Not usually a fan of downtime, I figured it was best to try to fill the void. A vacation that warrants the opportunity to doing nothing has always been difficult for me. So I figured it best, to make a Plan or Few, so that I didn't get restless or bored.
And as today comes to a close, I go over in my head of exactly what I DID accomplish-- and it still seems as if "doing nothing" was indeed something that turned up in a few moments last week, but not many.
Organizing is ALWAYS a great mind cleanser. Things about my house were in such disarray over the past few months that it felt good to get organized. So I sort through stacks of mail, sorted through overlooked business cards, cleaned up the paper lying around the tops of my office desk, organized and cleaned up space on the disk drives of my workstation and laptop (recycling a red barred 8 gigs into a blue barred 28 gigs-- completely wiping out the overruled 15 gigs of free space rule). Gone with the garbage! Argh! I tossed away and filed paperwork, properly updated my invoices and tracked my the speeds of workflow from scribbles to .doc. I was taught to at least always "try" to keep track of how long everything takes me while working. Just so that I'm self aware. It is indeed a good habit to get into when you're trying to speed up and it's an easy task, but for some reason, at the very end of the day it is an annoyance. So, I do the best I can and always try to incorporate it into my invoices so that it soon becomes a priority versus a practice...
It felt good to get organized. And it was a long time coming with the past few months.
I also dabbled back into some traditional skills. Picking up a pencil and laying it to a piece of paper had been another huge area that has been suffering for a while now. I have been itching to draw again. To really draw-- like I used to-- outside of my sketches and anatomy studies. So I took an attempt at drawing a portrait, or what I consider more to be my interpretation of a girl named Zoe.
As I had written, on my Facebook "Portraits: Never been a forte, but always good for refreshing the training of the eye... It's been a while... Next time I will go back to the grid, I think, though. Can't lose with that method!"
I mean it. It was a last minute piece and although it had taken a couple hours of my time-- I still find that the grid method that I was taught when I was a young student at my local library always worked like a charm! I had taken portrait classes in charcoal and pencil and we were taught to use that method religiously. I will definitely seek to use this method should I venture into another portrait. The best part about this method its that it breaks down the image into mathematically accurate components that can easily determine how the subjects of the image are laid out. The proportions of the subjects are easily deciphered as well with smaller areas of positive and negative space....
Yup, artsy-fartsy talk in all its glory. ;)
Anyways, It is a popular method that I'm sure most are aware, but here is link or two that kind of explains the approach:
GRID METHOD ONE
GRID METHOD TWO
This approach can also be used for a number of different avant garde experiments when you really start to think about it by "box" components instead of as a whole image. For instance, check out some of the works of Chuck Close.
Lastly, I attended an event in the New York City hosted by Oceana Digital for The Foundry, a software development company, in which they demoed Nuke a popular composting program and one of their newer hatching, Maridadi, both strong forces within the Visual Effects industry.
The event seemed to be a success, bringing a large volume of both followers and professionals alike, and offering a pleasant combination of fun mixed with earful of inspiring and useful techniques for navigating through their software.
I left with a small buzz and large ever-growing interest in Mari-- a program which I learned of back in issue 129 of 3D World, where they first discussed that Weta Digital, who initially developed the software as proprietary for use in Lord of the Rings (I believe) and the onto King Kong, and finally onto Avatar. As soon as I read the article, I was asking around about it and flaunting some trivial FYI knowledge-- such as Maridadi is swahili for "beautiful" -- Dumb facts like that in which I get accused of being a brown-noser, but I've always been keen on absorbing the weirder, less significant details. Mari is now being released for usage of companies outside of Weta Digital is now plays a large role in high resolution textures and look development, the latter, which I have always been fond of as a possible career option in relation to its close partnership with previsulization. I would imagine, however, a program that closes in this level of detail such a Mari (Mudbox and Zbrush and Vue, as well) is probably more commonly used while in Post-production.
I will comment more on its features in my next post. But this particular post is a glimpse of how I spent my week. Inspired for more still-- and wishing what we all wish for sometimes: If only vacations could last forever because last week was a really great and memorable week.
