Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Warming the Cockles of My Heart (ewwww)



Heehee.

And from Wikipedia's entry on the Super Mario franchise:
"Yoshi was created by Shigefumi Hino, a graphics designer, in response to Nintendo's design staff expressing a desire for Mario to ride a dinosaur."

Man, working for Nintendo in the early days must have been like one long acid trip.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Rundown of the Past Few...uh...

Since roughly the 23rd of December I...
1) Ate Mom's cookies, brownies, cakes, etc. Probably gained 20 pounds.
2) Had my SCAD grad school informal interview/portfolio review. Yikes. Do I feel inadequate! Well, at least I know what they'll be looking for so I can get my formal portfolio together in an acceptable manner. Man, I feel like after 4 years at Parsons I've accomplished next to nothing in comparison.
3) Submitted my first piece to Illustration Friday.com It's my Erzulie piece which is...um, somewhere on this page.
4) Saw native Floridian wildlife. Gators! Manatees! Giant Blue Herons! The oddly deformed local news anchors!
5) Did no art whatsoever

A photo:



In the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida, where my mom grew up. It's the United States' oldest city and the home of the legendary Fountain of Youth (which I have drunk from. 'Warm sulfurous groundwater' is an understatement). Mom said that she used to play hooky from school and play around the fort (before it became a national park/monument and thus has guards and such) when she was a kid. A lot of the rooms had names carved into the walls and I thought they were pretty nifty. I like to see evidence of people actually being normal people in settings like this. It's pretty cool to think you're standing in the exact same spot where some guy in 1880 carved his name.

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Fire Walk With Me

So I've been doing basically nothing since I got to Florida except playing with the puppy (who chewed up my wingtips! GRR!) and getting fat off my mom's home cooking. Not much done in the terms of art, just a few sketches and some reorganization of old stories into newer ones. Just basically boring nerdy things.
I have an interview, faculty meeting, informal portfolio review, AND class sit-in session at SCAD this Thursday, to see if I'm good to go for applying to the Sequential Art graduate program. Yikes. I feel mostly ready, and think I have enough portfolio material to show that I'm really interested in the field. Sigh.
Reconnecting with bizarre films etc of my youth: my parents gave me a box set of "Twin Peaks" for Christmas. God, I'd forgotten just how wonderful that show was. Agent Cooper was probably one of my first childhood crushes. (What, your parents didn't let you watch David Lynch when you were 5? What kind of childhood did YOU have?!) I've actually been to the town where "Twin Peaks" was filmed– Snoqualamie, Washington state:
Some Guy's Site About Going to the Film Locations
Proud to say that I've been inside the "Great Northern Hotel" on the top of the falls and had a cup of coffee and a piece of cherry pie in the diner. I'm a huge nerd. (In my defense, my parents and brothers used to live in Seattle in the 1970s, and it's like 30 miles away so they'd been to the town a bunch of times before....but that doesn't mitigate the fact that I am still a huge, huge nerd).




"Harry, she's dead...wrapped in plastic."