Naughty comeback

Just got to sketching in pencil. Next thing I know, BAM! I'm seeing blue. It could have gone either way to be honest. Nice to be able get something out, even if it does espouse a bit of self-indulgence and pointless misogyny.

Walking

I took a hike. Got a few shots. Armed bloke in front of some embassy told me to push off. I took off. (is this what they call a haiku?).

The handroller needed a dust off.

The HOLE PUNCHED FUCK SHEET

Inspired by Melissa McEwan's article on Grauniad's Comment is Free section. Maybe inspired isn't the right word. Bah! Either way, thanks to Dr. Kinsey for ridding us of this awful boudoir practice.

Beaten but not out

Meet ELM. He was gonna be in Pixar's ELM-E. Sadly, the producers decided to go with something that had robotic limbs and wiggly eye flaps (fuck you john lasseter, I know where you live). This desk sharpener is probably the most worn and beaten thing in the house if you discount my pulmonary system and that steak knife noone seems to throw away. Nice how MY trusty Canon 550d captured it, with it's layer on layer of texture, rust and general batteries-not-includedness (80s film about old people and electric razors coming alive). I threw it a milkbone, but it just bounced off and fell on the floor. I tsought it VUD VOLK! FEGERLEIN!

iFES

A slow month at CROTCH. Idle hands doing idle things. And what to do with those apple stickers? You could always revolutionize the way mankind drinks.

I'm here all week.

Bad Room Render

What's wrong with this picture? Just about everything. It flatters an otherwise suffocating interior that's more crackhouse than the simple leisurely corner depicted here. Mind you, the armchair is quite spot on.

Other notes: slightly low ceiling, obvious chamfers around the bay window, unrealistic paint job (needs additional cracks, specularity maps), the fabrics used require more wrinkles and folds, need to convey the mess I'm sitting in the midst of as I write this.

Stationery Week

Yes, it's stationery week! And that can only mean one thing. Money! Tons of it. I mean what do you think we're doing out here. -- Pulled from the memoirs of Sam Rothstein

Rockin'

Ah, business. The state of being busy. The upside is that you're whiling the time away without effort. If you're in the zone, you can beat depression, grief, and anything else that might be snappin' at your ass. This has been a dreary and awful year for me. And yet my output has been somewhat unexpectedly prolific. Thriving neath pendulous dark clouds is not a trait I thought I had, but it's nice to know I have a little salmon in me. Today we're Rockin'.

Woe is me

After a spin kick to the teeth from istock yesterday, I am trudging on. Three of the four files I had submitted just before the weekend went in the bin. This is very discouraging. I stand by my output and believe it to be considerably better than a sizable portion of the vectors produced on istock (albeit, there are some masterful contributors) People seem to be getting away with atrocious submissions, e.g. really badly auto-traced photos, amateur cartoons with poor stance and silhouettes, pathetic line weights, naive uses of gradients etc. So I thought I'd clean up some of my earlier work and make it legacy compatible to avoid the upload-rage.

Holiday Stock

Still churning out some possible candidates for stock uploads. Here be some design elements that just felt they needed to get away from it all. And they did.

Monsters and Swirls

I'm getting my istock phreak on of late. Emboldened (as a terrorist), I have once again resorted to increasing my iota of a share from the site. This comes and goes when I'm browsing categories for inspiration and I come across a simple shiny web 2.0 candy apple icon that says: Downloads >12000 (tally it up on a calculator and you'll quit your day job) Funny thing is that once the F5 overhaul of the site went into effect, my downloads just came to a complete standstill. I will have to read up on what new features they've installed. For all I know there may be a default "I'm just a fucking idiot, please don't index my files" feature.

Now for some 3D

Walking amongst some of the 3d renders and illustrations posted on istock, I thought that modeling might be an easy way in for an image application contributor (not having an SLR). I've been an istock illustrator for a while now, but have always had my heart set on the flexibility that being able to submit raster images would provide. So I'm trying to come up with some novel yet simple ideas that may go down well during the sample uploading phase.

Lion baby steps

Our lion is almost done. That's right, CROTCH continues to churn out those animation assets despite being swamped with work that brings in the real dosh (not like this art palaver). I'm contemplating a logo change, however, as the current one looks like it belongs to a landscaping business. My line of thought in creating it was "wilderness, bits of wood, leaves, round thingy and, umm, yeah... shit we're out of beer". It pays to think about these things beforehand. Next up, a pack of African Boobies. Before that, though, I may attempt a trial run on After Effects to see if this thing holds well together. Work in progress will be posted on Youtube.

HANDROLLER EXCLUSIVE!!

THIS is where it all happens. The Control Room of Great Things, or as it is affectionately abbreviated, CROTCH, is the source, the ground zero if you will, of all the mediocrity I sparingly provide to all you out there in the super information cyber highweb sub-etha singular happenstance or something or other. Fitted with the state-of-the-art of 2002, CROTCH now serves a sundry bunch of people, most whom I've never met. Its roots stretch back to the year 1998 when a man and his dog (now deceased and sorely missed) got it into their heads that it would be nice to occasionally eat and have a room of one's own.

JapAttack!

My friend went to Japan recently and all I got was... HEY WHERE THE FRACK IS MY T-SHIRT!?!

Only joking :) This subway sign of dubious authenticity was what she brought back. The unwavering Japanese translation method of "string words together and hope for the best" is probably one thing I would single out as my fave cultural idiosyncrasy. I'll be playing 2 gigs in Osaka in January, so I might pick up a few more. In the true tradition of mucking about on Saturdays, here it is as speech balloonized by yours truly.

Baby Rhino Steps

Currently story-boarding the intro for the Top Gear sendup, Wild Gear. Also, here's a rhino that will feature in the first few seconds of the intro. I didn't think much about the animation rig to begin with, so I may have to rethink this, although to begin with, all the character will do is chew with a deadpan look on its face.

Next up, a leopard or lion. Preferably a lion to avoid all the spotty coat work. I want to stay in the savanna, but who knows, Jeremy's always going places. Might hit the arctic for some penguin action. I have high hopes for this.

Doggy spec work

Trawling the depths of other freelance sites now after vWorker (formerly known as rentacoder.com) has, I am convinced, effected some sort of backend function to shut me out. Bid upon bid is not getting through to buyers and I'm losing out to talentless and hungry third-worlders in their droves. To get a foot up on these new venues, I'm doing some spec work to earn a little street cred. While I loathe it, I'm convinced that half of all labor currently under employment on planet earth somehow makes time between their arduous tasks to design a logo here and a banner there, perhaps being cut so much slack that they're even able to muster up a full-color painting by day's end. Where have these people come from? Poverty! Take their PC's and their motivation away or I'll never make rent at this rate.

IN THE WORLD

My new thing that I probably won't get around to doing is to create a little animated intro and parody for the British petrol-head pastime, Top Gear. A nice twist might make it worthwhile. I think it would be funny to have Hammond, May and Jazza marching through the Savannah talking shop about animals.

"Now THIS is the Cheetah. It's more pristine and sleek in comparison to its predecessors AND it also has one little improvement over it's evolutionary forebears. This Cheetah (pause in the middle of sentence) is the fastest Quadro Gambe...... IN THE WORLD".

And then having them go round their track, perhaps. The Stig might just be some African fellow wearing a loincloth and a crash helmet. We'll see.

The drawing didn't quite pan out, but it was finished in about 45 minutes and the man does have a jelly bean for a head. Gimme a break.

Bleh, Meh, and just plain fuckity fuck

The shimmering heat and nary another sign of summer in this god forsaken basement apartment is worryingly depressing. This, coupled with very little regular human contact and a short supply of inspiration is not paying dividends and dropping me down a few 'new lows'. It's fracking July, kids, and I'm shacked up (or down) here while people are trouncing around the globe on their wondrous, albeit to me quite pointless, excursions; having affairs with seagulls and petting squirrels who were there at Auschwitz while drinking Hefeweissen with carrot pulp. I can't even make any discernible plans other than the usual weekend pisser because I know I won't have the means to go through with it - as evidenced by the inevitable money-call I now regularly make to daddy whenever panic sets in at the end of the month. Bless that man. With all this weighing on my mood, I am now thinking of pepping up my self-promotion, improving my net presence, and sexing up my social media thingy. Good bloody luck with THAT!

To this end, however, I am reluctantly perusing some of those excruciatingly upbeat blogs that give you 10 reasons/tips/headbutts/kisses/anecdotes/hickeys or whatever in the hope that something, pernicious or beneficial, might rub off on me. In my state, I might benefit from entertaining the delusion that they are ejaculating pro bono gold dust in the face of anyone who cares to listen. This might get me through the day, and that may just be all I need. Because, suspended disbelief willing, there's enough material to get me inspired and excited till I'm stone cold dead with my face pressed against the contents of the old colostomy pouch. The better ones even have their own podcasts (radio with more transistors) where they have some big cheese from the industry harping on about the days when an HB pencil was considered "technology". All this somehow comes back full circle to you having to hear about their new book, you guessed it, 10 things you should know before dot dot dot dot.

In the spirit of gloom-proof blogging tippery, then, here's mine:

10 Reasons Why You Should Bone Your Dead Grandmother:

1. She may have been buried with her valuables.
2. It's just one more way of dealing with grief.
3. She was asking for it (this goes in the report).
4. The acoustics make for an eerie podcast.
5. Because it might be outrageous enough for this 10 reasons business.
6. You might get Oatmeal's attention.
7. Novel and edgy tweets are in short supply.
8. Chuck Norris said so.
9. Necrophilic booty call.
10. Yes We Can.

With the unrelenting wish that you step on a box jellyfish miles away from any discernible shoreline and a menacing confusion is the last thing you feel. Tata.

Scissorpeds

Just a quick sketch of a design for a simple and quirky robot in 3d. I may want to eventually incorporate more household objects to its anatomy, eventually posing it on my filthy desk and wishing there was cheap 3d printing available down the road. Silicon-gun, anyone?

Rolling Hysteria

Here's a puerile little exercise in mock-publishing. May or may not contain some in-jokes. Names have been smeared and reputations tarnished to piss off the innocent.

Pioneer One

Just watched Pioneer One. Not exactly ground breaking stuff, but not lagging behind your average network show either. It's definitely promising for something wholly funded by netizens. However, as pilots go, I am getting a little tired of things entering the atmosphere and NSA agents running around with complementary ear pieces as a keynote to the buildup to grindingly transformative hooplah of the highest order. I know torrent geeks are now their bread and butter (and stingy ones at that), but don't begrudge us our imagination. We heart FREE, and we might be willing to pay for it.

(sexy scientist must drop knickers by EP02)

Design Pays

As most people whom I drag over to read this blog will know, I recently won the grand prize in a t-shirt competition and added an apple macbook pro to my arsenal. Despite feeling acute nausea every time Steve Jobs speaks of the "magical", I have to admit that this machine has it together. That's not saying much, mind, when you're running a largely closed operation with so much control over all the ins and outs. I'm not even sure I've even heard of Apple ever getting any flack over shipping software together with their machines. For crap's sake, they've only quite recently allowed Windows to grace their la-dee-dah harddrives. SO WHERE'S THE ANTI-TRUST SUIT??

I digress. Here's me with some outlandishly expensive machined aluminium.

Pomegranate - Music Fruit

Here's something that took me the better part of zillions of hours. Mostly because I was playing by ear and couldn't quite decide which elements to include. Sometimes you get trapped in a painting. What was it Picasso used to say. "You feel me?". TO THE FRUIT BAR!

Leverage

Just got done with a another entry for the t-shirt gig. This one ended up looking like the cover for a magazine aimed at veteran louts (so I just had to go ahead and embellish).

The Blue Wazzo

Kids, I have procured a little animation I did last year. While this was just a test to see if I could get to grips with all the meticulous aspects of 3d animation, it slowly developed into a little story (I got so excited that I modeled the villain in 15 minutes). I dunno what kept me from finishing it, but YOU DON'T CUT A MAN OFF WHEN HE'S DODGING FIREBALLS!! I doubt that I'd be able to finish it now as I've forgotten everything I learned during those couple of days.

Enjoy!

VOTE TIME

For the past couple of days I've been dabbling with some t-shirt designs for this competition. Actually, it's rather disheartening and very annoying to see how much plagiarism goes on. People really seem to want the grand prize and they'll go to the far reaches of a stock illustration site to get it. When you confront these punks, they tell you that "not everyone's an illustrator", and that "it's the idea that counts". Oh well, then. I've wasted my life trying to be something that's hardly necessary. Ass chomping, afghan hound walking silverspoon suckers, the lot of them.
Anyway, here are my entries so far. Vote me a little fortuitousness.

Update: Added a couple more designs. Make note: you can find links to all the images I've submitted when you arrive at the site on the lower right hand corner.

link: http://tasarti.com/tshirt/tasarim/3495/NoodleYS.aspxhttp://tasarti.com/tshirt/tasarim/3505/Kamuflaj.aspx

http://tasarti.com/tshirt/tasarim/3544/For_Women.aspx

http://tasarti.com/tshirt/tasarim/3707/Salon_Sepeti.aspxhttp://tasarti.com/tshirt/tasarim/3657/Retro_Sepet.aspx
http://tasarti.com/tshirt/tasarim/3587/An%C4%B1nda_Hizmet.aspx

Big shout goin' out

I can watch the facebook feed roll by for hours. Things show up that would generally make any blundering cosmic passerby tick off "intelligent life" and go back to wallowing in their evolutionary puddle. Nowadays, though, an unlikely group of people are gunning for humanity (is that like fucking for virginity, again?). They are the let's adoptos (Copyright: fifty bucks). Notice, congratulate, donate, that kinda thing. Any whoo, seeing as how I see their posts everyday, I thought I'd do a little drawing for them. It's nowhere near finished, I'm just blocking in some values etc., but I like the idea. Tagline (the conversation you never have to have - I'm also very pro-population-control).

Shit in the Sea

She tugged at his arm and asked of him too much. They'd only just been blackout-matrimony'd. (and there'd be repercussions for that). This was familiarity out of thin air, with no basis, no purchase; mere ramblings that come with precocious histrionics.

"Not now. I'm absorbing these flipflops", he muttered. He'd appropriated a pair of them where the boisterous elderly expats had left them. Those were some loud folk. You know the type. They bonk each others' children while just about everyone looks the other way. These were vile and unthinkable flipflops from people who held vile and unthinkable mores. The touch of its thong to the bisection of his foot into two toes was now all he could think about. It burned and grated with the agony of a thousand shirleys, julies, janes, jennifers, allisons, phillippas, and sues.

He thought, 'screw it!'. I'll shit in the sea with my "betrothed to be annulled"... in the mean time I'll ditch these flipflops'.

Values over color time?

I got it into my head today that I might start painting values in monochrome and then handling the color on separate layers. This seems to be quite prevalent in the industry now and leads to some nice organic output. But you can certainly kiss the painterly look goodbye. So I went ahead and did a little value study slash geek porn. I'm now thinking of refining the creature sketch and placing it into a more interesting backdrop.

Indecision

Publish Post

I'm currently working with an indecisive client who not only wants to change the design he originally chose, but he has now opted for three different company names wherein the design has had to be redone accordingly. I sometimes wish to be taken out back and shot for the value I assign to my own work. Moral of the blogette is, learn when to say F**k off.

Chick Lit

I once heard a political cartoonist say that you should make the effort to draw every day, even if it's just a simple doodle. Well, we can't have doodles sullying our good name. Here's a nice and simple salute to PF that shows not a hint of hesitation in its execution (swoon, bitch).

Clients that get away

Every now and then - or rather more than I'd like to admit - I find myself having to do some spec work to snare a client. I've played into the hands of the viral tendency of competing for larger prizes than would be available for regular work. I've devoted a preposterous amount of my valuable time doing speculative work on sites like crowdspring, logotournament and 99designs, only to have the prize snatched away at the last second (not to say that these gigs have been without benefit - to become a no-spec advocate, you're either a professional seeing your revenue decline, or someone who's dabbled in the den of iniquity)

This here preview sheet was also done to entice the omniscient client to award me the project. As is so often the case he brazenly ignored it and the whole thing fell through. **Weep**

Anxiety or Imminent Threat?

I've been very short on money recently due to some haphazard financial maneuvering. So I scoured the bottom of the cookie jar to find a few bonus pennies that were still on my credit card. The final pay date was a few days overdue, though, so I wasn't even sure if I could make payment on the few staple groceries I was purchasing at the supermarket. The beads of sweat always like to make an appearance during times like these.

When Reality Becomes Self-Saturating

HOW A WEB DESIGN GOES STRAIGHT TO HELL

I've posted this here and there, but can't help but go back to it for some comic relief. There's scarcely any exaggeration here. I might recount a few horror stories of my own some time.

STOP! Banner Time

The blog header is finally complete. I wanted a unique and fun concept that had people asking questions. Questions such as "what's with the starfleet guy?", and "why are they lounging around in that bit of rolling paper?".

I find that I am finally much more inclined to take risks and employ the full tweaking capabilities at my disposal. I used to be quite averse to this. It felt like I was cheating or depleting my innate ability to deliver. As if even undoing was the realm of satan. Fuck that! It's a new world, and pinkies and large penises are on their way out.

The design was going to be in full glorious color, but as I wanted the focus to be on the pet alien and the officer, I decided to knock the color out and only hint at the presence of my inquiring face in the background. It seems to have worked well here.

Just a side note: the crown on the rolling paper refers to my favorite brand. They're available in Turkey for a fraction of the price of better known brands. But here's the rub. They lack the gum that allows you to roll a ciggy and keep it shut. So the trick is to wet one end and tear little bits off before you lick and close up. I've met someone who was able to explain the physics of this process. He'd had one too many that night.

Animating a Rock

Well, this is some animation work I can handle with ease. Yet another iphone app will see the light of day in sleeker and zanier fashion. Of course I've been tweening mostly and exporting to image files, which leads to a great deal more frames than might be necessary and make the game more memory intensive. We'll just have to see what the client thinks.

Keeping to the subject of animation, I have in recent years tested the waters of this difficult yet rewarding narrative method. It does not pay dividends in the short term. Patience is of the essence.