Sunday, December 31, 2017

2017 Recap

It's that time of year: New Year's Eve! Which means I'll be reflecting and talking a bit about how 2017 went for me overall, as a person and an artist. This'll be one of my longer posts to kinda keep you updated on what's been going on.


Here is my artwork summary of 2017!

The year started out fairly busy with my curriculum work that lasted until May. In the meantime I was able to do some art for myself, including my Eventure Doodles project. I got through almost all of the Eventures that were numbered at the time.

Since then, I have been reworking my story a lot and adding in parts earlier on. I created a few documents to keep myself organized, including a document for sorting the Eventures into arcs. That helped me re-order some of the earlier ones and really hone in on which ones fit together best. And all-in-all, we finished 9 Eventures this year! That's a pretty good average and tied with 2012 and 2015. That's technically the third highest number of Eventures per year (since 2011 and 2016 were tied for second with 12). I'm impressed we did so many considering how busy this year has been.

So back in the spring, I had the opportunity to participate in two weeks of Spring Break Camp with iD Tech. I met some really great people there and had a lot of fun. Then fast-forwarding to June, I taught at iD Tech's Stanford location: the biggest camp they've got! I was a Lead Instructor, so I had a lot of responsibilities and roles. It was a crazy experience, but I'm glad I did it. I learned a lot and was able to set some new goals for myself based on the experience.

After the summer, I flew to Kentucky to hang out with my friend Jinny for a week. It was great to have this vacation after the busy summer. And then after that vacation, I went on vacation part two where I went to Las Vegas with a group of co-workers and friends from iD Tech. It was the first time I had gone since I was a baby, so it was a lot of fun to see. So much good food and company!

Then I finally got back into working on personal projects full-time when September came around. I worked on personal projects for a few months and was able to accomplish a lot. I also worked a lot on the game I've been working on with my friends for about a year or so now. I finished a lot of re-writing and proofreading that needed to be done. We're still not sure when we'll be ready to post new information about that, but I'll definitely be posting here when it's time for that. We're doing a lot of re-working to make sure that it's up to the quality level we hope to obtain. This is slowing down our progress a bit, but it'll be worth it in the end.

And as usual, I participated in Inktober, Huevember, and Digicember this year. Inktober was a weird experiment where I designed new characters not for my main story. It was fun at first, but I started to run out of ideas towards the end. Huevember was a mixture of Huevember and NaNoWriMo, so it was also a fun experiment. I started spending a lot of time on them though, so I wanted to try out sketching more often. And that's when Digicember happened where I decided to be a lot looser with my work and it was the most successful of the three.

In December, I started my job back up with iD Tech, writing curriculum. This time around I'm also writing the new GameMaker curriculum, so that's been fun working in so far. Since I only started a week before the holiday break, I haven't worked a whole lot yet, but I'm excited to continue working once we get back from the holiday break!

Overall 2017 was an interesting year. I think I did a lot better in my personal life, so that was a nice break from some things that happened in 2016. I'll talk about some plans for 2018 in my next post, but overall I'm hoping to squeeze in more time for personal projects on days that I'm working so I can keep on practicing. 2017 was probably my busiest year so far, so that's why I might've updated a bit less, but we'll see what 2018 brings!


See you in 2018!

Saturday, December 30, 2017

More from Digicember!

Sorry I didn't post yesterday, I've been busy this week! But here are some Digicember drawings.


27. Akuma & Kaenah
Both of them keep to themselves for the most part, so since they don't talk to each other really, they'd probably be awkwardly standing there if they were to interact.


28. Veetoff & Gair
Veetoff has hated Gair ever since he found out his grandpa was the one who betrayed the Tano tribe. Veetoff always picks fights with Gair and calls him "the traitor," so they're basically rivals now.

Thursday, December 28, 2017

Delayed Digicembers

I didn't have time to draw any Digicembers on Christmas (and the holiday season has been keeping me busy), so I'm a little behind on these, but that's okay!

25. Piko & LMoF
Piko and Little Master of Fire are sparring with their water and fire powers.


26. Pubby & Lonny
These two are really good friends, so they get each other phone charms as gifts. Pubby is a lot happier with his gift than Lonny is though.

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Christmas Eve Sketchbook Drawings

I went to my grandpa's house for Christmas Eve, so I had a chance to do some traditional sketches in my sketchbook! I also took advantage of my colored pens since I don't use those often enough.






Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Bobolo River Eventure [Stop Motion Animation]

This year for Christmas, I worked on a very ambitious stop motion animation for my brother. I actually started this back in October, when I planned scenes, created props, and recorded the video. I ended up finishing the project in whole about a week before Christmas, so it was nice to take a break from looking at it constantly before watching it on the premiere date.


Since this video is GIANT, I don't want to upload it multiple places.
Please check out the video here though!
(the video unfortunately couldn't be uploaded at full quality because the file size was too large, as well)

In whole, the project took me 94 hours and 40 minutes to complete. And it's 38 minutes and 54 seconds long in total. This is definitely the longest video I have ever exported out of Premiere, which is why it took about a day to actually export. Also I didn't even export as the highest quality, because that probably would've taken another full day in addition.


The opening was one of my favorite parts because it involved a lot more drawing rather than pure video editing. I tried to make it look like an actual TV show opening.

I initially wrote this script in September 2016. This Eventure felt very contained and like a complete story on its own, so I thought it would work best for one video that I could share even with people who aren't familiar with the whole story.

This project has a lot of silly things like my voice acting and weird action figures to represent them, but it was very reminiscent of where The Nays actually started. It started out with us playing with action figures to create a story. We pretended our original characters were these action figures and we would play with them in various places of our house.

And now I want to share a few individual still images from the full video to showcase some of the best parts. Please excuse some parts of my house that can be seen in the background, I tried to cut most areas that weren't props out, but some scenes it just couldn't be avoided.


































Monday, December 25, 2017

Merry Christmas!

Here are some Digicembers for Christmas!

24. Sarah & Ann
Ann's a nice person so she's cheering Sarah up on Christmas Eve. I don't think these two have ever actually interacted before though.

23. Clove & Megumi
Both of them ended up in the Cold Springs after time traveling, so they ended up connecting there. Clove's a lot more outgoing than Megumi though, so she was the one to initiate the friendship.

Sunday, December 24, 2017

Merry Christmas Eve!

Tomorrow is Christmas, which means a drawing for my 3 best friends of our characters! This year I decided to draw our animals: Pubby (my character), Abandon (Hillary's character), Tails (Jinny's character), and Daisy (Laura's character).

Here's the final drawing.

Aaand the process of how I got there: