Ever Had a Bologna and Potato Chip Sandwich?

I've decided to switch to a new google account, so my blog is coming with me. Not that I update very often, but I like to think I'm going to come into this wonder habit of blogging. Weirder things have happened. In any case, my new blog is at laurenscanvas.blogspot.com

I really need to get into the habit of writing these things. Someone should tell me how they manage it.

ANYWAY. A few updates. Recently on Aramii.com, my first "Ami" was released. It's called the Pherra and so far is very popular. I based it on Herons and Egrets, and is meant to be a Pheonix-like creature. I was also the artist who did all the markings. I then made a little mini-pherra pet item to add in.

I'm very proud to see how much the users on Aramii like this new species. I'm now in the process of making the next one, though I won't way what it is until it's actually released. Suffice to say that this one is going to be different from all the others and I'm excited to see it realized.

So I've joined a new site that gets my creative juices flowing. It's called Aramii, and it's a virtual pet breeding site. There's all these little creatures called Amis, and each of them has a few of 10 different kinds of markings, and anything can be any color you want. It's all done with hex codes, which you can actually see on the Ami's pages. You breed the Amis together and the markings and colors mix and fade depending on the parents. It's in beta right now, and it needs a lot of art, so I've volunteered for the job since I think it has a lot of promise. It's also super fun to draw for.

I got started in Aramii making money by creating adoptable baby Aramiis. So far I've got 3:

The Labeau needs work. It was the first one I did, when I intended them to be kind of sketchy. But then the Lapire and Peregrin ones were done and they're nice and clean. So my next priority is to clean up the Labeaus.

Anyway, now I've been asked to do artwork for the site officially. The owner of the site, Mariko, can't pay me in real currency yet, but maybe someday. For now, she's paying me in the site's currency. I don't mind because all this is really fun to do and I need the practice. Besides, it's a nice little resume builder.

Also, someone on the site asked me to design a tribal tattoo for them in exchange for the pup of some valuable custom made Amis. They wanted a wolf, bear or pheonix. I've only got the wolf done.

I'm trying to crack down and actually make myself blog, in an effort to market myself. Therefore, from now on I'm going to do my darndest to update at least once a week.
The majority of posts will be about the art I've done during the week, and something I've been meaning to start doing as a sort of draw to my blog and my website.
Using my 3D modeling abilities I'm going to start making Papercraft! These will be announced here on the blog, and downloadable from my new website. We'll see how popular they get.

As for the work I've done this week, I've completely redone my website, http://www.laurens-canvas.com. I've got to finish the other pages, such as the contact page and the extras page. There is already a link to my blog there. Along with this, I've created a logo for myself, involving my two great passions. Dinosaurs and Fishies, who constantly do battle in my head for dominance.

Novism Graffiti was a great success! So many people enjoyed playing with our project. I think that it's important that people enjoy themselves when they experience art. It shouldn't be work. The only real hitch with it was that I had to change the settings on the program every day for some reason. The 2nd day we didn't get into the show in time for me to get the settings all ready before people started coming in, so that was a bummer. I had to leave it be with the red and orange not working because someone important wanted to try, who was then disappointed that they couldn't get it to work, because they wanted to use red and orange. I fixed it after they left though. If I had only been able to set up sooner...

I'm happy with how it turned out. I managed to get a lot of screen shots of everyone's pieces, though the outlines for them are on my teammate's computer. So everyone'll just have to guess what these pictures are supposed to be. They actually look pretty cool without the outlines, and a lot of people mentioned this. So I don't actually mind that I don't have them.



The other projects were successful as well. Though I was skeptic about the Lightning one, there's was really cool. You had to sit in a room with a simulated thunderstorm going on, and hit a drum in order to stop it. So you ended up making the thunder, instead of the lightning. I believe they intended for it to be frightening, which it wasn't. But that doesn't mean it wasn't successful. The picture overlay project was neat. I had no idea what they were really going to do, but I'd never seen anything like it.
They basically changed the shadow of anyone's hand that was in the box into a picture of something related to the background image. It was pretty neat.
I sadly didn't get to try the College Experience, since there was always a line outside it and I got distracted and forgot until the next time I looked and saw a line.
The cool fractal image project was impressive. I actually have no idea how they managed it. But it was fun to play with all the same.
The Colors project was fun to play on, even though I don't really know what it was about.
I think the Singing in the Rain project would have been more successful had it been in the same room with the rest of us. It was out in the hall, so many people didn't notice it. But it was definately the fanciest looking, with the motion sensing umbrella and everything.

It was fun, I'm glad I got to take part in it.

Progress on the Wii-Graffiti project is going smoothly. We're not calling it Wiifitti anymore though, since we decided to remove the wii part from it and instead just do as the L.A.S.E.R. Tag people meant for their software, and use a laser. Only we're adding our own twists to it. Instead of graffiti, we plan on making a sort of large digital, projected, movable coloring book. The general plan is to use two projectors, one for the painting program, and one for an outline that other people can try to color in. It's my hope to see people enjoying this project for the interactivity.

We've decided to call it Novism Graffiti, meaning that it's a way for non-artists and people who don't have the guts to do real graffiti, to try it just the same in a completely harmless, removable way.

Though the software provides easy to understand instructions we are having some setbacks. We have no way to set the camera the way they say we should, so I'm a little worried about how much white the program is going to see and then paint. The tracking settings are hard to do too. Every different lighting scenario causes a different effect on the laser, and it takes time to change the settings to fit that.

Still, I believe we can do this. I'm pretty excited to get this working properly. We got it set up in a really dark room, but the projector was too far away so it couldn't see the red dot of the laser very well. So it didn't produce optimum results. But I think once we're able to set up our own projectors this will work golden.

I've never really liked poetry. Perhaps I'm just callous, and not understanding of other people's more emotional sides. Perhaps I just don't know how to express myself. Perhaps I don't understand it, or maybe I just can't be bothered to read a bunch of rhymes or rythmes that either make no sense or make me want to gag. I'm sure there's good poetry out there. I confess to loving Doctor Seuss, who I suppose was a kind of poet. There were some other funnier poem books I enjoyed when I was in 4th grade or so. But then came high school, and the sort of black dribble that came out of my co-goths mouths and was written in their notebooks made me wish I was blind and deaf. I haven't liked poetry ever since.

I'm sorry to say I'm even less impressed by this hyper-poetry stuff. At least my friends in high school wrote things that made some sort of sense when you put the words together. The majority of the stuff I've found makes no sense at all. The ones that pick random words from a generator obviously can't help themselves. But a lot of the other ones, their authors having actually tried to write this stuff, still are completely inane.

There are some good parts I suppose. Everything has good parts. I'm intrigued by the idea of hyperlinking within the poem, to another poem. The whole tree-like effect is unique and I applaud whoever thought of it. Another is the use of random shapes or some other visual, though these are often as unnecessary as much of the text, at least it gives me something to look at while my brain slowly turns to goop. But I wonder about these things. Poems using these methods become more about the gimmick than the writing. People looking at them are drawn in by the novel ideas, not the thoughts and emotions put into the writing. Is this what their authors meant for the readers to experience?