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.

NO WAY!!

A photo of Me? Heavens no!

Loki's latest favorite thing is to show off his "pee-pee" when he lays down. He becomes more like his dad every day!

So I made some website revisions this weekend. I finally posted some new stuff from Neopets and Millsberry. I was surprised, it was about 10 new pages! This be one of them.

More Loki and a Haircut

So Friday was Carlos's first show with his band. He was so excited and nervous that he wanted to take pictures before the show. . . so here's my hair. I have makeup on and the image is flipped but you get the idea. Sorta.

I've been takin' tons of pics of Loki and Isis again lately, but these are some of the really cute ones. . .



Carlos wanted to send one of his MySpace friends a personal birthday greeting. . . Loki decided to eat the cardboard.


I actually sent this pic to Cuteoverload today. . . I just love it when the cats get into the guitar case.



Isis still hates you Loki, but now she'll allow you with in a foot of her, as long as there's SOMETHING between you guys.



EXTREME CLOSE UP!!!!



Carlos brought me a balloon last week. . . Loki liked the string so much we tied something to the end of it and let him have at it until the helium wore out and the balloon wouldn't float anymore.

Haircut

I'll add a pic to this later. . . promise.

So yesterday I got a haircut. I've needed one BADLY and since I've been having tons of headaches lately, I decided now was the time to do it. . .

I feel way better, honestly I do, but I got a wee bit bummed out this morning when I realized that I now have Eddie Vedder hair again.

See. . . in high school this guy I liked would always say that I looked like Eddie Vedder in the "Jeremy" music video. (Specifically the part in the video that the news media likes to CONSTANTLY show whenever there's a school shooting where Eddie is lookin' up above where the camera is located and his eyes are kinda rolling back into his head.) At the time I totally thought it was AWESOME to be told I looked like a celebrity, and since Eddie Vedder's a good lookin' guy, I guess I didn't think much of it.

This was Eddie's hair in the early 90's. Mine was pretty much the same in '92.

Now that I'm older I kinda feel strange being compared to a MAN. . . but yeah. Focus.

This is Eddie's hair right now. . . yup, you guessed it, that's my cut too. WHAT WAS I THINKING!!

I was listening to some Pearl Jam on AOL Radio today and saw that they had done a "sessions" session so I decided to click the button. And wouldn't you know it, the next screen was a group shot and Eddie had the SAME FREAKIN' hair as me! It was an immediate flash back to high school, which I guess wouldn't be so bad if my 10 year reunion wasn't next weekend. . . (boo HOO, I'm sooooooooooooo sad that I'm missing out, NOT!)

Oh well, it could be worse still. Vor some reason Carlos says I remind him of Ron Jeremy, the famous, nasty, gross lookin' porn star.

Why the HELL do people say I look like a MAN?!

Inspired

So lately I've been talkin' to this guy named Martin in the UK through Myspace. He stumbled onto my page I guess, and we've been talkin' since then. I kinda let Carlos think we're talkin' about other stuff as a form of payback for all his myspace schinanigans, but honestly, all we do is talk about drawing.

So the other day when we were talking I was telling him about my Aunt's painting and how I need to finish it, but sometimes I just loose motivation and let paintings sit around for a while. Like this one I started after Christmas for an idea I'm playin' with in my head (yeah, you heard that right, I'm admitting I'm working on a pitch) and I'm about 12 hours away from completetion, which is just one good weekend of work, and I can't bring myself to finish it. He was tellin' me I was way more motivated than he was because he couldn't even bring himself to finish a pencil drawing most of the time, let a lone a painting with more than an hour's worth of work involved.

When I read the part about drawing in pencil, I just, I dont' know, kinda missed it. So that night I drew this. I inked half of it that night as well, cause for some reason, I just can't leave pencil drawings alone anymore, and then the next night, I bit the bullet and got out my markers. In no way am I as talented as Potato Farm Girl, but she kinda taught me what I know just by introducing me to the damn things 10 years ago. I'm obviously rusty, but I was really REALLY impressed with how the pants worked out. I just kinda thought of how I used to see "the Potato" do her thing and for the first time it clicked right.

As for the paintings. . . I swear to the almighty creator of all thats good and evil. . . that I'm gonna work on it this weekend. Even if it kills me.