Recent work

My website is still down, I know. I'm waiting to get some help with it right now. So, still working on it.

I've been sketching daily at work to get back into practice. Here's one result that turned out rather well:

Something I'm finally starting to work on after wanting to for several years is a series of illustrations based on my dreams. Back in university, I was required to start a dream journal by a drawing teacher. This was when I discovered that my dreams are, apparently, far more peculiar than the average person's. Which, I suppose, bears out with me being far more peculiar than average in general.

Anyhow, I feel like I've finally achieved enough skill in my drawing to really do this series justice. So the other night I did a preliminary sketch based on one of the dreams that has long been a favorite of mine: I dreamed an evil robot was going to destroy the city unless I could make it a good margarita.

I like the face on the right-most robot the best, but the body on the middle robot is my favorite. So I'll probably switch heads on those two.

Where the hell have I been???

So I just wrapped up a one year volunteer gig as Chief Script Writer in charge of herding cats coordinating writers for a local amateur theater company known as FASS. It's a group affiliated with the University of Waterloo that writes and puts on a musical comedy each year. The show is in January, which meant that during November and December I was wrapping the script, and January I was busy rehearsing for the performance in February.

But Anna, you say. It's now most of the way through March. Well, my time since then has been spent on three trips to Ohio, battling the plague, and recovering from a cracked rib. (Tae kwon do sparring accident, nothing sinister, I promise.)

And now I've got a lot of catching up to do. So first thing's first.

Yes I know my website is down.

My webhost went out of business in December and I somehow didn't get notified. I didn't really find out until we were about to go into production on the play, and I'm only getting to rectifying the situation now. I know, I know, bad me. But I hope to have something up no later than Easter - I'm making inquiries about new hosting right now.

Secondly, I'm getting back in the swing of being creative. For the past year, I pretty much haven't done anything creative that wasn't script-writing; I just didn't have the creative energy to work on FASS and my own projects as well. Unfortunately, my drawing and writing skills are horribly horribly rusty. I have two different plans for this.

Getting back into writing form

So I started another blog. It's rather embarassing as of yet, but it's a blog in which I will attempt to force myself to do writing daily. It hasn't happened yet - getting back in the groove is hard. But I'm hoping by mentioning it here that will make me feel a bit more accountable to the five of you weirdos who have actually followed this blog and to the ten or so of you who check in every several months or so.

Anyway, here it is: Wundergeek Writes. Fair warning that I fully expect the things I post to suck for at least the next six months. I've had to do this before and I'm pretty familiar with how it goes. But the only way to get good again is to actually write, so I suppose I'd better get the pain of sucking over with now.

Getting back into drawing

Drawing is a bit of a harder faucet to turn back on, since it's not so much a thing that you do as a way of thinking. I've found that when I sit down with my sketchbook, I have trouble of thinking of things to draw. So I've been visiting the Daily Sketch Group over on the ConceptArt.org forums to mine old DSG topics for ideas of things to draw.

It's been working out well, so far. I'm starting to get back into the groove. I even did an original sketch the other day. So I thought I'd at least post some of those here so there would be something concrete to show:

Dude, the topic was "freaky looking creature that has the qualities of owl and grub". I kinda freaked myself out drawing it, which is why I draw an owlcat to make sure that owlgrub wouldn't get too uppity. Brr.

The Valkyrie is one of my favorite roleplaying characters ever. When I was playing her, I would draw her with a silver-age style costume - very skimpy and superhero-y. But I thought I'd try my hand at a more heroic and less scantily clad Valkyrie. I like how it turned out.

Zombie Santa! I had a lot of fun with zombie Santa here. I hope you can read my hastily scrawled notes.

Fog excursion

Last night, I went to go take out the trash and I stumbled into a wonderland of fog. It was so amazing I went inside, grabbed my camera, and told my husband that we were going for a walk, despite that it was after 1am on a Saturday evening.

Now, fog is very challenging to shoot in - especially at night. You can't see very much detail through the viewfinder, so you have to use your knowledge of what is there to mentally compose shots in the viewfinder with the elements you can see. You also have no idea if your camera is interpreting the light levels correctly. And there's always the risk that the camera isn't going to pick up all the detail that you can see so clearly. Plus I was pretty tired, so I didn't want to mess with the tripod.

I got lucky last night, though. A lot of shots turned out, even though many others didn't. I'd definitely like to do something with some of these, but I'll have to de-grain them first.

All in all, I got some great stuff. Take a look:

I love the sweep of the headlights here.

I totally expected zombies to attack us at any time. Totally.

You can't see it, but we were very near the highway, so there were these monstrous tall lights to light the highway. Kit and I kept joking about lights in the sky, since you couldn't even see the poles. So I got him to pose for a silly shot of him being "abducted".

Again, the tall lights are the lights next to the highway.

We kept joking that the rendering servers had crashed.

My photography instructors always said that the key to good night photography is to capture different kinds of light sources to get different color shifts. It's funny how lights that look white or yellow at night shift so radically "on film".

Spooky!

This picture took so long to take I had totally dismissed it as lost. I was delighted that it came out.

On Facebook, a friend left the comment that this photo made him feel like he was playing Left4Dead. I found that amusing.

Willows + fog = awesome.

Kit liked posing in the fog.

Coming back, the street outside our house.

The oft-talked about novel about my old job

From the day I turned in notice at my old job, I swore that I was going to write a novel based on my time at [Dysfunctional Company], a 'names changed to protect the guilty' kind of affair. It will make a metric asston of money, because everyone will think it's fiction because it will be just too absurd to be based in truth. I've kept a lot of things that I wrote about my time there, and I've made notes about how such a novel would be structured, and from time to time I consider dusting off the project and making a serious go at it.

The only thing is that every time I start to go through my notes from that time, every time I start to remember all the stuff that made me crazy and angry and miserable about that job, I find myself shying away from the project again. It's been more than half a year, and I still don't know if I have enough space yet to be able to work on this project and actually make it funny.

Huh.

An amusing side project

A friend of mine is having her first book published soon, and the person who was originally going to put her cover together had to bail out at the last minute. She asked if I could take the photo that had already been manipulated, add a neon sign, and put together a simple cover with title and her name.

I wound up doing two different versions, as the photo I was given was horizontal and I wasn't sure how cropped she'd want it. Since I had extra space to play with, I made myself some custom splatter and set it as a multiply layer over a free rust texture I grabbed off the internet and... voila!

I do have to admit that I added the line break in the middle of the title to assuage my angst about the lack of an oxford comma. My inner grammar nazi strikes again!

Total time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

I wish I got emergency design projects more often. This was fun!

Photography update

I've been doing a lot of photography in the last several weeks since I've been out of work in attempt to build up my landscape portfolio. I'm rather lucky in that, since I only live 45 minutes away from the Niagara Escarpment, there is no shortage of amazing scenery immediately available. Here's just some of the close to 1500 photos I've taken in the last few months.

I want to organize my porfolio a bit more, but the plan is to apply to around 20 Toronto galleries before the end of the year. I've talked about doing fine art photography long enough - now it's time to put my money where my mouth is.

The state of affairs (long post)

Happy Birthday, Robot!

At GenCon, I was lucky enough to be able to play Happy Birthday, Robot! with Marc Majcher and a friend of his. (Alas, her name escapes me. I met so many people at GenCon...) It's an adorable little game in which you tell stories about robots that always start with "Happy Birthday, Robot!". I think Daniel Solis has hit upon a real gem, here, and I highly encourage interested parties to go check out the threads on Story-Games pertaining to HBR.

I enjoyed the game rather a lot, so I promised that I would do an actual play in the form of drawings. Which I did.

Success. I should do comic stuff more often.

Illustration

I've got a few jobs in the works, right now. Not to be coy, but I'll have more about that later once I have something to show for my efforts.

Photography

As mentioned in my previous post, I've updated my website to bring my online portfolio up to date. I'm working hard on putting together porfolios to send out to local galleries, as well as sending out letters to local photographic studios that might need assistant photographers. I've also been working on beefing up my portfolio of fine art landscape photography as well, and hope to be able to post photos from some of my most recent hikes soon.

If you know of anyone local to the Greater Toronto Area or Region of Waterloo who needs some photography done, please do consider referring them to my website.