Apparel design
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.
Ok, maybe I am d...
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.
In the midst of ...
I somehow still seem to exist among the very fabric of the universe that continues to operate, even I as tend towards the other end of the spectrum.
I’m currently experiencing not a writer’s block, as one might be inclined to think, but rather, a coder’s block, defined as which (by me) to be that of an inoculate attitude towards anything unproductive, which is to say, I haven’t gotten around to coding the site up, and without that, so goes the motivation to keep it updated.
I’ve been trying, for the past few months, to get my ass together in order to ensure that what may prove to be the turning point in my life (whatever’s left of it, anyway) doesn’t go unrecorded in its excruciating detail. I’ve been holding off on updates since then. Unfortunately, since a few months have slid by with no sign of such achievements forthcoming, I suppose that I’ll have to start playing catch-up with the updates.
I’ve been sketching around with the tablet, among doing other illustrative work, and come up with a whole lot of new crazy ideas to throw around my desk, for games and comics alike in my absence. But let’s start with something a little different; a little recent. Then I can get back to having to recall painful memories.
Technology is in...
The world wouldn’t be able to function without it. It would, however, probably survive the advent of Windows Vista.
I’m not exactly sure about my own acquisition of Vista, as I’ve mentioned before. It seems like wherever you turn, you can find a million reasons as to why you should, and shouldn’t get yourself a copy of that vaulted software, until you end up not even caring. Honestly, with all the fanboys and anti-fanboys around the block these days, it’s hard to find yourself being objective about something anymore. Even Tycho has reservations about his own pertinent upgrade.
I’ll probably be getting it ‘because everyone else is’, though I might consider using Ubuntu as my primary OS instead, with Vista being relegated to something that I’ll use for kicks. Honestly, I really don’t see the point in it; it doesn’t offer me anything that I require other than improved aesthetics. It doesn’t give me better font management, it doesn’t give me better colour management, it doesn’t even make the shell skinning process any easier than it was in XP. I mean, Aero looks nice, but I know it’ll get old on me real fast, and I’d like the ability to be able to swap shells at will, if you know what I mean. Granted, XP never exactly had a very user-friendly skinning engine, but at least I know it works.
I haven’t exactly been using my O2 XDA II to its fullest potential ever since I got it a few years ago. Well, just yesterday, all that has changed. After browsing around a few sites, I was surprised to see the abundance of applications and enhancements available for my Pocket PC’s outdated operating system. I had, in fact, considered installing something like NetBSD over its Microsoft counterpart, but decided against it, for the horrors that could perhaps come with such a decision. I have, however, managed to get Blender onto my little thingamajig, which is probably an achievement that few would dare accomplish. Amazing what PDAs can do these days; even CAD isn’t out of the question for a tiny XScale processor.
You’ll note, of course, that I also have a new T-shirt design up on my store. The story behind the design is really quite amusing, actually; it spawned out of watching my friend vandalize his tabletop during a lecture and tagging off with the trademark of a phrase. It stuck in my head, and I promptly spit it out in Illustrator. It’s also my new Pocket PC wallpaper, which is amazing in itself, as I’ve been using the default wallpaper and theme ever since I first got it. I know I suck.
I really like the fresh look to it, the way it seems so Web 2.0, yet retains the feel of a communist propaganda poster. It’s also worth noting that it’s the first time I used Scriptographer, specifically to enhance the look of the little bubble box right there, though I did do some manual adjustment of anchor points after the script had worked its initial magic. I think I’ll be using a lot more of such interesting tools in the future.
I know the right column on this blog is in serious need of an update, what with my extensions to my extended life and all, but also because I’m about to embrace Blogger‘s label functions. You can already see some of them at the bottom of this post. Hopefully they’ll make my posts much more organized and easier to browse through than being merely arranged by random, arbitrary dates.
And I’m planning to add a Google search field as well. Will they ever find a place that they can’t permeate with their unbelievably awesome search functions?
One wonders. And I still have a Maths test tomorrow to study for; Physics didn’t exactly go along very nicely as I had planned. Even with the win over Thailand. So much for good omens.
Oranges are red ...
A very, very slight shift on the colour wheel, I assure you. This was confirmed via my various eyedropping tools in Illustrator. Of course, I am babbling bullshit here, but basically, the reference picture I took for a little new T-shirt design turned out to have odd lighting, to say the least. The shirt design was originally to have been on plain white, but I realised the Web 2.0 gloss didn’t exactly pop when placed against such contrast pure. Besides, red kind of fits Chinese New Year, which served as the inspiration for this design, anyway.
Perhaps this would be a sign of things to come. (For Illustrator junkies, contrary to what you may think, I didn’t use any 3D plugins of any sort to render the orange on the right. It’s really amazing what you can do with gradients without relying on computer algorithms to render depth and substance. Almost scary, in fact, when you look at things that come out from places like these.
Anyway, as an extended treat for myself, I’ve cooked up two wallpapers, intentionally kept simplified to allow for extensive customization, as to your own individual needs. I believe they are of a large enough resolution for most of your desktops.
The Dragon design which I did earlier, as I had originally intended it to be before deciding to keep the wings and the dragon head separate:
And the new Orange design, though in a palette more complementary than Asian-themed. I prefer cool colours as compared to warmer tones. Do with it as you see fit for your own desktops. You do know how to use the Magic Wand tool, right?
Indeed, the urge to order one of my own designs for the approaching festivities becomes more difficult to withhold. Maybe if more people bought my goddamn designs, then I’d have enough profits to purchase one of my own designs.
Hint, hint.
Anyway, Vista is only a couple of days away, and the wait is just about killing me. I can’t wait for it to be released, because it marks the start of the rig race, one in which I do believe will involve me finally getting a brand-new workstation for my vindictive pleasures. And of course, I’ll finally be able to play GRAW the way it was meant to be played; the memories of going 15 FPS at 320 x 240 still lingers, and haunts my nightmares.
EDIT: I just realised that the table in my Oranges wallpaper isn’t anti-aliased. I apologize; usually I work with bare pixels, and those require a lot of auto-smoothing algorithms in Photoshop to be turned off. The problem is, I always forgot to turn them back on when I’m working on normal stuff.
Dragons rear the...
On my Zazzle T-shirt store, after an extended period of absence. The first of many, as the title will proclaim, for the year of 2007. Remember, wearing it can give you the power of flight.
Incidentally, it’s also one of the few 2-sided T-shirt designs I’ve advocated, and it’s my first for a shirt without its white equivalent. Call me crazy, but for this particular design, I really don’t think black on white would do it justice.
That’s the front side. The back, as you might recall from earlier post, incorporates the wing design that I was working on earlier. You’ll notice the immediate deviation of style from my past designs in terms of its size; usually I try and maximize fabric real estate as much as possible; for this design, however, I chose to go with a more minimalist design so as to fit the style of the icon that adorns its front.
I may actually order one of these myself, though I have a strict policy against adoring my own works. But Chinese New Year is around the corner, and such a shirt as a harbringer of prosperity would certainly arouse my amusement, albeit weighing in at a hefty 50 Singapore Dollars (after shipping). I’d get it in blood-red, of course, if such event were to pass, but we’ll have to see.
I’ve been getting slightly more worried about my own personal study habits as of late. They’ve mainly consisted of trudging my way up a steep slope after a singularly useless day at school, plopping myself onto the couch, and taking a power nap which sometimes can last past dinner. Which is actually worrying in itself, but I’ll come to that later. What’s more pressing is that I’m hardly motivated to even crack open my pencil case anymore to get to work on my assignments or tutorials, and when I do, the urge to rip apart said material becomes overwhelmingly and increasingly malignant.
It’s worrying. And I’m not an advocate of sleeping throughout the day, but I fear the school’s air-conditioning system has conditioned my physical self in such an manner that I may find non-conducive. And since I will never wear a jacket to school unless I have an examination to sit for, it’s likely to stay that way. The solution is not, I feel, to force students to wear jackets; it’s to allow manual control over the air-conditioning system. It’s almost hypocritical to exult that energy-saving is to be a big part of the new privileges assigned to us, yet turn the fucking temperature down enough to make a polar bear feel cold-blooded.
A niggling last issue upon my mind is that the frigid wasteland also keeps me in a constant state of flu, which can only end in two ways: pneumonia or death. In case you were wondering, I’m not really a fan of either outcome.
Really.