It's been that way for nearly a month now and I'm still not sure I'm used to it. Going away to University has been a very bizarre experience. I've learned how to buy groceries, how to manage and not manage my time, how to keep an apartment clean, and a whole slew of other things I'd never really thought of before.
Before I delve into my artistic endeavors as of late, I just want to give a little update on my life in general. I have a job now, that's new. I do custodial work at a building on campus at four in the morning every Monday - Friday. It's been a little difficult, keeping up with both school and work and everything else, especially when everyone else I seem to meet is here with some prestigious scholarship under their belts and are only taking the minimum number of credit hours. But sometimes I take heart at the fact that I'm taking a lot of classes and have a decent job to help support myself. I'm really learning a lot about being responsible. And I really do love my job. All my co-workers are so funny and really nice - except when they're trying to scare you at 4:30 in the morning, but it's all good. The work itself really isn't too bad, either. We've finally hired a lot more people since I started working (my first week of work we had a crew of three people for the entire building) and the building isn't all that dirty to begin with. Enough about work. Classes are going alright. My Drawing class is by far my favorite. It's very leisurely and yet I feel like I'm benefiting greatly from it. I'm taking Anthropology, American Heritage, Book of Mormon, and the History of Creativity as well. I'm also in a Freshman Seminar class for the art programs. I only have it once a week and all we do is have guest speakers talk about different art fields. Our final for that class is going to be a pinewood derby. It's probably the one final that I will have absolutely no stress for this whole semester (possibly for all of college). My other classes are great and all and I love listening to the lectures (mostly) but the homework is killing me. I never thought I could ever be so sick of reading in my life. Me! Whose family only recently had an entire room devoted to books and knowledge. Ugh, do you know how hard it is to concentrate after reading for basically five hours straight with breaks only to take a few quizzes on the things you're supposed to be learning about in your readings? Okay, okay, enough complaining - on to the art!
This is a cake a friend and I made the day before I moved out. It's based on this iconic cake from the videogame Portal. This same friend and I have had many baking adventures before and we always end up making stuff up and being very slap-dash and experimental without much prior planning. This has made for some rather interesting adventures. Like the time we made fluorescent jell-o with tonic water. Anyways, we made the cake from a mix, but then added food coloring to the two layers to be the colors of the portals from the game. The frosting was another adventure in and of itself. I never knew how hard it was to turn something brown. We didn't necessarily want it to be chocolate flavored, so we just tried to dye it brown with food-coloring but it ended up this horrible cement-looking color. So we eventually caved and added some cocoa powder to it and voila, brown frosting. Sorry about the fuzzy pictures, I only had my iPod with me.
Okay, enough about food. Now for the thing I've been dying to post about for the past few weeks. Salt Lake Comic Con!
This is what I based it off of. It's Asher, a character from mine and my sister's comic.
I also decided to make a tutorial about how I made the shoes. I'd say more, but you can just read the tutorial.
I'm also still planning on fixing the soles of the shoes so they're sturdier. So who knows, you may get a third edition of this tutorial sometime.
And now for a few pictures from Comic Con itself.
I'm going to be lazy and just copy what I wrote my brother about it in an email.
It took us a while to find their booth (which was pretty much the biggest one there, but we were just looking on the wrong side of the convention center). We wandered around and looked at all the stuff they had - sweet swords and prop replicas and the like. I finally made my way to the counter to buy a pretty cool Weta hat (which you can kind of see in some of the pictures and is totally my favorite hat in the world now) and asked the cashier (who had an incredibly awesome New Zealand accent) if she actually worked in Weta. She said she just worked for their marketing stuff but pointed out two guys to me that actually work in the art department. The first guy I talked to (he's in one of my pictures - he's tall and bald and wearing a green shirt and talking to some other people) is the master swordsmith for Weta. He gave me tons of awesome advice about networking my talents and getting my foot in doors and to be the best in my field and always pushing myself to be better. It was kind of unreal to actually talk to him. Afterwards I got him to sign this ComicCon poster that I got for free. It was so great, all these people were spending fortunes on photo ops with William Shatner and Adam West, but I got to have a lengthy conversation, signature, and photograph of one of my new heroes pretty much. Later we came back and talked to one of the main modelmakers (seriously, there's practically nothing Weta's created, especially anything for Lord of the Rings, that he wasn't somehow involved in). Talking to him was both super encouraging and also a little discouraging sort of. He confirmed my fears that CG is completely taking over and very quickly eliminating the need for extensive, high-quality models in movies nowadays, but he also told me that that's no reason to not keep doing it. Talking to him was even more amazing than David Lyon (the swordsmith) and it took a lot of will power to not geek out. I was seriously almost shaking I was so amazed and awed to be able to talk to him about what I love doing and what I want to become. He also signed my poster and I've got it hanging on my wall now to remind myself of my goals. He's also in the picture I took, standing in black on the right side. I've been wanting to watch the Appendices ever since and build things and learn how to get better and just plunge headfirst into making my way to Weta caliber work. That was definitely the best part of the convention, but the rest of it was pretty great too. We met someone with a pretty awesome GlaDOS cosplay. They had an awesome-looking Tardis from Doctor Who that you could walk into and take pictures and stuff. The lego place was also pretty fantastic. My pictures of it aren't the greatest, but they built Hobbiton, the Argonath, Helm's Deep, and Baradur out of legos. It was pretty impressive. We also talked to a few comic artists and learned a lot of cool stuff from them. They had a Mos Eisley food court set up. Everything else was pretty geeky and awesome, but not nearly as memorable and meaningful as talking to Weta.
Anyways, sorry it took me forever to get this up (I actually began writing this post right after Comic Con, but I haven't been able to finish it until now . . .)
I suppose you could say my tip this time is my shoe tutorial, but I also want to say: Follow your dreams. Don't be afraid to do whatever it takes to be as awesome as you can be. Yup.
And since this post is focused on Comic Con and Weta, I encourage you to go check Weta Workshop out. Here's their website: wetanz.com And if you're a die-hard LOTR fan, go watch the Appendices for the extended-editions. Most creatively inspiring things ever.
