a few things

1) Website = not going so well. Because it's for ME, I keep changing my mind. I think I'll just have to settle on something and then change it by season. That's what I plan on doing with my branding colors. Since I also cannot settle on them.

2) I need to post something on my YouTube channel. I've been neglecting it. But the song I want to do I don't know how to play, exactly. I might just end up doing an a capella self-harmonization version of it instead of trying to learn it on guitar (I can't find the tablature and cannot play a song just by listening to it).

3) I'm back in drawing cycle again. Kind of. Usually it's either music OR drawing. Right now it's both. Because I kind of have time for both. So that's fun. I drew outside today until all the bees, wasps, and other forms of NATURE made me withdraw back into my cave (my room).

4) I'm back in crappy teen romantic dramedy mood again with my movies. How do I know? I just finished watching "A Cinderella Story". That movie with Hilary Duff and Chad Michael Murray? Yeah. That one. I have a love/hate relationship with this particular mood of mine. I love it because it means I'm happy (because these shitty movies make me happy somehow) and I get to indulge in my oft-neglected super-duper-girly side. I hate it because it's embarassing. Also I feel ashamed to be watching such superficial films instead of artsy smart ones (like my film buff-self would) or wicked-cool actions or sci-fictions (like my visual effects geeky-self would).
HOWEVER. All will be returned on Friday when...

5) STAR TREK COMES OUT!!! I honestly can't wait. I'm not even a Star Trek fan. I don't think I've even watched a single episode. But Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are in it, so that's a draw right there. But I won't pretend that they're the only reason. I was watching the trailer one day and there's this part where THE WORLD IMPLODES and as it did MY MIND EXPLODED. The effects are so beautiful I want to cry. And that's why I want to see this movie. The boy eye-candy for the girly-girl and the effects eye-candy for the visual effects geek.

Ok that's it for now.

DFTBA!

the launch of lauranicole.ca

For a few months, I had the address lauranicole.ca redirect to this blog, in lieu of putting up a real website. However, since graduation, it's occurred to me that I'll be needing to have an actual website upon which to host my portfolio and stuff. So I finally cracked and bought a hosting package and now if you go to lauranicole.ca you'll be directed to a page with a "coming soon" flash video on it and several links (one of them leading here).

If you visit that page you'll also notice that I've given myself a deadline to finish the thing: two weeks. And I'm really going to try to stick to that deadline and have the website all worked out in two weeks for its final launch onto the interwebs. It might also co-incide with the launch of my new live webcast show. I'm not sure.

On this blog I'm going to be posting some of my progress, including images, and links to resources that I have found to help me. So here's the first bit.

I used www.videocopilot.net to help me with the coming soon page. It's in a tutorial called "Disintegration" that's really super helpful. Though the lighting was my idea. I liked the way it looked like it was a light shining through water and the words were floating off into the murky depths...

Here's some stills of the "coming soon" animation:

i mean bid-ness

My current (and mostly final) business card design. Minus the fact that the information is all fake on this version ;)

Front:


Back:

business card

Obviously, the one that I'll be handing out will have real information on it, but you get the gist of it.

Fred | Nebula designs

Characters I'm working on for an animatic I'm doing. It's about a superhero teen named Fred aka Nebula. His best friend is CherryB. These are just some character designs I did today.


Jenny the Vole. Completely unrelated to the above drawings. Unless she somehow features as a super sidekick pet or something. But I doubt it. It was just something that Jenny (my friend. Who is a human, not a vole) commissioned/asked me to draw.

Hey! It Looks Like a Website Now!

As opposed to looking like a DVD menu, like it did before.

I can't believe that I've color branded myself with pinks and purples. I think I'm pretty much crazy. That is the only explanation for it. I plead temporary insanity.

But cool thing, I used GIMP for this project which is like an Open Source version of Photoshopola (sort of). I find the Mac version kind of annoying because everything is separate windows and I accidentally minimize things to my task bar thingee. And you have to double click the windows - one to activate the window and one to choose your tool or start painting or whatever.

But it gets the job done fairly well, and if you can't afford Photoshop (like me) it's a great altertnative.

See also, Inkscape, which is like an Open Source version of Illustrator and actually IS awesome. I didn't use it for this, but I've used it for other things and it's pretty great to use. Thought I'd just mention it anyway.

The Niddy Griddy

We had to create a three, two and one column layout for typography, and here is what I did. I used the same copy about Michael Buble pulled from his website, but this is what I came up with.

For what ever reason, with the two column, the JPG rendered outside the artboard. This the random picture of Michael's album cover.