MatthewMeyer.net

Just a short entry for now… I have a lot of work to do. I’ll write a longer one later. But in the meantime, here are the finals for my animal icon project.

It’s been a while since I wrote everything up here, but I guess it’s cause I’ve been a little busy. As you know, my entire weekend is consumed by Gaming Club activities; Fridays are Game & Movie Nights, and Saturdays are D&D Nights, both of which continue until the wee hours of the morning. D&D went quite well… the party sacked and destroyed an enormous ghost shipped manned by a 200-strong hobgoblin crew and in the process captured the pirate Mordechai. That may have been one of the longest D&D battle’s I’ve ever run — approximately 3 and a half hours real time, and over 50 rounds, game time. I did lose count, but that’s a pretty close guess judging by the number of hobgoblins per round and how many they killed before fighting and lighting the ship’s powder magazine.

Anyway, to update you on what’s been going on in *real* life… I haven’t done any more work on my storyboards yet, as I have to begin re-editting my story before I start thumbnailing any more scenes. I haven’t had the free time to paint on my own, but I will be starting a master copy of an N.C. Wyeth painting today. In Digital Video we’re kind of doing monkey work to get the hang of the software. I’m making a text & music animation about hydrogen fuel cells (assigned subject). I’ve finally found a working way to transfer my Illustrator files from PC to Mac, so I can continue working on my animal icon series. And, for the same reason, I’m doing my Illustration assignment (the weasel) on Illustrator as well. The manweasel has become a girlweasel, as you can see below.

And these are the animals I am doing for my icon project:

That’s it for now…

It looks like Self Portrait of the Day is really impossible. I kind of thought it might be from the beginning. I had no free time on Wed. and yesterday I fell asleep all afternoon after my morning class. I would have time to do one today, but I have to go grocery shopping and do more chores that I didn’t finish yesterday. So SPotD will just be whenever I have the free time. That’s unfortunate because I really do need the work.

Well, like I said, I have chores to do right now so if I can’t do a painting I certainly can’t be wasting time online. I’ll post again when I get the chance…

So today thumbnails were due for our first illustration… a weasel. Basically it was supposed to be an illustration of a story that describes a weasel as a metaphor for life. Sounds great, huh? So anyway, I think and think and sketch and sketch, and I come up with some thumbnails. However I was pretty convinced I didn’t have enough thumbnails… so I just sketched down some quick stupid pictures, one of them which I call “Manweasel.” Now, manweasel was meant to be a joke… but instead of laughing at it and just passing over it, the class thought it was one of my strongest ideas.

Now, this may seem like an isolated fluke, but actually every time I do a stupid joke thumbnail it ends up being my best idea for the piece. That elephant on my website? That was a joke idea from sophomore year. The Paint-a-thon lizard? He’s the evolution of Paint-a-saurus Rex, my rejected caricature for that project (along with Paint-o-tron).

So I guess the lesson of this story is simple: always treat your work as a joke, and you will succeed.

Well after throwing up profusely at the sight of my previous self portrait, I began work on today’s painting. I have to say, it is a tremendous improvement, although still not anything to cheer about. I’ll be glad to have that hideous one off the top of this page (although I actually liked how the Operation guy turned out…) and replace it with this mediocre one. The pose is still entirely lifeless, and I didn’t capture the expression too well (and let’s not even begin on the neck!) but it’s so much better than yesterday’s. And considering it’s my 2nd portrait ever in acryllic paint, I’m satisfied that I’ll be better by the end of the semester.

I was going to say something here about the State of the Union Address, but I just can’t anymore. Bush angers me too much, and I’m drained from leaving the news on while I did that painting. So forgive me for not inserting a long and harsh political speech here and just know that I am very disgusted with him.

Wow, look… I actually did a painting. Hell must have frozen over! Actually, this is the first painting in my attempt to do a self portrait every day (which will probably end up being every other day, or every couple of days, due to time constraints). This is a pretty bad painting but I may as well post it anyway. Hopefully the shame of having such a lousy SP on display for everyone to see will drive me to do better next time… or something. Actually, I’m not 100% unhappy with it, but there are some *serious* problems in the face, not to mention the whole thing is pretty lifeless. But like I said when I proposed this Self-Portrait-A-Day project, I need to work on my painting skills. So hopefully there will be visible progress as I post more of these.

As you can see, my site looks a bit different now. I’ve got a Moveable Type account on Dave’s space until I can scratch the money together to afford my own webspace. This’ll do nicely for the time being though. I’ve moved the other comments from this semester on to Moveable Type too… this stuff is pretty cool.

Anyway, what have I been up to? Nothing at all… this weekend has seen little work accomplished, against my wishes. See the thing is I’ve been really poor since I came back, and didn’t have the money to afford food until Friday. So I had been running on empty and by the end of the week I had lost all my energy. This weekend was spent sleeping and eating and refueling myself, and now finally I have enough energy to resume working. Which is good, cause I have a lot of homework…