"Judge Us Not Equally Abraham"

This weekend Val and I went up to Denver for her cousins wedding. That isn't the point of this post. That'll be soon enough.... Aaaaannyways, Val and I decided to rent an Audio book from this place called Aardvark Audio books. We had our hearts set on Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter and so we rented it. What an amazing book! All I can say is that this book is ridiculously good but very, very dark. The book starts out slow but give it a chance. It takes about 4 chapters before there's any real vampires but after that it takes off!

We were a little apprehensive because Val's dad and step mom said that another of the author's works, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, was a little too heavy on the Pride and Prejudice and not enough on the zombies. I'm glad that that wasn't the case with this book. The details of his actual life and the vampire aspects are woven together to the point that you start wondering if this book might actually be real! It reveals dark aspects of Abraham Lincoln's life, both fictional and non, and does a great job at story telling. Great read if you're into zombies or even horror. :D

The Woman Robot Saga

I'm very slowly building my robot and I even have a scene planned. She's going to be pulling herself away from the wall that she is plugged into. I'm gonna edit in some steam for effect. I'll also build a scene based off of the Hungarian movie "Kontroll". It has these awesome gritty scenes and there was one particular one that I liked. It'll be pretty cool. The torso is going to be tricky and I'm going to have to look at a lot of reference photos for the different parts.

I like the green glow :D. If anyone wants to leave feedback I would love it!

Nice dynamic angle :D

Side view.

Seriously! If anyone has any ideas or critiques let me know. I'm always looking for input!

Woman's Head: The Robot

This is something I made based off of the robotic woman in Starcraft 2. I'm going to work on it a lot more but this is a good start. I also haven't made it so that the parts are interacting together with the light.

Woman's Head: Part 2

Here's the next part of the woman I'm making. I'm not sure what I'll do next and I never learned how to do hair so we'll see how that goes. I'll probably do skin textures and stuff like that. This will be my first time doing this. :D

3 quarters view.

Distant side view.

Front view.

Woman's Head

I started on a new project since my "toughbot" was getting to be a little bit of a pain and I didn't want to work on it any more. This is what I've been working on since yesterday. It's a woman's head that I found a picture of online. It's a huge pain to find good reference photos for modeling! I'm almost done with it and will most likely post pictures tomorrow. :D

This is when I was pretty much done with the facial features.

This is where I stopped today. I just need to smooth it and then connect all of the pieces together. The ear was a pain but I found an awesome tutorial that helped A LOT!

Ear tutorial

Happy Birthday and a Teapot

Val and I were sitting around trying to figure out what to do for her birthday. We could not think of ANYTHING. It was not good. We had to find something new and different to do. After about an hour of thinking Val thought that it would be fun to go to Art Attack, a local place where you can paint your own pottery and things that they have prepped and ready for painting. We settled on a teapot that sits on top of the teacup that it comes with! I thought it was going to be weird and full of old people, but it wasn't at all. In fact, it was a bunch of artsy college students. Weird right? Yeah.... really weird. Anyways, we felt right at home and everyone was really nice there.

"I love tea..." in french

Val drew this character walking. How great!

Annnnd here she is again.

This is from the other side. It says "me too..." on the top, in Hungarian.

And this is what it looks like seperated :)

After we finished our couple teapot I asked the lady that worked there when it would be ready. "By Wednesday", she said.

"What!??!! Wednesday? Aww man", was my response.

"Well, I am throwing some into the kiln now and have some extra room.... I could put it in and it would be ready by tomorrow."

"That would be great! Especially since it's her birthday today," I said, pointing to Val.

"Oh! Well! Happy Birthday!"

So we were actually able to pick it up today, which was quite exciting since Val and I NEVER get to work on projects. Great times were had by all.

As a side note, the lady said that this was literally a ONE time thing. She would never do that normally and we would not get to do it again. How lucky for us that she let us do it at all! Well, hope you enjoyed this post and support your local art places!

Starcraft 2 Beta Invite

Just a quick little post. I opened my email this morning and found an email from Blizzard, the creators of such hits as Starcraft, Warcraft, and of course World of Warcraft. Anyways, I while back I had signed up for betas for both WoW and Starcraft and today I was invited to beta test Starcraft 2. So basically I get a sneak preview before it comes out. I don't get a lot of time to test and play it but hey it's better than nothing. ;)

RUN FOR IT!!!!!!

Totally rigged my "Toughbot" up. I also posed him like he is about to take off sprinting.

Vallecito Drawings

I've been forgeting to do my sketchbook lately. So as a fun little thing I decided to include my pictures that I drew at Vallecito.... I know! cool, right? Aaaaaanyways on with the show.

This is kind of sad about Vallecito. There was a huge fire in 2002 and a lot of the trees were burned. This is a drawing of one of those trees. When we talked to some people in the area about it they said that the area burned was the size of the state of Rhode Island. It's sad but when we saw that the forest was growing back with such force it was pretty hopeful :D.

I drew this thing because I thought that it was pretty bizarre. It's a bronze antler that was turned upside down in order to look like a statue. I loved it so I drew it.


Here's a page with some Hungarian on it. The robot is balsting the page with his eye laser and saying one moment to someone. I thought that it was kinda funny..... heh.

In the upper right hand corner is a guy I made when I accidentally made a thick arm and turned it into a head. I think it looks pretty creepy! The little guy singing was inspired by Katamari Damacy. It's not the prince from the game but just one of those guys.

This is the song he's singing:

There's some more Hungarian. I don't know if it's right but it should say in English "Where is my dog?"

Chubby was the name of the horse I was riding.

Most of these drawing were for Val.

On this page I tried to draw a bird pretty realistically. It didn't go all that great :P

These are some guys based off of that guy creepy Charlie. (If you look a couple of posts back you'll see what I mean.)

Well. That's everything. I wanted to make a little bit of a longer post since I was jealous of Val's epicly sweet/long posts. As a last note Val and I's friend Ken is in Las Vegas. He sent us some pictures and a picture of his Hungarian friend. It's so crazy how many Hungarians we are discovering in the world. They're EVERYWHERE!!!!

Vallecito!

This past week I went to a cabin on Vallecito lake with Val and her family. We had a great time. Very relaxing, good restaurants, and most of all horse back riding :D. Here's some videos:

Great times! That's all for now. I just got back from vacation a couple days ago and everyone's pretty beat from all the relaxing we did. ;D

The Last Airbender......

I don't think there was anyone more excited about The Last Airbender than the group of people at the midnight showing of the movie premiere at midnight this morning. People were dressed up as characters from the tv show, some had arrows drawn on their bodies. I made sure to wear my Appa shirt to show off my own personal fandom. Unfortunately, it was not worth the effort.
I don't want to give out any spoilers for anyone that wants to see it but know that I thought that it was not a good movie..... at all. However, beyond getting the names wrong, Aang was called Ang, AND changing huge chunks of the stories original plot, the movie was just poorly made. I don't blame M. Shamalan though. It just seems like the movie ran out of money. However, rather than using lower quality special effects, the rest of the movie suffered for the few special effects that there were.
The editing of the movie was bizarrely paced. Some sections seemed to drag while other, more important sections, flashed by.
The dialogue was atrocious. For some bizarre reason it seemed as if someone thought it would be a good idea to leave out EVERY pronoun in the movie. This caused some incredibly redundant sentences. This was especially true when referring to the Avatar. I have no idea why.
The bending was also done in a way that seemed to be saving money. Rather than having each martial arts move cause some sort of bending, the martial artists would do these incredible complex moves and then a small little fire blast or air blast would appear. It seems unintentional and another sign that this movie had a very low budget.
Overall, as a fan I cannot seem to fathom why things were made the way they were and why Nickelodeon studios decided to make the movie the way they did. What I do know is that this was a film that ran out of money far before it ended and this combined with poor writing ruined this movie for me. I would say that anyone who was a fan of the show should probably pass and anyone who has never seen it, catch it when it comes to Nickelodeon later this year.

Effects: 8
Story: 6
Dialogue: 2
Overall: 5