Oh Calcutta!

So I'm not much of a photographer or a photoshopper, but I've been working on a set of photos taken in Kolkata, an ode to nostalgia :)

They're not that great, but I gave them all an old, filmic, grainy look. Kinda like the pictures on the walls of Oh Calcutta! (the restaurant!! ;P)

SOME of them, however, are all colorful, cause you can't represent India without color! Or without bhel puri!!! Mmm...

LaDiDa

So I started animating!!! I'm just going to be practicing different walk cycles and actions. Simple stuff. This is just the first 13 frames. The head's all over the place, but I think I fixed it. Haven't tested it yet. Mainly because I need to set up a proper camera- the webcam isn't quite suitable =P Dunno what the black bars are.

Yay, finally doing some stuff. But not enough =(

evaporate.

No actually, sublimate. It's so hot!! The one thing I was glad about when I left India was that I could finally escape the heat. But noOoOo. I go to college in a place that has the most inexplicably random (redundant wording? I think it's necessary) weather pattern. And when I'm not in college, I'm with my parents at an equally inexplicably randomly weather scheduled place. I blame my ineptitude at writing meaningful sentences on The Heat.

Anyway- I GOT A TRACING BOX AND A PEGBAR!!!! Now I have to wait till my right arm and shoulder and hips and right leg stops hurting, my eyes stop burning, and my head stops feeling dizzy before I can be-gin.

I had work at HSP yesterday and today the organization is organizing, if you will, their Feed the Kids program. Hence, the organizing part had to begin the day before, that is, yesterday, when I was present- and I was part of it.

I'll start again. Today is the Feed the Kids event (which I am not attending as I don't work there on Wednesdays) where select impoverished families come to the Humanitarian Service Project (where I work) to pick up their pack of food (including veggies, fruits, and CANTELOUPES). So yesterday, I had work there and had to help the volunteers prepare the packs and I was in charge of canteloupes. And canteloupes are heavy, if you didn't know that already. And they start getting heavier when you get to carrying about the 50th canteloupe. In total, there were approximately 180 canteloupes to gallivant around the warehouse with- 2 for each of the 90 boxes. On top of that, there was a powercut. So YAY for that. And I was wearing uncomfy business formal shoes.

Yea yea, it was painful. But it feels good to have done this much at least for all those poor people. Indeed, they're not a part of a really poor county. I think we're like the 47th or 48th poor state in the US. And indeed, their poverty pales in comparison to those lying on the streets of India and Africa and such... But it boils down to this, they all need help regardless of what percentage they represent in a town or state or country or continent, or the world.

So it feels good and it's only my fault I get all tired and sick after a day's hard work. I'm feeble like that. God knows how I'll spend the rest of my life animating.

Right now, college money is an issue.

Here's stuff I didn't have space to post last time. I also got a new sketchbook, but it's pristine at the moment because the right arm is dysfuntional as ye all know. Figures I chose not to post them- they're the worst of the lot, but also the first of the lot so I think I can be excused?

static dynamics

So here's what I've been doing during parts of my spare time- which isn't much considering I have all the spare time in the world. It's not great, but I'm getting better at it.





A little wonky and lop-sided in places, cause I'm saving trees. A very difficult feat for an animator, I say.

Gah! There's no space!

Well ANYWAY. Most of them are not even renderings of live people- they're from pictures. Which, I know, is not the best way to practice drawing. But hey, practice is practice.

Some of them, though, are of my mom, dad and dog. I got a little carried away with my dog and started turning him into a cartoon :P

Those would be the tiny doodles on the last drawing, which don't look like much from a distance, but I really quite like them!




I need to subscribe to some seriously-cool-inadequacy-inducing artist blogs out here. Oh, and I really hope on doing some more Hitchhiker's illustrations. But I think doing this, and getting a driver's license are first priorities.
I'm hungryyy!
Wow this is a messy entry.

Rainy Day.

It's raining buffaloes and kangaroos here in Wheeling. And I just found my favorite color. I absolutely LOVE the green on a cloudy day. It's like this pastel-y green, and it looks delicious against the sky. I'll take a picture tomorrow morning if it's like that again. Forgot to today. It's something to fall in love with. I like the blue too, but I don't think I would like it without the green.

So the whooptidoo animation up there is my first frame by frame hand drawn animation. Just thought of posting it up here cause it gets all distorted on vimeo, and hence, isn't on there.

Ze link to my vimeo would be ze funky crane room picture with my medusa hair in the corner.

=)

This day was bad, but I've bounced back to a doable mood.

Orientation for Adopt-A-Pet tomorrow. No, I ain't adopting- I've got my hands full with Joey. Or my parents do at least. I'm thinking of volunteering there. A reason to wake up on time!

Just realized the vid here is distorted too. Oh well.

so long...and thanks.

So, in order to celebrate the fact that I have finally completed reading the Hitchhiker's Guide, I decided to start doing some random illustrations from random chapters of the book. I got the exact feel I wanted- sketchy black ball point pen drawing with watercolors. BUT I didn't wish for it to look THIS amateurish. Oh well.

This particular one is from the 7th chapter of So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, I believe. It's when Arthur Dent finally comes back to his home in England and discovers a mysterious package among all the piled up letters, which contained a fish bowl in it that had inscribed on it, in subtle silver lettering- "So long, and thanks..". There is, however, one error in the concept, which I just realized- he doesn't put the bowl to his ear until MUCH later in the book. I was actually planning to do that particular chapter before I changed my mind.

Silly me.

decisions decisions.

Ok, so here's the plan.
This blog is going to record my growth (hopefully) as an artist. Hence, all the stuff I do, good or bad, will be up here.

At first I thought I'd be writing about life in general here.

But guess what, I just realized.

Art IS my life.

=)

Glad I got that cleared out.

>> And those random things would be my amateurish pre-cursors to an animation I would like to do sometime in the near future. Inspired by the old couple from UP. I'm gonna work on making them look less scary. I realize it'll take forever to model them. And then animate them!!! Anyway, along with the old man comes a rickety wonky looking typewriter. I see dull yet metallic greens and blues, and lotsof cross hatching. Wait, here is what I see. I'll prolly end up doing a different one for the old man animation. But I do want THIS typewriter somewhere in my works. (It wasn't drawn by me btw)

old leaves.

So I had set out on a mission to edit some videos I took from our visit to Niagra Falls last month. But it didn't work out so I decided to look through old stuff from India in my hard drive. Pictures, but more effectively, words. Saved conversations on MSN, letters I wrote to people..and weird novels I has started writing. Almost brought tears to my eyes. I miss the past. I think I've almost reached the part of my life where I've learned not to deject but embrace the past. So now, although I never thought I would, I miss my old self. And I care about my old self. I think, maybe, reading through all the conversations may have suddenly stirred up this change in me. Or it was always there and I acknowledged it now. I don't know. Once I've completely reached the so-called "part of my life" when things get sorted out, I'll know everything. But then, on the other hand, maybe it's okay not to know everything.

Anyway, here's the first chapter of my "story". I do remember that I infact didn't have a story. I just got inspired and started writing. I wonder if I continued writing now, what it would lead to? See there's a wide range of things I could be doing now, yet HOW i manage to spend days without accomplishing things, I don't know. I think, partly, it's my parents and their presence. I don't know what I mean by that, but it's my gut feelings. Whatever. Here goes Chapter 1:

~

I am always the last person, to hang from his last feeble thread of tolerance. Today, I hung again. Challenging the tensile strength. Which was fun. And like always… TWANG. And the sting tore.

Oops. Here we go again…

I sat on the floor, engulfed by a battalion of words of discontent and juvenile frustration. I waited patiently. I seemed to do that often these days. Either wait patiently, or pacify him, or speak the truth. Usually, I start by speaking the truth, then wait patiently, and then pacify. This was my job. And the side-effects of it were beginning to become more prominent, ever since I befriended this rather old, yet verbally active, man. A 68 year old man.

And I’m not bored yet. This man was infinitesimally interesting. But I wasn’t bored. Not just because my job didn’t allow me to be bored. I don’t exactly know why I wasn’t bored yet. But, I wasn’t. Ouf. And I’ve accepted it.

Obviously, things wouldn’t change. Just get worse. And that’s the fun part of it. And I’ve wasted infinite years of my life waiting for something fun to happen. The fun came since I got the job. It came in freakishly horrifying ways. Entertained me, and left me blunt, stupid…and not so much dumbstruck.

However, nothing fun was about to happen now. This was more than just a daily routine of venting. The “cleansing ceremony” as all my other peers call it. This man had advanced in the performance of unbottling his heavy feelings quite well. He learnt it, from his previous melodramatic, hypochondriac ancestors. And even at the age of 68, he was astonishingly good at it.

But today was different.

And unlike other days, I was meant to stop this ritual of harsh abusing, even though I triggered it.

After all, it’s not always easy to tell the recipient of a “thorough rage-management-therapy” (especially if he’s your client) that his only daughter was murdered by his best friend from kindergarten.

why are yawns contagious?

today was my first day of the internship at HSP. was there from 9.30 to 5.30. Didn't do much- researched poverty in the DuPage and Kane Counties, tried to find out the number of children and seniors in poverty in those counties, and looked up contact info for radio stations and news channels. That's about it.

But I'm so exhausted. I wanna read books on animation. I need to at least finish reading the Animator's Survival Kit. But also the Hitchhiker's Guide cause I'm no way starting it over again to actually finish it. And the Rules of the Road cause it's about time I got a driver's license.

I wish I could just ride a bicycle everywhere.

Pah.

So tired.