steady rollin'

We went down to Salinas to J's sister's new place, and holy crap is it huge. It's got a nifty layout, and infinitely more space than their old house. We hadn't seen Natalie since before she was walking so it took a while for her to stop giving J and I the suspicious eye, but by the end of the night it was lots of carry-me arms, and where Sophie is usually all about her Uncle J, somehow this time I ended up with her hanging on me more often than not. I suspect it was that I was wearing a pink shirt so that boosted my coolness rating. It's interesting to see the ways her personality has changed now that she's a big sister. Sometimes I wish we lived a bit closer in order to visit more often.

Anyway, we hung out, ate food, played with dolls, tried to devise a plan to steal their adorable pug, and at the end of the evening I got the bonus of belated b-day gifts. See subject. I have also increased my fuzzy scarf collection by one, so I should probably put out some of the ones I don't wear often out onto the curb.

The drive was nice, and J and I talked a lot about the ways in which we'd like to focus on our projects for school and general creative things. I'm back to having a solid idea of where to go with my current assignments so I'm feeling very rejuvenated about them. Which is good, as I need to be doubly-focused this weekend, since I didn't actually get any extra days off, and the lab is closed tomorrow which is typically my dedicated time to go in and work all day on my homework!

I have absolutely nothing to chatter about.

( Concept art for my character sculpt... )

Been wanting to play things, but ogame is about all I have time for. It's nice being able to queue up things and then just sit back and wait as my empire grows stronger.

I have a creature design and modeling class this semester. Our first assignment followed standard procedure and had us doing a bunch of thumbnails. I did about 50 thumbnail sketches in silhouette form last week and tried to stray from humanoid since that's something I tend to draw naturally. We narrowed down our silhouettes in class to two and so my homework was to take those and further develop them. I went the concept art route as it was the easiest way for me to come up with features. Creatures aren't something I find at all comfortable to work on, especially since I tend to like horror/grotesque art over fantasy/alien so I really had to push myself here. Ended up doing one humanoid figure since that was one of the thumbnails my teacher suggested, but I'm far more likely to do one of the others. Tomorrow in class, I'll pick finals and then need to draw up the underlying muscle structure and properly narrow down skin/surface type and all that fun stuff. I wish I had started actually painting before this afternoon, but once I know which creature I'll be modeling, I can go in and do something more detailed.




( Creature Design concept sketches )

I missed a work deadline earlier this week on top of completely not understanding what it is the client was asking for. Got that sorted out the next day, but am still slightly irritated at myself. And I just clued in on that I missed a fannish deadline this week too. Gah. (The lovely mods just gave me an extension though, yay!) My sense of time has been completely fucked lately. I think it's a combination of adjusting to my new schedule coupled with this stupid cold that has decided to live almost entirely in my sinuses to the point where wearing featherlight glasses is painful. It's been a week and a half and it's going away, thankfully, but I'm still catching myself with moments of complete bzuh.

Going in to my second week of classes, I'm wondering just how much free time I'll have with the amount of homework I'm looking at. I was hoping to sail through my online English class, but the instructor is actually good at structuring the discussions and putting up interesting materials (if on infuriating subjects), so that's taking up more time than any online class I'd taken previously. I am equal parts boo and yay about this. All three of my on-campus classes are project intensive, although I'm very, very happy to be nailing down what I need to model early on and not floundering around like I was last semester.

Driving down to my mom's today and visiting folks, which is cutting out almost a full day of homework, but is necessary on a few levels. I'm hoping I'll be able to get the online stuff out of the way while I'm down there though, and this weekend I'm not on opening shift anymore so when I get home from work I shouldn't be quite as exhausted as usual.

- My classes are awesome this semester. All of them except english. I took the same exact class two years ago, only when my credit transferred in, it did so for the prereq. Thanks, AAU, for fucking over my transfer credits in as many ways as possible.

- I have a cold. Hopefully this won't be a repeat of the billion day cough of the cold I had last year.

- Did I mention my classes are awesome? I get to sculpt a maquette! And need to buy a few artbooks I've been wanting for ages but hadn't gotten around to. Yay for fun required texts.


Fun thing of note:

- There is a Watchmen Kink Meme running on Dreamwidth. Even if I haven't played on one of these for ages, I encourage prompts as I am /so/ wanting to doodle.