Merry Christmas to ALL. . .

. . .And to all a Good Night!

Well the last few weeks have been insane, as some people may have noticed. I've actually been really, REALLY productive. So much so I haven't been able to pause and post on here.

Right now I'm so excited because I've finally been able to go home for the first time in two years and it's so peaceful up here in Western Washington. My parents sold my childhood house back in November, but built a beautiful house up in the Olympic National Forrest and it's just WONDERFUL! It actually snowed two days ago here and Carlos and I are super excited! He no longer thinks I was crazy for buying him a ton of sweaters and a heavy winter jacket any longer and can't wait until tomorrow to go play "Hoth" in the snow with all my Star Wars toys.

Well, I could ramble on forever, but I don't wanna bore anyone. I'll have fancy drawings I did over vaction up on the blog when I return to Burbank. :)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!!

Another Old Friend

Here's another old friend of mine. I have the tendancy of making things too cute. :) I don't mind. I like cute evil things. Down below is a detail of the little bug. I love bugs too. (Oh and that's a Canopic jar. . . I can't remember but I think that's supposed to be the one that holds his liver.)

Old Friend, New Look

I have a very bad habit of getting caught up in little details that no one will even notice or be able to see.

Kitties on Ice

Okay not really. . . But Loki, for some moronic, kitty pea-brained reason, LOVES to crawl up in the refridgerator when ever I open it. He's silly.

Dear Family members, please do not be alarmed, that picture happened to be taken the day BEFORE I went to the grocery store. We do actually eat. :)

In the Immortal Words of Freddie Mercury

Another one bites the dust!!! Thank GOD! Now I can go back to working on Christmas presents. :)

Distracted

So, as usual I'm pretty busy, BUT I get bored super easy. . . Like today. I've got these "plushies" I'm supposed to be working on but my mind is all over the place again. I may have to take my mom's advice and step out side for some glorious smog filled air.



So I'm kinda in the middle of this one. After my last MySpace fiasco, where the drawing I did for the musician failed to please her and I just got a very polite "thank you, but my legs are too fat" response, my boyfriend has nagged me into doing one more drawing for a complete and total stranger. My boyfriend and I have been going back and forth over the hand for a few days now and we've come to a compromise, where once I take the few minutes it takes to add fingernails, all I'll have left to do is throw in a couple of tombstones and some grass and this baby will be done.

Not one of my personal favorites, but that just because I wanted to draw her as a cute little witch on a broom and my boyfriend felt it was his duty to act as a self absorbed art director that doesn't know his asshole from a hole in the ground. . . not that I've had one like that. . . but the previous owners of my current job were pretty close.

You KNOW You're a Nerd When. . .

You get up early on a workday to get ready for work JUST to go to Target and buy "Cars" on opening day. And it's even WORSE when you gotta pack up your portable DVD player just so you can "listen" to it while you're working cause you've been waiting MONTHS to watch it again. Yeah, I know it's just like "Doc Hollywood" but I liked that movie too. Only it's not as COOL to look at.



Anyway, cause I felt I needed to post some artwork, a few weeks back I got to do game art for the Neopets Flash game requested for the release of the movie. I had to draw top views of Lightning, Mater, Sally, and Chick Hicks. Granted they aren't the best cause they're pretty small in the game and I had to use the top of my toys for reference since the client only provided side views.

Anyway, it's the climax of the movie and I still got work to do. Enjoy!

Masquerade

Well, after months of racking my brain trying to figure out how to get my other two films up on the web I've finally been able to piece my Sophmore CalArts film back together and upload it to YouTube.



I really must thank my friend and coworker Nicolette Davenport for being kind enough to reburn the disc's from my freshman and sophmore films on her mac. Retardedly I had chosen this option called "session" burning and my pc would only read one of the multiple sessions on each disc. So much of the information I needed to reoutput my films was trapped on the original discs. I really could not have done it with out her and I'm very, very greatful. :)

Anyway. This film was a super personal one. Since I didn't grow up in the LA area my dreams and ambitions to become and animator, and the quirky personality traits I had due to that dream, we're kind of looked down upon when I was growing up. Shortly before my graduation from high school I'd started following the path of the "dark side" and kind of became a sudo-goth, which if we look at todays terminology just basically means I was Emo before there was a word for Emo.

Masquerade was supposed to be about all the pain I felt growing up as a teenager an how my first summer at CSSSA (California State Summer School of the Arts) made me feel like I was going to join other people like me. I was lucky enough to go there for two years and it was so refreshing to know that there were other people like me out in the world. It gave me something to look forward too, even though it was only for a brief time. When I got to CalArts for college, having not been around other animators (well, except for Potatofarmgirl) for nearly 5 years I was overjoyed to be back around others of "my kind" and decided to make a film about it.

Sadly no one cares about personal films in college, especially Character Animation. The more personal the film, and the more "realistic", the less people notice it and push it off to the side as an "art film".

Now, don't get me wrong, I admit that there's TONS of things wrong with this film.
For starters my dumb ass didn't bother to take a story class that year. Imageine that, only a sophmore and I thought that I didn't need anymore story instruction. I was a moron. Secondly, anyone that tried to tell me to change my film, or to make it funny, I'd shoot down and tell them that they just didn't understand what I was trying for. Basically that year I was an arrogant prick and very pig headded so I missed a TON of really great learning opportunites all due to pride.

Quite honestly, this film is truly one huge flop. But now I don't mind looking back at it, because it teaches me a lesson everytime I do. And that lesson is this. I will NEVER know everything and the instant I think I do, or start acting like I do, I'm only going to lead myself to self distruction.

Día de los Muertos

To my pleasent surprise I looked at the calendar today and noticed that it was Day of the Dead!! SOOOOOOOOO in honor of Día de los Muertos!! Have a spiffy drawing!

In my quest for inspiration, I found this nifty pic as well. :) I love all the Day of the Dead skullheads!!

Comments Are Back

At the request of Eliza, and against my better judgement, I've decided to turn the comments back on. We'll see how that goes. I'll probably turn them off again soon.

I wish I could claim credit in ownership of the little cranky deamon above, but sadly, my little dark princess just looks like this:

It's My Day to PAR-TAY!!

So it's the one day of the year that I get more excited about than any other, yet for some reason this year it totally snuck up on me. Now I know how "normal" people feel about Christmas. Anyway, I wasn't prepared this year at all so I kinda used about an hour or so of work time on this thouroghly unproductive day of Ghostliness to bang out this horrendous little greeting. If you recieved it on MySpace then you is very special like. If not enjoy it here in all of it's color coordinated with my blog glory. :)

Total Dork

Okay, so I admit it. Sometimes I'm proud of my work, from work, and this is one of um. I actually got to animate a week or so ago and was all excited because they let me animate some bats. It's sooo cool too because not only did I animate the little grey guy, a few months ago they let me design him too!! So for once this is ALL ME!!

Work A.D.D.

Again.

Mary -- [noun]: A poltergeist sent back in time to change the course of history forever

My friend Nicole sent me a link to that quiz the other day and when I typed in my name that's what came up. I thought it was toooooo funny, but I didn't wanna put it up on myspace cause my page all cluttered with crap to begin with, so I thought I'd post it here.

I'm so getting tired of work A.D.D. I think I need to make a better effort at completeing my portfolio cause the boredom associated with this job is getting to be too much. That and on average I usually only stay employed somewhere for 2 years before I get antsy and have to see what else is goin' on in the world, and I'm almost at a year and a half.

Just a little random retarded drawing for today. I was talkin' to my homie Lisence and tellin' her how it's been bad lately cause there's halloween candy out everywhere and all I wanna do is eat it. I made some sort of comment about how I've eaten so much I feel like I can feel the little sugary monsters eating my teeth. Well of course, since I DO have work A.D.D. I had to go off and draw a little bugger to send her way. Obviously that's not to scale. :)

What Goes On at Home

So recently when people call my house and they're on the phone with me for any extended ammount of time, they usually hear the sounds of cats fighting. To which they constantly ask, "What the HELL is going on over there?" Well, here's your answer. . .

Girly Things

So I've been a little busy lately. I don't really know why or where my time is necessarily going, but I'm busy.

Also, recently, I've been finding myself smack dab in the middle of a bunch of girly stuff, not necessarily girly stuff as in shoe shopping or putting on make-up, but girly in the sense of things that have brought the fact that I'm a woman to the surface. How so you may ask? Well. . .

Last Wednesday I went to this really interesting forum hosted by the animation guild. Basically they had asked actress Geena Davis to come speak to their union members about her foundation See Jane. In short it's an organization that is working for the cause of sexual equality in media or more specifically in children's broadcasting. Her organization "commissioned ground-breaking analysis research by USC's Annenberg School for Communication analyzing the top 100 G-rated movies as well as TV created for kids ages 0-11." Basically, to save time let me tell ya this. The average of female to male characters in children's entertainment programming is 5 males to every 1 female. All they are trying to do is get the ratio to be about 50-50 so that children of all sexes can have a role modle type character to look up to.





What I found more interesting than the "cause" of the forum (which I kinda agree with, but mostly I agree with there being a good story and the sex of the character being what ever fits the character best) was the small bit of research the union did on the male to female employment ratio currently in place at the studios. Mind you these numbers are pertaining to the number of females and males CURRENTLY union members and not taking into account all the people (like me) not lucky enough to be in a union shop. (Oh, and if there's any spelling errors, which I'm sure there are, it's not my fault. I copied the ditto they gave us VERBATUM!)

Gender Breakdown of Employed Active Membership as of October 10, 2006

Producers................................ 8.0% (2 of 25)
Directors................................14.9% (20 out of 134)
Writers..................................10.8% (10 out of 93)
Art Directors............................11.1% (2 out of 18)
Visual Development.......................13.1% (8 out of 61)
Story Art................................13.8% (51 out of 370)
Layout...................................17.8% (41 out of 230)
Model Designers (characters & props).....21.4% (36 out of 168)
Background...............................25.6% (34 out of 133)
2D Animators.............................21.3% (50 out of 235)
3D Animators and Modellers...............13.0% (47 out of 362)
compositors..............................29.2% (21 out of 72)
Tech Directors...........................13.8% (42 out of 304)
Checkers, etc............................34.0% (35 out of 103)

=========================================
Industry Wide.............................17.3% (399 out of 2308)

SEE DAD!!! I'm not lying when I said that it feels like animation is a "boy's club" sometimes!! There's barely any girls in it!

On a slightly bitter note about the meeting, towards the end of the meeting the working professional women that had decided to attend the meeting were wondering where all the women were and why there weren't more now a days and that kind of stuff, and I wanted to scream "they can't get their foot in the fuckin' door with all the boys hookin' their boyfriends up!!!" But, I just sat there and told myself I needed to just work harder on my portfolio cause there's gotta be something missing from it still since I can't get a test. . .

Anyway, on to other girly stuff. This weekend I FINALLY stumbled upon some kick ass cookbooks from the 1950's. I had to post some of those for all to see. Back in the day they used to put quick little illustrations in there. Really REALLY simple ones that were only two tones. They are just too charming. In fact, they are so charming I'm going to totally let it slide that they were in a Betty Crocker cook book and that Betty Crocker is part of General Mills evil empire.

Also, were you aware that Bisquik has been around since the 1950's? I seriously learn something new everyday.

Now, if you click on all the images EXCEPT the little piggy, you can see larger versions of the kick ass cookbook illustrations. If I were you, I'd definately click on the little lamb/sheep. I thought it was kinda funny. :)

REJECTED!!!

This adorable little bundle of CUTENESS, has been REJECTED by the evil overlords of Neopia.

Naw, just kiddin', he has been rejected but his little batty brother will be making his debut in Neopia around Halloween.

Keep and eye out for him, this guy's little bro that is. Hopefully they'll let me name him Flipflap.

So Freakin' Excited!!!

This is me. . .



This is me after buying my plane tickets home for Christmas on my Boyfriend's credit card!!!



I can't WAIT until I go home. . . even if home isn't in West Seattle anymore, in a beat up little house!

Lisence, you. . . me. . . Carlos. . . and Cody. . . EMP on the 26th!!! Be there or be square! WOO HOO!!!

Nic, please don't let your kids eat me. . . I fear children.

Seattle, here I come!!!

You all envy my mad drawing skills. Save time and admit it to yourselves.

I Miss Pencils

I think, when I was a sophmore in college, my animation teacher said one day that if we were to wind up working on a computer all day we needed to keep drawing with a pencil to stay fresh. I'm not 100% positive that he said this, just because my memory gets progressively worse every year, but I'd like to think he said something like this.

Just between you and me, I think it's more like, if I don't draw outside of the computer I"m going to go CRAZY!

Recently I've been, once again, finding it harder to stay upbeat about things. I've had some upsetting times at home recently and disagreements with my boyfriend. Unfortunately the recent emotional stress has been starting to rub off on my artwork. I've become very listless as of late and I'm not quite sure what to do about it. Along with my personal work being effected, so is my professional work, and I'm starting to think that it may not just be an effect of depression. I'm starting to think it might be time to start thinking of moving on.



Anyway, I only had about 6 hours this weekend where I didn't feel completely bummed out, and most of them were right before I went to bed Sunday night. So I decided to call in sick today. I don't know about you, but I seriously feel that depression is just as bad as the flu anyday, and if the only way to prevent it is to go do something I've been dying to do now for over a month and just relax for a day, then fuck it! I'm sick!



So. . . I went to Disneyland. . . again. . . for the millionth time this year. ONLY this time I went alone and armed with a sketchbook and some watercolors. :) Thank GOD I have my annual pass, or that would have been SUCH an expensive day.



I've been wanting to draw people for a while now, but I get intimidated easily. I don't like people watching me draw, or asking to see them, because I sometimes feel like my sketches from life leave a lot to be desired. Well, when I'm drawing them I do, then when I get home and look at them again I can see improvement, or some nice things happening and stuff. Hence the reason why I'm postin' them!!

Enjoy the "Disney Magic". . . and take it from me. Disneyland is seriously the most awesome place to go draw people. I mean, everyone's on vacation, most of them are happy, and a ton of them aren't from LA, so they all have different body shapes and clothing and attitudes. Of course, you can probably tell from my sketches which ones do come from LA. Just look for the anorexic girls with the large breasts. :)

I Do Custom Work Now?

So a couple of weeks ago I went to San Diego with Carlos to help "customize" his nephew's guitar. Only problem was that his nephew's guitar used to be MY guitar and I only sold it to him cause it would still be "in the family" and I could see it from time to time. I retardedly named it Gavin, and it was a girl, cause I think that would be a prettier girl name than a boy name (yes, I bought it when Mr. Gwen Stefani's husband's band was big). As you can see, She's a beauty and as I found out was a slightly rare guitar color, even for the Ephiphone (cheap Gibson knockoff) line.

Needless to say, when I was informed that Carlos and his nephew wanted to DESTROY Gavin and make her a "custom" I wasn't very happy, but since I no longer had control of Gavin's destiny, this is what happened to Her.


As you can see, they tried to "make it up to me" by letting (forcing, is more like it) me paint a little monster on it. Christian (his nephew) didn't really know what he wanted so he started listing all these animals and said he wanted a combo of them. so I got out my sketchbook and tried coming up with a combo he might like. We agreed on this one. It's a BirdFishRhinoElephantRabbit Monster.


You can distinguish the BirdFishRhinoElephantRabbit Monster from other monsters by it's bird-like head, fishy fins and scaling, elephant like feet, rabbit ears, and Rhino horns. It's quite deadly. And why is it green you may ask. . . cause I like how that green looks on orange. :)


Obviously this is the proud owner of what used to be Gavin. Now his name is Peter. . . I guess it was more like a sex change operation than a guitar customization. :-/

Bye GAVIN!! I'll miss you're beautiful finish! But at least I got revenge by giving the BirdFishRhinoElephantRabbit Monster some Glittery, Iridecent fins. WAHAHAHAHAH!!!

So I wouldn't cry and get cranky during the sanding process of my dear sweet Gavin, I was kicked out of the house. . . >:P


For more pics of my Old Towne San Diego adventure to one of only TWO houses that are Certified as Haunted in the State of California by the Commerce Commision (that cracked me up when I read that on their site), click here. Also, if you're interested in seeing the Whaley House yourself, go check out their website for more info.

Starlit

So I've officially completed my first real fan art piece EVER! I feel like such a nerd.



Her name is Starlit. I think that's her stage name cause she signs all her MySpace bullitins "Simara Rose". Anyway, I love her look and I liked her sound as well and I got inspired to make this little ditty.

It's all flash, as usual and about 10 hours worth of work, but I'm pretty happy with it.

MySpace unfortunately is turning out to be a better networking tool than I had anticipated it being. But since I still hate networking, it gets to stay over in the "things that annoy me" category of the links. :D That and Carlos is still on it every freakin' hour of every freakin' day. Even when we're out of town.

So yeah. Fan art. Carlos want's me to do a couple of drawings of a couple other goth modles on MySpace and after the response I just got from Starlit (she really liked it and was very flattered) I think I might definately give it a go. I wouldn't have before, because I felt like I was doing a bunch of artwork for free, but the more I think about it. I still have all the art files AND it's pimping myself out with out me actually having to go meet anyone in person. So it's a win/win situation. :D

1 Down, Time to Schedule a Meeting

So, as I said a couple of weeks ago when I was on vacation, I finally started working on some of the artwork for my pitch. I'd also shown the rough/beginning painting. Well I'm happy to say, it's finished. Next time I do something I'll approach it with a better color scheme, but all in all, it turned out pretty good.



I would have had it finished over a week ago, but on the day I posted that pic of Loki and I, I'd had a very BAD day at work, which continued when I went home and tried to finish the painting. I'd thought the whole thing was lost until last night when I realized that since the mistakes were in white on pastel parts, I could gently rub out my mistakes and no one would know the wiser. Thankfully it worked. :D

My Day

Need I say more?

Back to Work :(

Well, the vacation's over. Until December anyway. :D Then I'll take almost 2 weeks off!!

So as usual, once I type things sayin' I'm gonnna do stuff and set a plan and everything it always falls apart.

Thursday things got messy cause, like I said, my homie Sergio couldn't make it out and they Dealership took WAY longer getting back to me about the car then they said they would. Which kinda destroyed my plans of going to Meltdown to meet with the Gallery guy (good thing I hadn't made an appointment) and the heat sucked my will to paint. Although the Banshee is almost done and it's lookin' pretty sweet. I just gotta finish her right hand and paint on some tears and spiderwebs then I've gotta paint Bobby.

Friday I spent the whole day with my Uncle. It was really hot out in the Riverside area and I barely helped him at all because I was super tired. But I got pretty good at using a calking gun. :D We went to the dump, which was super gross. As I've gotten older, trash grosses me out more. The smell, the germ factor, all of it. Gross. But I got a nifty "Paris Hilton shirt", as my uncle calls it, to remember the experience, so it's all good.

Saturday, Carlos finally found out where he can park on the weekends, so I got to sleep in. I had Breakfast with Bri and then came home and didn't do things I was supposed to. Then Carlos and I went to the Martha Baxton Auction to show our support for the Martha and then we went to Grand Panda for dinner. (Grand Panda is only the BEST Chinese Food restaraunt I've ever gone to and it's convienently located in Valencia, so I can only go if I'm up at CalFarts for some reason.) Then we went to my Homie Vin's b-day party. It was fun. We got home at 1am and I stayed up until 4am watching NCIS.

Sunday, after 6 hours of sleep, we got our cranky butts into the car and went to Disneyland. Although the park was pretty dead, by comparison to other times of the year, it was still busy enough and hot enough to make us even MORE cranky, so we went home and had some dinner and bought some TP and spent the rest of the evening at home. With the cats. One of which is Teething, and has a double row of FANGS right now and thinks the only way to feel better is to tear the skin off my bones. He gets sprayed a lot with the water bottle right now. I think the baby fangs should be out in another day or two.

And that's the end of my vacation.

This morning I've got more "paint by numbers" work to do for Millsberry. I'm drawin' baby swans. :D

VACATION, all I ever wanted. . .

. . . Vacation DON'T have to get away!

I love the Go Go's, they coo.

Anyway. I'm a little over half way through my first real ADULT vacation and it's been freakin' AWESOME! I really haven't done too much so far, but what I have done has been pretty cool.

Friday was the last "Summer Friday" at work so I went out with Vinny and Josh to Chuy's, like they do ever week, and sipped a Coke and chatted for about 3 hours and had some fun.

Saturday I had to take Carlos to work as usual, but on a "normal" Saturday, when I come home and crawl back into bed, I usually only allow myself a couple of hours to sleep because I've got so much to do before I got back to work the next Monday. But this week I woke up after a couple of hours and almost started panicing because I had a ton of stuff to do, but then I realized that I was on vacation so I had a whole 9 days to chill and do my stuff. So I went back to sleep. :) I did do other stuff that day, but honestly all I can remember is sleeping most of the day, and it was TOTALLY RAD!

Sunday I hung out at home doin' random stuff. Carlos was out all day with his boss doin' whatever it is that they do when they hangout together, and then Sunday night we met one of Carlos's MySpace friends named Kristen. She actually turned out to be really awesome and we made plans to hang out with her again soon.

I think it was Sunday night, or quite possibly Saturday night, that I finally sat down and started workin' on one of the long put off pitch paintings. I decided to paint this one in watercolor and gouache like I normally do, but I took this as an opportunity to actually delve into making a more complex water color background. As you may have noticed from some of the other paintings I've posted, I normally just do a watercolor wash background in a single color and that's it. this one is actually a full on environment. It's pretty awesome.

Monday I spent almost the entire day painting. It was pretty sweet. Carlos had to work Labor day, but it's all good. I drove out to Pasadena to the Art Store and picked up a few supplies for the painting (including gold and silver gouache) and then ran back to work some more. As you'll see when I post it, I'm also making one of the characters part water color because she's a ghost/banshee and I wanted her hair and "tail" to be transparent. I also threw a very thin wash of the silver gouache on top of the transparent parts to make them sparkel a little and must say I'm pretty happy with the results.

Tuesday was a little crazy. Carlos has been with out a car for a little over a week and I've been driving him, as I probably said in the last post, so he took the day off work to go to Disneyland with me and we had decided to take his car in that day as well. Well long story short, which was rapidly turning into a money pit to begin with, required more than a thousand dollars worth of work, and since he hates the damn thing anyway, he just decided it was time to trade his car in on something a little more dependable. Not to mention fashionable (I play, seriously). Anyway, we did a bit of quick internet research, and since we discovered that our first choice of a Prius was essentially out of our price range for the rest of our god given lives, we discovered that a Scion xB was actually perfect (in not only price, but style and the Carlos "want" factor). So we printed out some internet used cars from the web an headed to our nearest dealership (Toyota of North Hollywood) where they had a beautiful, black, 2005 that fit our budget perfectly. After about 3 hours we walked home with the beauty and got the curse-ed deamon car out of our lives. We may not have made it to Disneyland, but we now have the confidence that Carlos will have a trustworthy car to get him back and forth to work.

Wednesday was my homie Vinny's birthday, and in celebration, I convinced him to ditch work and go to Disneyland with me. It was so awesome! The park was totally dead and we walked onto EVERY ride. I think our longest wait the entire day was maybe 20 minutes at Indiana Jones. It was pretty freakin' sweet. I think Vin had fun and when we got back, and Carlos got home, the three of us went and hung out at Target for a while and then we introduced him to Civeche (this really awesome citrus-y fish tostada thing). It was a pretty cool day.

Which brings us to today. I was supposed to give my homie Sergio painting lessons today, but he had to back out because he made plans to do something far better for humanity. Really. He did. He's voluntarily donating bone marrow.

So far today, I've taken Carlos's new car back in to have his alarms installed on the Scion (they gave me a rental car, well, a rental minivan, so I'm playin' soccer mom today) and my goal is that before I go to sleep tonight I'm gonna have that pitch painting done. I'm also planning on (once the shop gets the Scion back to me) heading up to Meltdown to see what the hold up is with show I'm trying to put together. I figured that e-mail and phones are nice, but nothing gets answers better than shovin' your immediate person up in their faces. :D I like answers.

I'm excited cause tomorrow I get to go out to Moreno Valley to see my Uncle, whom I haven't seen in quite a while again. Saturday I'm gonna be pretty busy at night and Sunday, sadly my last vacation day, I'll probably be goin' back down to Disneyland.

Seriously, that pass was the smartest thing I think I've ever purchased in my life. :D So far, anyway.