So I've been very fortunate over the past few days to have an influx of commissions coming in. The downside of this however is that it leaves me with less time to illustrate for fun, so I have nothing new to share today. I did however come across this AMAZING stop motion video done by a fellow SCAD alum, Bang-yao Liu. I do not know him personally, but I'm always happy to support a fellow classmate. As much as I love 3-D animation, it's always encouraging to see more traditional forms of animation being explored. I'm awe of people who have the patience to put together a project like this. Please enjoy:




Pretty awesome huh!

In the spirit of awesome stop motion, I also had to post the following video, "Her Morning Elegance," by Oren Lavie. I know this video has already circled the blog circuit but I love it none-the-less. Every little detail of this video is a work of art!

Fireflies

Last week I got my monthly edition of National Geographic (it feeds my need for travel when I can't afford to actually go anywhere) in the mail and I just now got around to reading it. Towards the front of the magazine was a brief article about how the worlds populations of fireflies are apparently down something like 70%! It had occurred to me that I had seen far fewer of them in recent years but I hadn't seen anything in writing declaring that there is a problem.

Reading this really drove home for me how you really cant take the small things in life for granted. Having fireflies out to light up the night in the summertime is one of those lovely bits of nostalgia that you really don't know you love until they are gone. Perhaps it's just a small thing, but I'm a little saddened by the fact that my future kids may grow up in a world without fireflies.

In tribute:

Pugs

So my boyfriend and I are going to be moving into a house together in July. Along with the standard excitement of having our own place, having a whole house all to ourselves, etc, we also keep bringing up the possibility of eventually getting a puppy. It's something that probably won't happen for awhile since I don't know if I have the energy in me to go through house breaking a dog right now, but it is nice to know that when we decide to get one we will have a yard for it to run around in. We're both pretty quirky people, so we would want to get a dog with a lot personality. Currently, a pug or some sort of a pug mix is seeming like a good fit. Knowing us, our dog would end up looking (and acting) something like this:



Clearly I've got puppies on the brain. :)

Savannah

I recently spent a weekend in Savannah visiting my old roommate. It's always fun to go back to a place that you used to know intimately well and revisit it with a fresh new perspective. One of the things I always loved about Savannah was how close together everything is. It's easy to see all of the main sites the city has to offer in one weekend and yet there is always something new to discover when you come back for a round two. Living there for four years I loved that I had my bank, my job(s), my school, and all of my friends all within a mile of each other. Everything was within a short biking distance, a feature that is very hard to duplicate in a city the size of Atlanta. I do miss commuting to work on bike and don't think I'll ever truly get used to being in my car all the time.

One of my main goals for the trip was to re-shoot a panoramic I'd attempted to take of River Street back in college. The series of photos I used on the last try were good enough for me to use as a reference to paint this for my watercolor final,



but it didn't stand on it's own as a photograph. Parts of it were out of focus and I'd done a poor job merging the seams in several places. So, on my last Savannah excursion, I took the ferry back over to Hutchinson Island, took a new photo about every ten paces, put them together in Photoshop, and came out with this:




A much better result!

I also got a picture of the Talmadge Bridge lit up at night that I was rather pleased with:

Easter time!

It is a wonderful thing to have a pet bunny around during Easter....

They take the cutest pictures!



Happy Easter everyone!

Sewing crafts

So I'm VERY delayed in posting these, but I'm still very proud of the way they all turned out so I'm going to post them anyways. Last Christmas (yes, Christmas) I got very crafty with my presents for everyone (primarily out of a need to save money this year). First, I found this adorable stuffed bird pattern on Spool, downloaded that and converted my apartment into a bird factory over Thanksgiving weekend. Here are a few of the results:



I ended up making about 20 of these little guys. I added the little wire legs so that they would be able to stand-up on their own. A part of me still wants to make more, especially after I saw this BEAUTIFUL bird mobile idea on Design*Sponge, using the same bird pattern. However, while my crafty heart says "yes," my tired fingers say "no." At least for now.

I had already made birds for my coworkers for another occasion, so I had to come up with something new to give them for the holidays. For them I drew out a simple star pattern and then designed a monogram for each of their initials. Using my light table, I painted each of the monograms onto a nice muslin fabric and sewed them into ornaments. For a very impromptu project, I was very pleased with the results!



The good thing about them is they don't have to be just for Christmas. Several of my coworkers came back saying they were using them as door hangers so they could leave them out all year long.

Snow!

So Atlanta was buried under a whopping 6 inches if snow yesterday. A friend of mine who is living in the UK commented that it was even colder here than it is where she is in Bradford England. It snows so infrequently here that a snow day still feels like a gift to me. In a sense, it's God telling me I need to calm down for a day, go run around outside and build a snowman. I got absolutely nothing accomplished, but who could when you have views like this outside your apartment:





My thoughts exactly.