Saturday, August 28, 2010

Giddy

Why? You might ask.

Because I received a great honor. Artist Sam Spratt, who has been doing illustrations for Gizmodo this week, complimented my in real life (IRL) adaptation of one of his works.

I had been browsing Gixmodo on Thursday, as I usually do, to read the latest tech news there. They are currently running a series about inventions. One of those was about the accidental inventions that people have made.

The original artwork is at the top of the page.

I was rummaging through some of my things yesterday, looking for a pen that I have placed somewhere, which still remains a mystery to me, and I found a little 1oz tub of Play-Doh. I opened it up, and it was orange. Perfect! I recalled the illustration on the Gizmodo article, and grabbed my camera and a sheet of drawing paper for the background, posed my little orange blob of Play-Doh and took the pictures, trying to get them as close to the illustration as possible. I was using a LED headlamp and my camera flash for the lighting. It was not optimal, but it worked out OK.

After uploading the pictures to my computer and using Photoshop Elements to edit them, roughly, into a quadtych (hm? four pics in one?) like the original, I came out with this:


I then posted the link on Sam's Facebook page. He both "liked" my post, and complimented me, saying that the picture is "brilliant" and he would like to link it in the next batch of his work on Gizmodo!

Needless to say, I hope you can understand why I am giddy!! :) That is such a huge compliment to my work because this was more one of those, "Hey, that's super cute. I wonder if I can make the illustration come to life IRL," quickie idea.

This has definitely made my day! :)





Original article
http://gizmodo.com/5620910/whoops-the-10-greatest-accidental-inventions-of-all-time
Info page
http://gizmodo.com/5620127/meet-our-contributing-illustrator-sam-spratt

Monday, August 16, 2010

Bees. I don't like bees.

OK, I'm gonna write this before I forget it.

I was sleeping this morning, and had a strange dream right before I woke up. I was in this place, it was like a college campus, and looked similar to Bethel but had aspects of it that were different and abstracted and stuff. I was on the computer tech team as I was at Bethel, and was going to work on an office computer in the "admin" building (though it wasn't the bethel admin building it was similar in style sort of and really not) but we were in the office of someone on maintenance or something. The guy whose computer we were working on was living in the office so it was more like a house that someone lived in. And we were in the front room of the building which was the main office and were at a computer talking and stuff. I was with another girl and a guy who was older and was our supervisor. We were all working on the computer and throwing around ideas and just generally talking. The supervisor guy left or something, I don't remember. But then we were all gone and apparently we left something so I went back to get it, and went into the kitchen of the building to look for it. And the guy who lived there came in and was like "what are you doing? you shouldn't be in here, etc" So I was trying to explain and then decided to book it out of the house, and the guy had a teenage son, and I ran past him and out the front door, and the porch, which had like those round slender posts on the corners, and the porch itself wasn't very tall, maybe a foot or so tall. And on the post to the left of me, where I was heading, was a bunch of these bees that looked like mutated large yellow jackets. They were kind of a mix in look between a cornbee/hoverfly and a yellow jacket and then cartooned/mutated into something larget. And they were swarming around on the post and one flew at me and I started to run and then I woke up, and was sort of like I woke startled, and I turned to lay on my back but I felt like I couldn't breathe so I just got up.

And then I went to go put some books back in the storage shed, in real life, just a few minutes ago. And I saw one wasp flying around the building up to the top. Then I looked to my left where it had come from. And there on the side wall close to the front side of the building was a wasp nest where wasps were coming out. I had to spray it down with WD-40. Had wasps flying around trying to get away from it. One came at me and I ran back, and shook my head to keep it away from my face. Ended up flinging my glasses to the ground but they don't stay on my face well anyway (which I absolutely *hate* about these glasses. not sure why i picked them two years [or more?] ago in the first place.) And then it occurred to me a little bit ago, oh yeah I had a dream about a swarm of bees this morning. Great. Any now I'm like super shaky. I hate dealing with bees. Or bugs in general. I dislike dealing with bugs in general. They're ok as long as I don't have to do anything with them. If they are dangerous, I seriously hate dealing with them.