DO THE HAPPY DANCE!!!

Today, I heard the good word.

I got accepted into Sheridan's Bachelor of Applied Arts, Animation.

FINALLY!!!

After weeks of stressing out and losing my mind, months of work on my portfolio, panic attacks, giving up whatever semblance I have to a social life, having my work picked at and reviewed and handed back to me for change---

IT'S FINALLY OVER!

Last week I thought the results were coming out. I was panicked, stressed, and so afraid I was going to get rejected again. I was avoiding thinking about it, but it was always a heavy looming presence in the back of my mind. They day finally came around, I checked OASIS to find--- nothing. I went to admissions to ask what the deal was.

The deal was, "Later this week, or next week." Shoot. So when this Monday rolled around, I checked OASIS again, only to find there was still no update. This was getting ridiculous, I have plans depending on my acceptance to my applied courses, and it wasn't fair to keep stringing me along. After all, there were about half the applicants this year than there was two years ago, yet the results were taking longer to come out. I decided I wasn't going to settle for a second, "Next week or later this week," (which I got) and went straight to the head of the Animation department.

I was told the same story, and I expressed my concerns about being forced to wait for so long, when there's so much banking on the results from Sheridan. She told me the same thing-- that they hadn't even started to input scores yet, and I would have to wait until next week.

By next week, I wouldn't have any nerves left.

I returned home, angry, bitter, knowing that if I didn't have my heart so set on the program at Sheridan, I would have left and never brought my business back.

And then I had to write a huge essay.

So write I did! Until two in the morning. And then I crawled into bed, and had trouble falling asleep because of my back. I woke up at seven, and was exhausted. I left the house tired, sore, and in one of the most foul moods I have ever woken up in.

I got to school, and remembered I still had to staple my essay together before I could hand it in. So, taking Chelsea with me, I head to the learning commons. The stupid stapler is empty. Alright, no problem, there's another stapler on the other side of the learning commons. As I'm crossing the learning commons, I hear my name. Confused, I turn about.

It's Allison! A girl applying to the same program I am.

"I got in!"

"Heh?"

OASIS updated this morning. With a sickening lurch to my stomach, I ask if I can borrow her computer, so I don't have to wait twenty minutes for a different one to start up and boot me in. I go to OASIS, and I log Allison out, and log myself in. At first, my heart plummeted, as I saw "Under Consideration," but Chelsea gasped and pointed to the program under the computer animation status I was reading.

Firm Admit.

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAH!!!! I was so unbelievably thrilled I got excited and hugged all in the vicinity, I texted my room mates, and I jumped around a bit. I'm quite sure I started everyone in the LC. I then ran (well.. I sped shuffled) to my classroom, handed in my essay and bolted. I had to find my teachers and let them know; I had to share the good news with the people who supported me. I would have done a happy dance, but as I attempted to skip my way down the hall, my back abruptly interjected with a painful: "CUT THAT SHIT OUT!!" so there was a lot of shuffling around and squealing with Chelsea.

I tried to hunt down my other animation friends, but the only other person I could find was Sue, who I told my news in excitement as we exchanged mystery gifts on our pokewalkers.

I then went to class and watched a movie.

AND I BOUGHT SHERLOCK HOLMES ON DVD! It's totally my reward for animation and I wasn't already planning on buying it, really.

So, for today starting in the worst of moods ever.. I am a happy person today.

Tis the Season for Floofy Dresses

And Gradients, apparently.

So anyways, I drew something-- I can't remember what, but Chelsea asked me, "I wonder what Tina would look like in a dress... I've seen her in a skirt, but not a dress,"

Today, because Chelsea was down the hall making a huge ruckus as she was working on her flash homework, I figured, Okay, I may as well draw something.

I was avoiding doing anything art or school related, because it's stressing me out this week, but I haven't had any headaches today (At all, it's almost scary), so I guessed I was safe to do something a little more relaxing. To the right, on request, I present Tinette, all done up in a summer dress.

Which was startling and weird to look at when I finished. She looks pretty, and Chels said to me that she actually looks approachable, and she might go up and speak to Tinette if she was dressed like this.

Apparently the costume makes the character, hm?

Annie

7:21

Still no word on animation. I hate the bastards in admissions.

Annie-Mation

Today, I have nothing except this link.

Personal Portfolio made for Digital Media Class.

Which you should totally click on and follow around and comment because I spent hours on it and it's really nifty.

Before you decide to take a look, the contacts tab doesn't work. What it's supposed to do, is it's supposed to open up as a separate email window, that goes to my sheridan email. However, SWF files apparently don't support that feature.

That's all right though, because PDF files support that feature!

But PDF files don't support page transitions, and without them, my entire portfolio looks like crap.

I'll be asking my teacher about that, because everything I read says that PDF's can indeed support page transitions, and if I could just get that one aspect working, I wouldn't need a SWF file, I could use the PDF. It also means I could include bookmarks, which is good.

I also wanted my splash page to open with a quick slideshow, with a flashing of four separate images, each one of my characters, and then fading to the "Annie-Mation" window, with a blinking cursor beside it.

InDesign isn't capable of making slideshows, or supporting animated gifs.

It's like trying to paint with a toothpick, there's so much I want to do but the program just won't support it.

I was up until four in the morning working on this; and then my room mate texted me at eight thirty asking if she could borrow my jam. The weekend world doesn't exist before nine, please don't do that on a day when I don't have class.

Other than that, I've got my biggest concern for next week out of the way! Now all I have left is a 400 word report, 2 billboard designs and a drawing of Bernini's David with some muscles and bones.

Hooray! I think I'm going to eat some dinner.

Annie

6:47

Vibrant Colours!

How I do love bright colours.

I drew a bunch of pictures today, but they were all in my fellow classmates sketchbooks, so I don't have any of them to scan.

Sadface.

I draw a great picture of Ninja that I really liked in ballpoint; so I came home and was talking to Chelsea and I randomly wanted to draw her character AdrennaLynne, because she remind me of Ninja, in the fact that she's incredibly energetic.

She also loves insanely bright colours, and apparently dresses like me. SO, of course, I had fun. Coloured quickly in markers so I could scan it and send it to Chelsea before she went to bed.

Wee, I love drawering.... I wanted to draw Suka, but I've been drawing her a lot these past few days, haha.

Annie

1:04

Today, Something New Happened.

Today, I did something I've never done before.

Today, I bought a pokemon game.

I've never played pokemon before, nor do I know anything about pokemon, but as with all things I have even the faintest interest in years too late... Things had gotten so far beyond me I couldn't hope to keep up.

Well today, I walked down to the mall with my friends, and I considered picking up a copy. I'm pretty sure I just wanted the little pokewalker; and I figured if I didn't like the game, I'd sell it back.

Well, it's actually pretty fun. It's like classic RPG's that I'm used to and it's flat and 2d and adorable and it's fun.

I think I like pokemon.

Especially when it requires me to go for walks to earn points to fight pokemon on my little pokeball shaped electronic device.

It's fun.

Way to hop the bandwagon years and years after it's pinnacle...

To the right, a drawing I made of Suka. It's a redraw of an image from a few years ago (pre-Sheridan) that I don't have a copy of, but it's in my head. Originally, when Suka existed as two separate characters in two separate stories; After her family was brutally murdered (Yeah, I dropped this and took the lesser of the two evils) she was found and raised by a traveling merchant that she called her "Sapapa" which translated to "Second Father," When she goes missing, and she's found again, all banged up and looking absolutely horrible... The first thing she does is apologize, which breaks her step-dad's heart.

I also partially drew this because it's so much fun that I can tease one of my friends with my characters miserable fates. She gets very sad and undignified, and it's hilarious.

Suka's a little bit older in this picture, I'm debating even going as far as saying she's twenty. Like I pointed out, she's pretty banged up, but she's also not hiding herself under layers and layers of clothing or bandaging. Why? Honestly, because I wanted an excuse to draw her without hiding every aspect of her; so I made it part of my story.

Ouch, hot tea, hot tea. Buuurn.

Ah, working on maquettes today, and I'm super super excited about this sculpture project. It's going to be Alan and Suka; I was talking about a few posts ago how I wanted to try and get a proper drawing showing how my two characters interact with each other, and it's hard because I just can't get the feeling right.

Weeeell, today, with our little miniature maquettes, I think I got the kind of feeling I want. They're super simple, super abstract shapes right now, but....


If you can even tell what's going on, haha- they're going to look good when I'm finished; I think. I'm hoping not to make anything too massive, but this maquette at least shouldn't shatter or break off in chunks as easily as my poor Baeddan maquette did.

But yeah, I wanted to work in basic, simple forms to try and make something that felt incredibly personal, like Rodin's Cathedral Clasping Hands, or Devotion, with closeness, and something you'd stop to look at and think... "Wow, someone really captured that moment!"

Of course, my final isn't going to have any of that 'wow' factor, because I want it to LOOK like two cartoon characters sculpted out of clay; I don't want it to look like my aim was realism, because it's not. I just want the feeling to be there. The entire time I'm going to be keeping Bernini in mind, because everything he made (out of marble, no less!) was believable. I won't be able to do any of his crazy folds, or his incredible mastery of skin... But I'm going to try my best.

And just a fun little thing to end off the post and stop me from needing to switch positions of both pictures I've already uploaded:

Something sweet and adorable my friend Chelsea drew for me when I was teasing her about my characters.

D'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw, it's so adorableeeee.

It's also the first fan art I've gotten of Suka that isn't RP or Fanexpo related. AND, the first one ever of Alan!

Doesn't that make me happy?

Yes, it very much does.

Aaaaw....

Annie

11:41

Itsy Bitsy Little--

Million doodles!!
(As usual, click for full size, blogspot doesn't like my massive image sizes)

A whole bunch of drawings I never really felt justified enough to post and forgot about until this afternoon.

So now, I get to talk about all of them! Bahahaha. Don't I just love talking.

Okay so number 1 is fairly old, I drew it last month while trying to decide on an outfit for Tinette to wear for her portfolio. I liked the first one, as it's probably what she's wearing in the role play right now. Poor Tina, she needs a new outfit. I wound up deciding on the latter of the two costumes, as it just felt a little more finished. Lesson learned from rotation? I need to pay more attention to how clothes curve around backs.

2. Is Suka and Alan in ballpoint. I always, always wind up drawing these two during my elective, Art in the Cinema. This is part of my story that I haven't written yet; but it's Alan discovering something he probably didn't want to hear, and frightening Suka as he tries to get confirmation of whatever it is he just heard.

3. Tinette! Of course. I like drawing in ballpoint sometimes, I like the loose way the lines wind up looking, even if I can't create something finished out of it. I enjoy drawing curves. Very much.

4. This is Suka and Alan again, this time depicting something I just finished writing yesterday, where Alan finds out Suka hasn't got any family; but also that she's married. I imagine that was a bit of a surprise to him, as he found her lost and alone in the woods, and she seems too young and too... helpless to be married but alone.

5. Is my initial attempt at drawing Sariel, an angel character I invented for a role play I'm in. I failed massively, but I had fun drawing it. She does look nice, and it's a decent drawing, it's just-- a character design failure. I scratched it.

6. Is Sariels SECOND design attempt, where again, I failed. She's much too tall; Sariel is in the form of a young girl, like.. seven or eight years old, but she's much much older than that. Much much older, she's a couple millenia old. So again, I failed. Working on it. Sariel isn't known for her patience, while Asmodel, her older counterpart, being the Angel of Patience, is. I will draw Asmodel eventually.

7. FEEN! My demon teenager character. I'm also working on my design for Urnan, but yeah; he's bothering me. Design wise at least, they're fun as hell to RP with, because Feen pushes Urnan around and is happy and charismatic, while Urnan is a wuss, does what he's told, and never stops whining.

8. b. c. d. Are character studies for Ninja! She's a sixteen year old, unbelievably hyper, uncontrollable girl. Without her brother around to constantly shoot her down and keep her grounded... I'm really not sure what would happen. I imagine it wouldn't be pretty. When I role play Ninja, I don't know when to make her stop talking, because she seriously never stops. Just keeps going, and going, and going, and going--

9. b. Two drawings from a study sheet I started for Suka. I didn't get very far...

10. A drawing of Suka I drew two days ago when I couldn't focus on anything. She's my muse; when I can't draw, I always wind up drawing Suka. An incredibly unsuccessful picture; I accidentally made Suka too fat in the calves, and I gave her very broad shoulders. Oops.

11. TINETTE! Again. And again, I drew this one forever ago. I just needed something to fill white space; and I never posted this doodle anywhere. Just quick photoshop flats.

12. My Gaiaonline avatar! My vampire avatar with a frog prince. I have a nice elaborate little story... and it's much more interesting than the original fairytale! I'm so lame, every avatar I make needs to have a story.

And that, is my sketch dump. I have no interesting story for the day; except now that my portfolio is finished, I can't find motivation to do anything. I don't want to do my homework, I hardly want to wake up in the morning to get to class. It's a little disappointing, but I guess since my break was full of a lot of fighting with my older sister I feel a bit cheated from my break and still just... sit in break mode.

It's also a gorgeous day outside, and as usual, I'm sitting here on the computer watching TV. Haha. What a way to appreciate the gorgeous outdoors.

Multiple Attempts

I always try things a few million times before I get it right- This is my second or third attempt at this drawing, so here it is.

As per usual, I don't like it.

There's something about Suka I don't like;

This is what I drew Wednesday during the hour or so I was waiting for the rest of the class to finish up their sculptures. Mine was already finished; soooo I doodled.

I really don't feel very well today... Sick to my stomach and I have a headache.

So yeah, second or third attempt, I'm probably going to try a few more times before I finally draw a decent picture of Suka and Alan that I think really shows their relationship. Which is, very very needy;

Suka needs someone to take care of her, because she's really shitty at taking care of herself. Without someone there to help her, to look after, to distract her, she promptly deteriorates. If it weren't for Dr. Verden, she probably would have died before my story even got off the ground.

Haha, that would have been a really cruddy comic to read...

ANYWAYS, I have another drawing to work on.

Annie

2:10

Getting into the Swing of it

Adjusting to having all the time in the world again. Figuratively, of course.

Felt like updating my blog today. So Thursday was our second monthly ATC meeting!
How'd it go? Well, I thought it went over really well. Got the dvd's up and working, turn out was GREAT, lots of fun activities, lots of snacks, and fun fun art was exchanged.

To the left I have some quick and pretty bad scans of the atc's I made (my pale blue and yellow just disappeared in the middle one there), for the themes Supernatural, Aliens, Persephone and Zombies.

Zombies are infuriatingly popular, it seems.

In return I got a handful of Indiana Jones cards, one of which made me laugh till I cried. That's right, it was that awesome. Couldn't have asked for anything more amazing.

So another thing, I wanted to post the life drawings I hauled ass to create for my portfolio.

These are my collection of 30 second poses I decided to include in my portfolio, with my room mate as acting judge.

Apparently, these are really good for thirty seconds, because they include a full figure.

Before I went to extra life on a weekend, I hadn't done thirty second poses since last year. I assumed I wasn't going to be able to get a full figure in, and I was spooked. After all, I have a hard enough time getting a decent figure drawing in two minutes, how the hell was I going to manage with only thirty seconds?

Fairly well, apparently. I enjoyed myself highly, and think thirty seconds are probably my favourites, once I get ten or fifteen poses in. I think the bottom three are from the same session, while the top two are from the day before and the day after, respectively.

These are slightly longer poses, where I could start adding more refined lines and stuff. The reason I went to extra life was to pick up a bunch of five minute poses, but I came out with a lot of successful shorter poses that were decent enough to compile on their own pages and show off.

The first one was an "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeh," for a possibility to use on my full pages, but I wound up going back on Sunday (and missing the first period of the hockey game) for a final round, and it's a really good thing too.

These are the final drawings I wound up using in my portfolio, each of them having come from my last session. My favourite is the middle one, where the model was sitting with her back to me.
It was a pretty stressful weekend, but I was really proud with the results. Thursday I recycled about ten pounds of newsprint, all full of life drawings, and flipping through them I realized, "Hey, these aren't all that bad!" Guess I'm getting better after all. Ironically, throughout the entire weekend of drawing, my wrists didn't hurt at all. My arms on the other hand, were sore to the touch, and so was my back.

I'm really glad DQ went through everything... I don't think I would have been happy with my initial portfolio anyways.

Worked really hard to bring this portfolio together, I really hope it pays off this year.

When the Red is Gone

I get very sad.

So today, when I was heading out to business class, I made a note to grab some more red lead for my pencil. I ran upstairs and into my closet to grab some.

I get to class, and I realize, holy crab apples, I don't have any red lead.

How did I DO that? Apparently while in the process of fishing around my closet, I didn't actually grab the item I originally went into the closet for.

I'm so smart.

So here's what I came out of business class with. I'm probably not going to finish it, because I had to draw it and scan it into my computer in three different parts. I couldn't get the characters to be proportionate to each other on the same page, SO, I drew them each on their own, and that way they were proportionate. More or less.

I really can't tell, the lights were out and I was using my iPod to give me light.

Today's guest speaker kept calling us out for not paying attention to his lecture. I just realized I forgot to sign the attendance sheet in class today.

Faaaawk.

I'm going to do something I find more entertaining than just sitting here!

Annie

6:33