Pan’s trying to learn how to paint..
After hours and brutal hours (well..more like a few minutes of swearing and pen throwing) Pan decided that he had absolutely no grasp of color theory, and was therefore better off using greyscale.
Pan is a failure.
I’m currently downloading Soul Eater 8 and Macross Frontier 7-8, all of which i really want and need to watch. Heheheh…Stein is such a bad-ass…
Been playing WoW again instead of drawing and working -_-;
I did get a decent sketch done, which I will be going through and learning to paint on. I’ve been devouring whatever tutorials I can get, but I still suck at painting. It’s probably due to my lack of understanding of color theory, as well as familiarity with the brush presets in photoshop.
Started out as just a face practice, but turned into some elf in armor…
No reference for the lineart.
As I knew it would happen, I’ve spent my first week of summer vacation binging on video games and anime. Yiyiyi…During the school year, all I could really think about was summer and all the stuff I would get done. Now that it’s finally come, I find that all I can think about is slacking off.
To thine own self, be true…
It’s been over a month since this came out, and the price still hasn’t dropped, so I went ahead, broke down, and bought it yesterday. Now I’m kicking myself for not buying it sooner…Ironically, the price will probably drop five bucks or so by next week. Anyways, first thoughts:
Pure. Joy. Since I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the AI and gameplay fickleness of War of the Lions, it’s a nice change to have something with action that I have greater control over. Don’t get me wrong, tactics is a great game and I intend to finish it, but for now, I am enraptured with the beauty that is Crisis Core.
More than anything though, I really want to get caught up with the whole Final Fantasy universe. Since the extent of my console gaming career stopped with my N64, I haven’t played through any of the older FF titles besides I and II. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a decent dose through my PSP. Just need to set up my damned wireless so that I can download PS1 titles…er…maybe I should just save up and buy a PS3?
Laptop or PS3. Laptop or PS3. GAHHHHHH
On to the anime:
This just started airing a few weeks ago, and is based on the manga by Atsushi Okubo. Neither the anime nor the manga have been release in NA, so I’m stuck with the subs of the anime alone, and can’t say anything about the manga. Still, this series is looking to be amazing…
It centers around a group of students attending the Shibusen, a technical armsmaster school run by a highly stylized version of the Grim Reaper (a.k.a. Shinigami-sama). These “meisters,” along with their human shinigami weapons, are trying to vanquish demons and witches. The ultimate goal of the meisters is to have their weapons eat 99 demon souls and the soul of one witch in order to become an ultimate death-god weapon.
Sound silly? Well, it is. But the production value, art style, and animation are all ooohhh so good. In fact, the animation is probably the best I’ve seen from any animated feature. The art style is way outside the normal boundaries, and is amazing as well. Even the soundtrack is stylish and compliments the action in a very dramatic way.
As of right now, five episodes have aired, four of which have been encoded and subbed. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series 
Macross Frontier is set in a universe in which humanity has left for the stars. Instead of home planets, people live on gargantuan cities in space, clustered together with military and other ships to form huge fleets. Most of the action in Macross Frontier happens (or has happened so far) in the fleet named, well, Macross Frontier. Anyways, the show focuses around Alto, a 17 year old high school student, and his struggle to become an ace pilot, and Ranka, a cheerful 15 year old girl who survived a horrifying attack that killed her entire family.
The Macross Frontier fleet is near the center of the galaxy, and has encountered a mysterious and powerful enemy know as the Vajra. Humans pilot what are know as Variable Fighters, which are more or less a mix between the American F-14 tomcat and F-18 hornet, except that now they fly in space and transform into robots.
…yeahhhh….
I’m not very familiar with the entire Macross series, more or less because I could give two shits about giant robots and transformers. It’s just one of those things im not into. Still, this show has fairly good CG and animation, and the production value of the music is quite stunning. The story isn’t too bad either, I’m actually enjoying it, so I’ll look forward to the rest of the series. Like soul eater, Macross Frontier is on episode 5, which I haven’t gotten quite yet.
Some of the other manga/anime series i’ve gone through recently:
Claymore – 26 episode anime and 11 volumes of manga. I like it, although the anime deviates way to much from the manga, and not for the better.
Wolf and Spice – Anime, manga, short novel. WON’T SOMEONE TRANSLATE THE NOVEL FOR ME???? *sob*
Death Note – Just finished the first season of the anime…about damned time -_-;
Blood+ – I really need to finish this…I’m on epsiode 7 of like fifty..
Stuff I have an want to check out soon:
No idea what it’s about yet…
Till later, apologies for the long ass post
Hmmm…I really need to mess with the CSS for column spacing…
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”
~William Shakespeare, A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream
I did a charcoal gesture of cupid once with my eyes closed. It ended up pretty well if I recall correctly.
I’ve been reading a little bit of Shakespeare lately, a trend that will hopefully continue during the summer…I’ve never actually read Midsummer Night’s Dream until now.
Also, whoever coined the phrase “love makes people blind” must have been one gloomy motherfucker. To love someone is to see every aspect of them, good and bad, light and dark, and to be willing to accept them whole, without question, without change, even if it means gaining nothing and losing the person in the end, even if they don’t care. Love sees more, not less.
Anyhoo, I finished a few anime series recently that I wanted to touch up a little bit on…
All in all, these were pretty interesting movies. The visual style was beautiful, and of course, Shirow Masamune is a god, so all of the machinery, weapons, landmates etc. were to die for. As far as a 3d film goes, I honestly felt that alot of the character movements, especially in the first movie, were stagnant and stiff. Still, this really only applied to the scenes in which the characters were idle, as the action sequences rocked for the most part.
There were also alot of plot holes, especially involving Deunan’s past. I never actually figured out why the hell she was spending time as some resistance fighter, who she was resisting, and how Briarios got into Olympus in the first place. The sexual frustration between the two was pretty hilarious.
Great mix of humor and very serious themes, as farfetched as some of them seem. It was a little bit hard and annoying to keep up with elements of Li’s past as they surfaced episode by episode, then died off…but the series did do a good job of pulling everything together at the end. I liked the juxtaposition between Li, as a human with contractor powers, and the other contractors, who supposedly didn’t have souls. Although Li had a soul and a conscience, he seemed mold around the contractor mentality anyways. This created a lot of subplots small peaks of character development, although in the end this didn’t really go anywhere. It’s dark, brooding, but hopeful and refreshing at the same time. I like it.
I just finished this tonight in celebration of the end of all of my school projects. This series sort of blew me away. The first dozen or so episodes sort of sucked, with the characters (especially Roy) working out problems from their pasts, although there was a good dose of humor. There were also a ton of plotholes, mostly involving the RUC, cities, and Proceeds, which I didn’t think were well explained until much later than they should have been explained. Finally, the series got really really dark and bi-polar during the middle, with Solty learning about life, death, emotions, and Roy dealing with finding the true identity of his daughter, then losing her twice, in a way…
But, the way that all of the main characters developed was charming and powerful, albeit a little bit scrunched together towards the end…it was good enough that it made up for all of the other flaws. The ending was just beautiful.
I do hate the fact that I know most of the nuances of dialog is lost in translation, as I end up just reading the subs. I really need to learn Japanese…
I finally got my hands on a dubbed version of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, so I’ll probably be watching that tonight after doing some sprites. After that, I really think I’ll be moving onto something a little more…cheerful…maybe Lucky Star? 
Grrr…As much as I love sleeping for 14 hours straight (I usually binge on schoolwork for days straight, and then crash on the weekends) it completely and utterly fucks up my sleep schedule. So I’ve been working since around 2 this morning, and I know I’m not going to be able to sleep at all come later. Oy…
Got this caricature done though…heheheh…about a half hours work. Kinda fun and relaxing, it’s a nice break from doing walk cycles. This is just a doodle thats going to be scaled down and turned into a sprite for our Geek Squad project. Don’t ask how a general fits into a Geek Squad cell phone game…
Oh my god, it’s almost over!! Two more weeks and we will be free…this entire semester has been circle after descending circle of Hell, although I’ve learned a lot, and I think that my art at least has improved a bit. I also know how to use Photoshop now ^_^
Summer is going to be amazing, as I will finally have time to sit down and do the things I didn’t have time to do during the semester. There’s still a lot I don’t know about various graphics and modeling programs that I need to learn, and I still have twenty or so pages of my sketchbook to fill before I can get myself a new one. I’ve realized now that the field I’m going into is extremely competitive. I like to think of myself as a good artist, but there are thousands of people much better than I am…so I need to practice -_-;
And reading! I can’t remember the last time I read a book for fun. My eyes are about to melt from staring at a computer screen fifteen hours a day…I have such a huge backlog of books I want to finish. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series’ first book “A Game of Thrones,” especially, has been sitting on my desk for the past three months, completely untouched. It’s terrible to let such a great series go unread! Also, as depressing as they are, I really need to finish Sartre’s collected essays. His essays on Nothingness make me want to cry though…Finally, I’m almost done with the Ender’s Game “Shadows” series (Im on Shadow of the Giant), so I really want to finish that as well.
Also, I’ve got a full time job with my 245 Professor, working for his cell phone game company Morvid. I’ll be basically doing what I’m doing now on my current projects with Morvid, so I’ll get to do sprite art as well as get some experience in the game industry. Yeah yeah, I know, it’s a fucking cell phone game, but it’s a game nonetheless. It’s also between 30k and 60k a pop for a successful project, so it’s good motivation to do good work…maybe he’ll be kind enough to do some profit share..? It’s going to be a fun summer ^_^
On an somewhat unrelated note, we had an Earthquake here yesterday morning around 5:30…I believe the papers said it was around a 5.4 magnitude quake. What’s more amazing than that is that I was actually awake for it, scrunched up in our computer lab working on a CGT project, when the low 30 second rumble swept through our area. Everyone in the room was slap happy from pulling the same all-nighter I had just pulled, so our first reaction was to glare at the person sitting across from ourselves and tell them to stop shaking the &*#$ table.
And that was my first earthquake.
Cold. It was the biting cold that wrested her from unconsciousness. Slowly, her eyes began to focus on the corridor that she was sprawled out in. She could see shapes in the dark, machinery jutting out from the walls and the panels of the floor, and brief sparks of light from the broken cables hanging from the ceiling.
Where am I? How did I get here? What’s going on? She drew in breath and felt the soreness in her lungs. Her head felt like it had gone through a trash compactor.
Something told her that she needed to move. She didn’t quite understand why, but deep down inside her, alarms were ringing. You’re not safe here! Get up! MOVE!
Kristi tensed her body, drew in her outstretched arms, and pushed against the floor, but the fractures in her ribcage and leg rebuked her instantly. She slumped back onto her stomach, writhing in pain.
She lay there for a moment on top of a beveled floor panel, sputtering and trying to comprehend the severity of her wounds. Aside from the burning pain in her chest and her left leg, the rest of her body was numb. She felt dizzy and disoriented. At first, the thought crossed her mind that she had hit her head on one of the metal fixtures during her fall, but seconds later, she realized that this wasn’t the case.
The small air duct that she had landed next to had been fully open since she had been awake, the result of a redundant life support fail-safe kicking into gear. Now, suddenly, with a sinister hiss, she felt the air flow next to her come to a complete stop as the oxygen tank ran dry. The air was still for only a moment before she heard another much weaker hissing noise.
She tilted her head slowly and painfully until she could see behind her. The hiss was coming from a large bulkhead and its adjoining hatch not four or five meters behind her. Her vision still blurry, she couldn’t quite make out the source of the noise, but seconds later, she felt a draft pulling over her. It’s pulling towards the door. That means…
Suddenly, Kristi realized in horror why she had lost consciousness. She strained her vision until it focused on the large, yellow lettering printed on the door. It read: “Airlock.”
