was something to do with old photographs. More specifically, we had to scan pictures into the computer and optimize them for website use.

Since I'm a lucky duck the teacher basically scanned all my images up for me. I have a scanner at home so it wouldn't have been too hard to do that if I hadn't volunteered. Anyways, I was having some wicked trouble trying to get Photoshop to do things for me so that's the main thing I remember. This project was pretty related to the next one, which involved putting the pictures online... but I'll detail that in the next entry. 

TESTING

One, two, three. Is Blogger going to work for me today? Y/N?