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.