Would not be enough to convey the sheer amount of life that has transpired while my online presence has been, for lack of a better term, lacking. I do hope that’s over and done with, though: I’d hate to think I blew all that cash on my very own domain for nothing.
I must say, though, it has been a rough couple of months. I was recently involved in my Army Open House held at Pasir Laba Camp from the 3rd to the 7th of September, which preparations required me to (finally!) get out of my normal holding area in Sungei Gedong camp and over to the much-more inhabitable world of the School of Infantry Specialists.
Well, at least outside of the school, at any rate. Anyway, long Army rant ahead, so yea, if you want the really juicy bit, scroll all the way down.
Is something that I’m still really kind of new to, despite my previous experience with Zazzle. Most of the time, I was mainly fooling around with bullshit ideas that I really wanted to sketch out in vectors rather than with pen/pencil and paper.
Recently, though, I’ve been in a design rut of late (no thanks to my current stint in the Army), and after receiving some inspiration from several sources, I’ve decided to start again at a steady pace.
So I loaded up Illustrator and got to work. Here’s a small sampling of what I’ve come up with so far.
Are awesome. I’ve been reading on watercolour painting for the past few months, and been working with Corel Painter for a bit before I headed off to the army. As opposed to working with stuff like oils and acrylics, you work from light to dark instead of dark to light, conventionally speaking.
It almost mirrors film and digital photography, where in the former you expose for the blacks and develop for the highlights and the latter vice versa. Really, it’s not that obfuscating once you understand the actual workings behind the smokescreen. Sort of.
Are two of my favourite colours, in case the entire site hasn’t made that obvious. It’s also how I’ve chosen to shoot stuff recently, by which I mean with a camera, and not something else more suited to my current vocation in the army.
So my first roll of black and white film was pretty much an all-around positive experience, my second roll of film decided to truly and completely fuck me over, and yesterday I finally got my film scans back from the new photo developer I’ve decided to try out, because the first one I went to was closed on Sundays and that just happened to be the day I would head all the way to the city just to develop my film.
So you’ll notice that my Flickr hideout has had a sudden influx of photos, presented, curiously, in a format that I’m usually more comfortable with when it’s fully customizable. And I mean customizable in every sense of the word; where I can make red look like goddamn green if I want it to. All with minimal artifacting, made possible with the advent of RAW.
Imagine my surprise when I found myself at the nearby coast, on my bicycle, clutching an unfamiliar Nikon F-301 to my chest, Fuji Neopan ISO 400 black and white film loaded within.
36 shots, and a whole length of beach to cover. It’s a monumental task.
But who says dying means the end of all things? As Left4Dead proves, this is not the case.
In truth, I’ve been playing a little too much, eating a little too often, running and exercising too little, and it’s resulted in predictable changes in my lifestyle: I’m now a slob.
A slob who may still be playing Team Fortress 2 and more recently, Left4Dead with reckless abandon, but still a slob. I’d normally make the obligatory ‘content’ post which would mostly comprise of several photographs taken recently, but I’ve come to realize that it’s a wasted endeavour, seeing as it’d be much more productive to post them on forums or elsewhere and actually get some constructive feedback, rather than enshrine them on some meaningless server for all time.
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