My first animation

Get out your memory books because this is a Lori first.

It's my first animated gif! Of course its a gator. I hand drew the four frames and then scanned the frames (well photographed and uploaded. I don't have a scanner.) Then I put the frames in Photoshop and used the animation feature. I didn't want my little albino gator to get lonely so I gave him some color and a potential girlfriend. Let's hope he doesn't screw this up.

Oh, here's the link to the tutorial I used.

Clipart: a history

Clipart will always have a place in my heart. I'm about to sound like an old fogie, but I have to explain. Back when I was a munchkin of probably 6 or 7 (already glued to the family Macintosh) I liked to design little projects using Clarisworks. This was pre-KidPix and circa Photoshop 3. Basically, Clarisworks let you combine text with images and that's about it. Without a scanner or Google image search (or Google for that matter), I was left with a single CD-ROM of clipart images. Terrible terrible clipart. Knowing the Millslagles, I'm going to assume it was the cheapest clipart package on the market.

The CD-ROM came with a booklet of all the images that you could thumb through to find the clipart that you wanted to use. I remember sitting on the floor of my dad's office with this book, tucking little scraps of paper in between pages to mark what images I wanted to use. (To clarify, my dad's "office" was really the storage room connected to my sister's room that we affectionately called Christmas Town. Aside from housing our trusty family computer, it also housed holiday decorations.)

So I had this clipart book stuffed full of bookmarks that I'd use in my rudimentary documents which had text along the lines of "LAUREN'S ROOM. KEEP OUT!!!" with a regal looking lion head below.  When I ran out of signs to make, AKA I was told to stop wasting printer ink, I would get a paper and pencil and draw from the clipart book. Again, keep in mind that this clipart was just the cheesiest, most poorly rendered and random group of images one could put together. Eventually, we got a scanner and the Internet started to evolve so I retired the clipart book before it could really damage my artistic aesthetic (thank god).

Fast forward 17 years (god, I am old) and I just made my first batch of clipart. I just started working as a graphic designer for the Carlsbad library and one of my main projects is the children's calendar. Every month there's a theme (August is Beachy) and normally the calendar is populated with dingbat images. However, now that you know my story, it's pretty obvious why I requested to make the clipart myself. Above is the result.

To dream the dream

Herro,

So I've been working a lot on my trees for Spring Splash. Here's a look at one of my trees in progress:

My tree as an adolescent.

It's been nice to get back into "work mode". I feel like I'm working on my senior thesis again especially when I bring Kapu and he assumes this position:

My constant companion at his finest.

I brought his old bed to my new studio so he spends most of his time sleeping under the desk while I work away. I forget he's there until I hear him sigh out of boredom. Such a cheeky little one.

In other news, all I can think about is having a booth at the North Park Farmer's Market and Ray at Night so I've been working on stuff to sell on my Etsy. Here's a peak at some of the prints I just pulled.

"Woodland Teaparty" and "Owl and the Pussycat"

Standard Deviation

My goals for yesterday were:

1. Draw for 30 minutes 

2. Retake photos of: the elephant, polar bear, green valentine dinos, otters

3. post all of the above on my Etsy

4. make two new original creatures.

Being a total boss and ultra productive member of society. I can go ahead and cross off 75% of my to-do list before 1 p.m. Here are the results of today's drawing sesh:

As you can probably see, I decided to deviate from the Pikaland what to draw list and do some visual thinking. I want to do more mixed media projects. I'm thinking about utilizing felt for capes and crowns specifically.

As for the 25% of my to do list that I haven't conquered, I'm steadily chipping away. This is the first of my original creatures. I have to do a second one and I haven't thought too much about it yet which means you should tune in tomorrow. Same bat time. Same bat channel.

Otters and Terrible drawings.

So today was pretty productive I'd say. Job wise I didn't get a job, interviewed for a different job, and scheduled an interview for third job. So hopefully something works out before I have to move into the poorhouse and subsequently get kicked out of the poor house for being too poor.

Etsy-wise, I finished my little hand holding otters and I think they look pretty damn cute. Here's a close up of one of them.

Cute, right? I'm coating them in mod podge right now so they should be ready to post on creaturecreatures tomorrow. I also posted some more valentine dinosaurs and worked on a little monster today. 

Aside from being uncharacteristically productive. I also checked off one of my goals. I drew for thirty minutes today from the Pikaland 100 things to draw. I only managed to cover the first two items: 1. your cat and 2. your dog. I don't have a cat, but if I did I'd want it to be one that Deth P Sun drew (hence my out right copying of his drawings). Drawing felt good. I'm a pretty lazy drawer as you might be able to tell. These drawings are pretty terrible, but hey I did 30 minutes right??

So since I am being goal oriented I want to set some goals for tomorrow:

1. Draw for 30 minutes 

2. Retake photos of: the elephant, polar bear, green valentine dinos, otters

3. post all of the above on my Etsy

4. make two new original creatures.