Well, I’ve made it to Oregon, thirty minutes southwest of Portland in the bustling town of McMinnville.
It’s about as big as Vista was, but it has the wonderful benefit of being more then just a suburb. I think there is a lot of potential here, which is good because income would be nice about now. I just need to find my niche here.
Meanwhile, I am continuing arting. I will keep you all posted as things develop.
All of the sudden I’m moving to Portland. What I’ll find there I’m really not sure, but then that is really a big part of what makes the trip worthwhile. At least, that is the plan, well, idea. Plan is a little strong a word. I’ve been doing my best to plan, but so much seems to be insisting on leaving itself up to fate. Which is cool. Fate and I are on good terms.
Why am I going? Why am I banking my life on a concept barely two and a half months old? Good question. I needed a change. I REALLY needed a change and this just feels like the right one. I’ve been working two no-future jobs and living in my parents’ house FAR too long. If I don’t do something about this now then I may not get another chance. Plus it will be nice to live with someone I can just hang out with again. I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed having a roommate.
It kind of makes me think back to the last year, it is really scary how little I’ve accomplished for myself outside of work.
Bleh, so what this is, is a jumpstart. A beautiful town with a lot of energy to it, fountains, stimulating local plus other locals which will likely also be stimulating. the only negative point is that I can’t seem to line up employment before heading up. Going from two jobs to none is not the most assuring feeling, but at least I have enough set up, and I’m guaranteed not to spend the rest of my life working those two jobs. Hah, while I’ll really miss spending all day doing business cards, I know I can do a lot more.
So, yes. If you never hear from me again that is why.
Hasta Luego!
There has certainly been a lot that has happened since my last entry. Which I suppose is not really a shock considering that it is almost a year old. Looking that entry over again, for as much that has happened to me personally and professionally, as far as my art is concerned (and by extension this blog) nobody has really missed much. In fact, I only began last week to start releasing choice bits from that massive library I mentioned for public use (through my DeviantArt account). Something I intended to do immediately following that last post.
That isn’t that I haven’t been working on anything of course. That would imply that I was deceased or something worse. Just that with the crazy hectic schedule that I’ve had working nights and days scattered across all 7 days, time for personal projects has been few and far between. What I HAVE been doing though, I like to think is at least pushing myself when the opportunity arises.
In my drawing, I’ve started to branch FAR away from my roots of using digital photo colloguing and scanned pencils, into entire works created in Photoshop using digital painting techniques (With BACKGROUNDS no less! ) If someone told me in 2006 that I’d be pulling this stuff off… well I probably would have believed him, but I’d have been incredibly skeptical of the results. I’ve been doing some professional stuff to but I’m not sure how much detail I can go into that yet.
I’ve been shooting when I can to, though in this case I have rather gone back to my favorite subjects of “sets” and “props.” If nothing else then because it can be such a stress reliever to go to this beach or wooded area or urban environment, and use the viewfinder and shutter to just try to yank out what makes these places unique and wonderful. I try to find the souls of my environment for lack of a more rational sounding term. I’m not sure where I’m going with it at the moment, but the only thing I think that really matters now is that it is still going. And, like anything else it could be big, or at the very least, form the basis for some epic fantasy artwork when I do wander back into the colloguing (Or a fellow DeviantArtist decides to for that matter).
This daily grind I have set up for myself though, I’m starting to wonder how necessary it really is. I’m afraid I might be reaching my limit (Which may or may not actually be possible depending on who you ask). I wonder what bigger and better things might be out there. It is something to get excited about.
But honestly, it’s not all doom and sorrows, spending the day designing business cards can be just as incredibly fun and relaxing as anything else.
As of late, I've finally been really going though all those photos I took last summer during my trip to Maryland and Virginia. I found it so odd that out 4 and a half gigs worth of images, I've only come up with maybe half a dozen that I've felt worthy of posting onto my DevientArt account. And it's not that they have been bad photos either, A lot of them are really rather interesting and only about half of them I'm deleting. There are beautiful pictures of clouds from the plane, and sunsets and local architecture. It's all worthy of being shown off, but what's stopping me is that it all feels so incomplete.
Let me explain.
I got into photography in the first place as an escape from having to draw backgrounds (when I felt the need to have backgrounds n the first place) which always seemed to clutter up the focal point (characters, cars, or what have you) of the piece. As time grew on and I continued to unlock the secrets of photoshop, I started getting more experimental, focusing just as much on the photo manipulation aspects as the pencil and ink work, leading to the current state of my arting.
My point being that, with occasional exceptions, my viewfinder eye isn't looking first and foremost for subjects or focal points, but rather useful elements and/or stages to drop things into. It can be frustrating because in the end I have a massive library of source material, but I'm only just starting to find the inspiration of what to do with it. I hope I find it soon, and while I still have free time to really focus on it, because this stuff deserves to be explored. And it just seems wrong to leave it all incomplete.
Wow, I never intended to wait so long to update, but it really has been a busy few months for me. The biggest event being, about four weeks back, getting a job at the Oceanside Fedex-Kinkos. It’s an interesting position. I was specifically hired on as a pseudo-apprentice to guy in charge of their Sign and Graphics department but I’ve found myself doing pretty much everything there is in both the production and service areas of the store. It’s nice to not have the chance to be bored, because there is always a new challenge presenting itself. The job is also an interesting continuation from school.
- At Ai I learned “how” to do things, the creativity, and all the sheer possibilities involved in accomplishing a giving task.
- At Kinkos, there is a lot less creativity involved, a lot less of everything other then deadlines. I’m being forced to learn in a trial by fire to increase my output and heighten my attention to detail or risk upsetting the entire workflow of the store. It’s certainly the kind of pressure I needed to develop and I think it’s working. It can be very stressful though.
On the flipside of this I’ve been trying to rekindle my purely artistic side as well. I came dangerously close to burn out near the last few months of school and I’m still working on recovering from it. I’ve tried to draw more often and with more variety and I’m looking for new locations to shoot photos. Living in North County though, it can be difficult to escape the suburban monotony.
But there is certainly always something.
Wow, the site has only been live for one or two days and already I've made a significant update! Take a look at my stylish new gallery interface courtesy of Lightbox 2.0! AND, if you are fortunate enough to be viewing me View internet explorer, I'm sure you have already noticed the integrated scrollbars. Unfortunatly scrollbar customization seems to have been disabled in Firefox. It's kind of suprising really, considering everything else you can do with it.
In nonsite news, I am offically done with school, most likely forever. It's both a rather liberating and hollow feeling at the same time.
Onwards to better things!
Hello Mr. Internet! The site is a GO! I'm glad to finally meet you all.
To start things off, a pair of cultural excerpts:
"we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration.
For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile." He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. "We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition."
...
"Do we have a past, then?" Stonestreet asks.
"History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when," Bigend says, his eyes narrowing.
"Who did what to whom. With what. Who won. Who lost. Who mutated. Who came extinct."
"The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now."
"You sound oracular." White teeth.
"I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we're interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won't seem very relevant."
--Pattern recognition, William Gibson
The writings on the wall beside the sneak hole
There's a message carved in here.
It looks like they use an ice pick or
something.
The faint hope I had is slowly changing
to despair.
I've somehow managed to tunnel this
far, but no matter what I do, I can't
get any further.
The hallway, the windows, the walls...
It feels like this room is stuck
in another dimension.
Eileen never noticed...
--Silent Hill 4
This isn't actually here...
This never happened.