So it’s the end of the week and TGIF! I’ve picked Friday as a day to relax, or at least half the day because I have a evening class tonight. Right now, I have the tv turned on with America’s Best Dance Crew playing in the background. Go Kaba Modern! I know, I am a sucker for reality TV. America’s Next Top Model, Girlicious, Project Runway, you name it, I watch it. The only show I’m watching right now that isn’t a reality show is LOST. I am completely obsessed with it.
So I was browsing online and stumbled upon two unbelievable and talented artists. One is a traditional artist and the other is a digital artist.
The first artist is Julian Beever who creates pastel masterpieces on pavement. He make his drawings extremely realistic by using a special distortion where it looks 3 dimensional at a certain angle. Here is an example of his work:
My art background consists mainly of traditional fine art. I have a diploma in Fine Arts and have always enjoyed painting and drawing since an early age. Digital art has peeked my interest and I decided to give it a shot.
At school, we watch a lot of student demo reels from past graduates both good and bad. Some of them were impressive, but I was blown away one day when I was browsing YouTube and just typed out “animation demo reel” and found Eric Provan’s digital work. I love his style and the level of detail is amazing. His characters are so imaginative and unique.
The start of this week has been busy non-stop work and I know nearing the end of the month it will be even more chaotic. It is 12:45am and this is usually the time where I can unwind, surf the internet, and blog while Late Night with Conan O’brien is running in the background. This is one of my favourite parts of the day. Just laying in bed with my laptop and dozing off to the sounds and comedic antics of the one and only Conan O’brien.
Spring is around the corner. Today, I finished creating some Spring and Easter themed chalkboard art for the local coffee shop Uprising Breads on Commercial Drive. I started working for the company last October, designing chalkboards and signage for the holiday seasons. Here are some snapshots of the work I have done for them :
If anyone needs any chalkboard art for their business, feel free to contact me at myuan83@gmail.com!
Also, semi-related..or maybe not…I have a small side business I started a couple of years ago, importing and selling goods from overseas, so if anyone needs some cool voodoo doll keychains please visit www.voodoods.com or email me at mona@voodoods.com!
Besides chalkboards, I also make hand-painted posters for advertisements and Uprising Breads needs 3 finished by the end of this week for Women’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Easter. Also, two of my co-workers are putting on a comedy sketch mid April and they want me to help them design their flyer. I helped them take their publicity photos and just finished editing them in photoshop. They need within the next two weeks. It’s going to be a busy week for me. On top of all that, and more importantly, I have a gazillion projects due in the coming weeks. Hopefully I will stay sane by the end of the month.
So it is 1:30am now and even though I should be sound asleep and far off in lala land (btw my younger sister’s name is Lala and i’m not kidding you), I find my self wide awake and blogging. I have an early 9am 3D Animation class tomorrow and yet I feel an urge to blog right now. To think, I was dreading this blog assignment at first. Now, I guess I have become a newbie “blogger”.
So far it has been a pleasant and exciting start to the 2nd term of the Digital Animation Program here at BCIT. I am actually looking forward to and getting anxious about LEARNING. I don’t think I have ever been excited about school in my whole life. I guess that’s a good thing. We have just started to learn character modelling, which I have been anxiously awaiting in our 3D Design course. I admit that I did somewhat enjoy modelling 3D environments last term, but character design is right up my alley. I’ve always loved drawing cartoons ever since I was a wee girl. I would try reproduce drawings of cartoon characters I had seen on tv or in comic books, such as Archie, Jem and the Holograms, Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers, Tiny Toons, The Simpsons, Sailor Moon, various Disney characters and the list goes on and on. I remember when I was about 10 years old, my cousin would attempt to write storybooks and I would illustrate for them. Come to think of it, I was a lot more artsy and crafty back then, than I am now. I would constantly update my paper doll’s wardrobe by designing new outfits for it. I also remember being intrigued with animation at a young age. I would doodle stick figures on the corner pages of textbooks, then flipping the pages to watch my stick man run across. Creating art was fun as a child and I think part of that fun had been lost while growing up. Designing goofy little cartoon characters for my walk cycle in my 2D Animation class had brought me back to my roots and helped revive my inner creative child. I think I might be going off tangent and sounding a little too metaphorical so I’ll stop here. All in all, I am having a good ol’ time. I’ll try my best to update this site on a regular basis and post up my artwork now that I am a “blogger”
I leave you with a few selected portraits from a series paintings of my grandparents, when I was in the Fine Arts Program at Langara. These paintings are based off photographs I took of my grandparents, where I got them to pose and act all FIERCE for the camera.
What a long day. Woke up at 8am, drove all the way from Vancouver to Langley to register for the poker tournament before 11am, tourney started 12, got knocked out at around 5pm, headed to school for my 7 o’clock class (that I was hoping to miss because I wanted to get farther in the tourney) class ended at 10pm and now it is exactly 11pm and I’m sitting in bed blogging away. I really need to start blogging about school, art, animation, design, or anything other than poker. This will be my last poker related blog because I won’t be playing anymore…or as much. It’s going to be CRUNCH TIME at school. Please skip to the next paragraph if you do not want to hear my poker rant and for some non-poker blogging. So the 2008 Women’s BC Poker Classic started at noon for the Ladies LIMIT event and out of the 360 available seats, only 260 spots were filled. I’m guessing the newly added Shoot Out tournament happening tomorrow took all our players because last year all 300 seats were filled. Anyways, everyone started with $4000 in chips, which ain’t that much considering the blinds start at 25/50 and go up every 20min. every 20 min! that’s insane. By the time the blinds came around to 300/600, most players were probably going all in if they raised because that would be most of their chip stack. The women at my table were very passive players, checking there hands to the river even though they have top pair. If anyone put in a raise, chances are most of the table would fold. I had some nice hands early on, two people limp in front of me and I wake up with KK in mid position. Small blind folds and the limpers call. Flop comes the dreaded ACE. Something like A57 rainbow. Automatically, the 2nd limper bets out. It was a decent size pot and I know she has an ACE, but I wanna just see if I can catch a K on the turn. I call and it is heads up. The turn is rag, but it must of scared her somehow and she checks to me. Woohoo, I get a free card and gladly check. The river is…(as Scotty Nguyen would put it) YEAH BABY, KING BABY! The lady thinks for a bit and puts a bet out there. YEAH BABY..YEAH BABY. (btw if you wikipedia or youtube “Scotty Nguyen” you will find tons of videos of him saying “BABY” after every other word in his thick Vietnamese accent. It’s Awesome.) Automatic RAISE. She thinks and calls, showing A 10 and I take down the pot. Lucky, lucky river. This made me chip leader at my table for a bit. Unfortunately my table broke when I was on the button, and I moved to another table where I was UTG and the blinds of 500/1000 were coming my way. Now this table plus the blinds ate me alive. I was no longer the aggressor at my table. The pots were being raised left and right and blinds were getting stolen. I donked away a bunch of chips by protecting my blind. Before the lunch break I ended up with $2900 in chips with the blinds being $600/$1200…haha..*tear* Not too long after lunch and when my blind came to me, I was OUT. My friend got knocked out roughly the same time and we headed to the table of free dessert and fruit, grabbed a plastic cup and loaded it with grapes for our sad and long drive back haha.
YAY! for a non-poker related entry! Wow that first paragraph took me exactly 46min to write. I’m quite tired now but I refuse to make this blog all about poker. Ok starting now I banning the word POKER from my blog. so ANIMATION………..animation is cool.
I’m kidding, I can write more than that. So I’m starting to enjoy my program here at BCIT. It’s the beginning of 2nd term now and the bald spots from me pulling my hair out in 1st term are starting to grow in now. I was seriously stressed out back in October. Now I am comfortably adjusting and familiarizing myself with MAYA and XSI.
My latest project was a exterior environment and I modelled a carnival/amusement park. Check it out!
Now, I’m just gonna throw on this page a 2d animation of a bulldog I made. Check it out!
Hello Blogging World! This is my very first blog post ever and I am starting a blog only because it is an assignment for my Career Prep course for the Digital Animation Program. Who knows, maybe I’ll fall in love with blogging and end up blogging it up until the wee hours of the morning. Maybe, I’ll become addicted to blogging. It would be a cheaper alternative to my current poker addiction (half joking). Speaking of poker, I am super excited and anxious because this Friday I will be playing in the 3rd Annual BC Women’s Poker Classic. I played in this tournament last year and couldn’t wait to play in it again. It was my very first tournament ever and I ended up making it to 13th out of 300 participants. woohoo!
My hope is to bring home the grand prize so I can pay for my tuition. That’s enough poker talk because my life isn’t all about the game, right now I am devoted to school. I apologize to all my friends reading this whom I have promised to hang out with and haven’t contacted yet. I have to hibernate till this program is finished. My background mainly consists of training in traditional fine art, but I have entered the digital realm now and I am keen on expanding my skills. I am excited to use this blog to showcase some of my traditional and digital art. I am a pretty random person and I tend to veer off topic, so I can be blogging about almost anything and everything. Right now I am wondering where the word “blog” comes from…. and I just wikipedia’ed the term because I am constantly wikipedia’ing everything and it is states that the word blog is a portmanteau of web log. So, I just wikipedia’ed portmanteau and it means a word that fuses two or more words or word parts to give a combined or loaded new meaning. So there you go. You gotta love wikipedia.
So it’s the end of the week and TGIF! I’ve picked Friday as a day to relax, or at least half the day because I have a evening class tonight. Right now, I have the tv turned on with America’s Best Dance Crew playing in the background. Go Kaba Modern! I know, I am a sucker for reality TV. America’s Next Top Model, Girlicious, Project Runway, you name it, I watch it. The only show I’m watching right now that isn’t a reality show is LOST. I am completely obsessed with it.
