lately

Quite a few things have happened since my last post about life. (though until this week I was keeping up with life.is.sweet)

Basically, I'm back to doing college classes and learning a lot. Cramming in math so I can finish the level I'm stuck on right now to take environmental science starting the 30th. And I somehow had (most) of the money to buy an awesome little something for my computer/work/school.

Oh yeah! And Fine Arts is coming up again soon.

college classes

they started back up on the fourth. English 111 and History 137 for right now. I was hoping to be able to take English 102 and First Aid originally. That way I would continue from English 101 and also get my first aid card. But, there weren't any seats left in English 102 (thus I'm taking 111 - literature) and no First Aid. If you're familiar with Harry Potter (I personally love the books) then you'll understand the following metaphor / correlation. If you're not, well you might still anyway.
Basically they have this class called Divination where they're supposed to find the deeper physic in dreams and tea leaves and stuff. Well, basically Ron and Harry didn't understand of believe in the class and to make it through with a decent grade they would just make up random dreams and "interpret" them how they knew the teacher would like.
That's what it feels like I'm doing with my literature class. Seriously. Literary art (literature), like any art is highly in the eyes of the beholder. Everyone has a different opinion and definition of what art is and so I don't think some writings can be referred to as literature while others are left out. And if it's not something I connect with then I have no deep insight into what I've read. In fact, a lot of what the teacher has had us (the students) read so far are depressings things that I SO did NOT understand.
But, I knew the "lit babble" (my term) that he wanted to hear and just applied it to my work. Voila, good grade.

math

to borrow the colloquialism: 'nuff' said

the little piece of awesomeness

which would be my new Wacom Bamboo Create.







I was SO excited when it came in the mail! I literally took these as I unboxed it. I was dancing and squealing all over the place.

Originally I was going to get the smaller Bamboo Capture but wanted to have more working space on the tablet so decided to save for the Create. SO happy with it! I've wanted something like this for a long time but never really got around to looking at what was out there. I started thinking about it more last year at Fine Arts because I wanted to digitize my t-shirt design to make it look better. But it's really hard to digitize a drawing into a digital mockup. Now, I can draw right into my computer. Also, I got a nice discount because of my Amazon Student Prime account. And I just looked at the price now, and it's actually got up! Glad I ordered when I did!
For a little size-reference, my laptop that it's sitting in front of in the second picture, is 15".

The night I got it I seriously stayed up until 2am playing with it.

Finished my first design with Sketchbook Pro.

For those of you who don't know I actually design clothes...I've just never really shared them with many people. But this one I was super excited about thanks to the wonderful tool called 'layers' where I can pick which can be shown and colored. That way I can work on one piece of clothing / of the design at a time. This design actually is something I mostly got from an episode of Stargate: Atlantis but loved so much I had to draw / make some changes to. I'm still a little iffy about the way the underbust/cape lays/billows.

Also, the tablet comes with Autodesk Sketchbook Express 2011, which is great in a lot of ways but has some limits I was really frustrated with. However, I looked into it and Autodesk actually has something called the Autodesk Education Community where if you're a student you can sign up and download their software for free! If you're an artist I highly suggest Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 2011!
Since I'm drawing and stuff so much more I finally got a DeviantArt account as well. You can find me here.

I'm looking forward to sketching out my Fine Arts t-shirt design submission!

Which brings me to the next subject of late...

Fine Arts

it's coming and I'm working on getting some work from the church to make some money to pay for gas. Last year I painted the walls in the basement of the church building. Boy that was a lot of work! But it paid for gas to Fine Arts and back so it was well worth it. Besides gas money, we're also figuring out some place to stay. My dad has some old friends that actually live about twenty minutes from where the district fine arts festival is being held this year, so I'm hoping we'll be able to stay with them!

all things considered

Life is good and God is providing.

listening: bullet soul by switchfoot