See, I am being productive. The girls will be in my next website layout, though they will be clothed and probably not in this forest-y setting. I'll admit that I'm still not entirely happy with them yet, so I'll probably mess around with them some more before I start dressing them.

In other news, I am looking for a summer job. So for the past day or two when I have not been obsessively working on the lovely ladies you see above the previous paragraph, I've been filling out applications and running around Richmond and asking people if they have any openings. It's a little tiresome, especially since I haven't had a job in two years and haven't looked for a job in about four years. I might not even find someone who'll hire me, since I'll be out of town for Otakon for four days and then I'll be taking that two-week trip to California in August. And to be honest, that's okay with me. I don't seriously need the money right now, but I feel like I need to at least make the effort to try to find a job because otherwise I would feel like I'm being lazy, even if I am spending all of my free time working on my website and planning my cosplay. Speaking of which, I need to get back to that. Later.

Labels: art, characters, croquis, job hunting

Since I had finals during the weekend of Mother's Day and couldn't make it to my mom's to celebrate, I waited a week, baked some brownies, and brought them down yesterday. We spent the afternoon being nerds by playing computer games while watching movies on the Starz channel, then we went out to the local Japanese steakhouse for sushi (or in Mom's case, cooked appetizers and a salad). I had a tuna roll and a fujiyama roll, which is basically salmon tempura, cream cheese, and cucumber inside a maki roll topped with spicy tuna and tempura flakes. It wasn't the best roll I'd ever tried, but it was something I'd never tried before and it wasn't bad. My mom actually tried one of them, too. I'm so proud of her for trying her first piece of sushi containing raw fish because she's tried California rolls, sweet potato rolls, and shrimp tempura rolls before but never anything containing raw fish before; however, she still doesn't really care much for sushi in general. I'll have to find a roll that she likes.

After dinner, we made some margaritas and continued playing on our computers while watching movies on TV. Eventually the movie Julie & Julia came on, and I had been interested in seeing it because it had to do with cooking, which is one of my newest hobbies as of last year. At some point there was a scene in the movie in which Julie was shown making and later eating a hollandaise sauce with artichokes, and the combination of this scene in the movie along with my memories of seeing artichokes in the refrigerator earlier in the day and of trying hollandaise at a restaurant in Richmond several months ago inspired me to try my hand at making a hollandaise sauce myself.

So my mom made artichokes for lunch today and I made a hollandaise sauce from a recipe on Allrecipes. My hollandaise was not perfect; it was a little runny and not as smooth and creamy as it should have been, and I think I cooked it too fast or too hot, or maybe I didn't separate the eggs well enough, but we still enjoyed it. I have since found the original Julia Child recipe and plan to try that one sometime in the future.

After lunch, we got on the subject of cooking in her family and she mentioned that her grandmother used to make meringue kisses, and I was inspired again, so I found another recipe for chocolate meringue cookies and decided to make those. They just came out of the oven a little while ago, and I think that once again maybe I didn't separate the eggs well enough and then maybe I cooked them a bit too long, but they're still really good. I'm planning to bring them to my boyfriend's place and hopefully surprise him with them tomorrow, as long as he doesn't read this before then and I don't accidentally tell him (because I'm so bad at keeping secrets). You better not be reading this before tomorrow.

And that concludes my adventures in cooking for today! Maybe I should invest in an egg separator sometime in the near future.

Labels: baking, cooking, dessert

Finished croquis for my computers final. I'm also currently toying around with the idea of using them for new layout images sometime in the near future, if I can ever motivate myself to actually get around to making a new layout. I'm sure I'll do something productive soon, anyway. I only just finished my project over the weekend and already I'm beginning to get bored and restless. Well, I do have a cosplay to work on for Otakon...

Labels: characters, class, croquis, fashion

I am currently taking a class titled "Computers for the Fashion Industry," and it is basically fashion drawing in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. We do things like come up with color stories, build inspiration boards, design prints, and draw flats (technical fashion drawings). It's pretty fun stuff, if you're already reasonably familiar with Adobe software. However, a lot of my classmates are struggling with it because they've never used the software before, plus some of them aren't really crazy about drawing in general. I can't really blame them because it takes a lot of practice and patience to learn the software, and although I've been working with it for several years, I still sometimes have trouble remembering how to do certain things.

I've been working on the final project in this class for a while now. The assignment is to design a collection for a designer of our choice for either spring or fall 2011. The collection has to consist of twelve to sixteen pieces, and it must include at least one jacket and one dress. Today I finished my technical flats and started dressing my digital croquis (fashion figures) for my illustration page. I still haven't gotten into the rendering part of it, but here's my first one so far:


She kind of looks like one of those silly little web dolls, but hopefully when I get around to rendering her, she'll look better. I am not quite certain how I will handle rendering her because I feel like I want to do more than throw her into Photoshop and use the dodge and burn tools like my teacher suggested. I understand how it's quick and easy and how it works for people who aren't really familiar with Photoshop, but I feel like I'd prefer to paint in Photoshop the way I normally do, with the brush tool.

Also, just because I feel like showing off, this is one of my technical flats.



I'll post more as I get them done. For now, I'm going to take a break to play Breath of Fire III. (Which, by the way, is one of my favorite games of all time.)

Labels: art, class, croquis, fashion, flats, hikari

So yeah. I had to migrate this to Blogspot because Blogger decided to get rid of FTP blogs for some reason. While I'd prefer to keep the blog.seaofwishes.com URL, my migration to Blogspot will be a good temporary solution. You know, in case I actually decide to make more than one or two posts here before I find a good alternative.

In other news, I've really been meaning to update this for so long. A lot of things have happened and a lot of things have changed since I last updated, and I want to write all about them, but many of those things will have to wait, and some of those things will probably never see this blog because they are special and personal memories. A blog really isn't really supposed to be like a personal journal (even though I've always used mine as such), anyway.

In other other news, I'm planning a major update and layout change for my blog and website sometime in the near future (as in when I have some free time) because I just can't stand seeing these old drawings of mine all over the internet and I need to show something else. I regrettably haven't done much in the way of real art over the past year because fashion design is much less like art than...well, art, but I've been doing some interesting stuff in my computers and fashion drawing classes. So hopefully I'll come up with something cool. Anyway, it's time for class now, so I'll update again later.

Labels: blog, life