somewhere out in my mind

Riding Dino in the Races

2011-07-27T09:16:00.002-04:00

As always, things have been incredibly busy and making time for creative ventures is difficult. Sometimes, it's just easier to revisit previous work. So: Remember this guy?

With your help, he may become a t-shirt!

For the last few weeks, he's been undergoing extensive critique over at the Threadless forums to become ready for submission. And now, he looks like this:

For the next 7 days (July 27 - August 3) this design is up for public scoring. Please take a look and leave a rating -- how he scores will help determine whether he moves on to be reviewed by The Powers that Be over at Threadless. No matter what, though, I'm so proud of how far he's come from his #dailysketch origins.

Thanks!

2010 in Review

2010-12-30T23:18:00.009-05:00

Happy New Year!

It's hard to believe that 2010 is already over! With another year gone, it's time to look back and see what has been accomplished.

Last January, I set one main goal: to remember to make art.

At very least, it was important to remember to make time for art in my life. With my very broad personal definition of art (pretty much any form of creative expression), the odds of meeting this goal were strongly in my favor.

Shortly after setting this goal, I took up the #dailysketch project. The "daily" part was soon abandoned as I found flaws in the plan and other activities upon which to expend my energy and time.

In February, my new camera was given a trial-by-confetti-fire in Manhattan's Chinese New Year parade.

Through the winter to mid-summer, I took to crafting - picking up knitting for the first time in years and teaching myself to crochet. I indulged in some crafty geekery (documented in more detail here), joined Ravelry, and this blog started to see a trickle of regular visitors thanks to some very kind cross-blog promotion by the Pixelated Mushroom.

I also tried my hand at cake decoration, using colored marshmallow fondant. The Great Cake Decoration Experiment taught me three things:

Kneading fondant, even marshmallow fondant, is HARD. (My arms and hands were quite sore for the days that followed)
The people who decorate gorgeous cakes for a living must be incredibly patient as well as talented.
I don't really like how marshmallow fondant tastes.

The Cake is [not] a lie

2010 was not a great year for my involvement in audio drama activities as I generally stayed behind the scenes and did not do much. However, I did cheer from the sidelines as I saw my friends over at the 4077th get themselves up and running.

Art appreciation was also high on my to-do list, in the form of visits to proper art venues, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Denver Art Museum....

The Denver Art Museum has one of the most vertigo-inducing

architectures I have ever encountered.

And a horse on a giant chair.

Not actually from the Denver Museum of Art -

just a statue in Denver.

Other instances were merely exercises in thinly-veiled geekery combined with the opportunity to meet in person various artists and creative people I admire and enjoy.

I even got to thank Neil Gaiman for his part in inspiring this!

Perhaps appropriately, given that it was technology and the Internet that led me to the articles and quotes that got me thinking about creative endeavors, that technology has helped keep me engaged in discovering new outlets which are likely to keep this effort going into the next year and, hopefully, onward.

For instance, pointed towards the SketchbookX app on the iPhone by the guys at DarkMojo Productions, I learned that working on the #dailysketch project was only as difficult as pulling out the phone I have with me all the time.

Drawn and colored on the subway using my fingers and a phone!

We truly live in the future.

Twitter has also put me in contact with a new collaborator, Julio Angel Ortiz, whose writings are being released in e-book format. I am helping him with covers for his stories about Palequus and Peter, the ex-Reaper and cherub who go on paranormal, paratemporal adventures. The first story featuring a cover illustrated by me, Unnatural Time, was released a couple of weeks ago on Smashwords. It's fun and bizarre and a tiny bit Steampunky - great fun to draw!

In retrospect, 2010 has been an amazing year - I've created and indulged in more creative activity than I have in a long time. I am certain that part of it has been due to increased awareness, making the effort, making time. This coming year will be harder - in the next few months alone, I will need to finish and defend my dissertation proposal, get IRB clearance... Life will increasingly get in the way.

I hope to keep the momentum going.

I hope to continue to find and make the time to make and appreciate things.

I hope that the things that need to be done get done and the things I want to have done can be too.

I hope that everyone has a happy new year!

The Doctor and I

2010-09-10T23:44:00.034-04:00

Okay, so this isn't the epic blog-dump I had intended, which would have covered what I've been up to in these last nine (!) months. That post is coming... eventually.

Instead, this is the "short" version - mainly a post about knitting, crocheting, and crafting, prompted in part by the stream of new visitors visiting here via pixelatedmushroom. (Hello new visitors!)

It wasn't long after I started the #dailysketch project that I realized I'd overlooked a very important downside to my plan - coming up with new sketch ideas is hard. Not that the project was supposed to be easy, but spending more time each day trying to think up what to draw than actually drawing... that just wasn't going to work.

As an alternative, I decided to commit myself to one massive long-term project that (1) I could work on a little each day, (2) would end with tangible results and (3) most importantly, not require a lot of thinking. This was supposed to be therapeutic, gorramit!

The ideal project was obvious: A 12-foot Doctor Who Scarf. And after four months exactly, knitting ten minutes to an hour every day, it was complete!


Easy peasy. The real question is what to do with it now that it's done!

Following completion of this project, it was pretty clear I was now hooked on crafting. I'd gotten so into the habit of making something each night that it felt weird not having something to work on. Furthermore, after four months of the garter stitch, back-and-forth, back-and-forth...I felt ready for a challenge!

Browsing Etsy and the CraftyTARDIS Livejournal Group for ideas, I stumbled upon pixelatedmushroom's fantastic10th Doctor Plushie pattern. Being very much a fan of the 10th Doctor and finding the pictures of the finished product adorable, I decided to make my first foray into the world of crocheting.

Over the summer, I taught myself the basic stitches (via the magic of YouTube), fought through the hand cramps, leveled up by learning some basic amigurumi techniques and completed my first crochet project.

I'd say it came out pretty darned well:


The Oncoming Storm

The Doctor loves his TARDIS


Ready for Adventure!

Working on these projects have been great experiences and I've not only learned new crafting skills but the quiet repetitive nature of the work has given me time and space (heh!) to think and draw analogies to process struggles in my "real" work. Therapy indeed!

Moving forward, I know I'm going to continue crafting (I've already started another, non-Who scarf and have been "commissioned" to do various projects by family and friends), and I'll be documenting the process here, on Twitter, and on my Ravelry account. A thought that lingers, however, is whether this is really in the same spirit that prompted the #dailysketch or if it's something else altogether.

A month or so ago, I posed to my hive mind on Twitter the question: "Is crafting the same as making art?" and received no real response. So far, I am certain they're very closely connected, but I have not yet decided if they're quite the same...or if that even matters.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

[P.S. To anyone who is familiar with my pet peeve about object-pronouns and is surprised by this post's title... Blame Barrowman]

Earth Day 2000 - 2010

2010-04-22T22:43:00.004-04:00

So, it's been a while! A proper catch-up post is on the way. However, given that today is Earth Day, it seems appropriate to dig into the archives and recycle some old material. (Ha!)

Way back at the turn of the millennium, having successfully negotiated Y2K and the mass panic that technology would fail and civilization would fall, I was enrolled in my high school’s computer graphics class. Two sections of the class existed, using our “state of the art” computer graphics lab – one section focusing on CAD, the other focusing on Photoshop (5!). Identifying myself as more of an “artsy” type (I guess some things haven’t changed so much) I opted for the latter, which meant an hour and a half a week each week to mess around with whatever images we could unearth off of Lycos or Altavista Picture Search. (Sidebar: I can’t imagine kids today being given the same freedom to explore the Internet wilds – if I recall correctly, there were hardly any filters or rules!)

One of the few mandatory assignments in the class was to develop an entry for the Earth Day 2000 campaign. I’ve long since forgotten what the actual prize of the contest was, though I imagine it had something to do with advertising and posters and random merchandise. I was simply excited to enter a real art contest. I may have even created my first e-mail account to enter.

Below is what I submitted:

I was so proud of it. It had taken me the better part of a month to put together and really reflected my Photoshop philosophy at the time: blurry equals better (no crunchy pixilated edges). I loved how the dolphin and eagle traced the edge of the nebula and the way that the (very obvious) paint daub filters made the colors blend and glow…

I was even prouder when I learned that it had made it through the first round of competition.

For weeks I tracked the contest - only to learn that the entries that had made it through to the final round were all crayon drawings by elementary school children!

It turns out that the “youth” category included everyone under the age of 18, and, really, who was going to vote down the little kids? Oh well.

Ten years on, I’m fairly amazed that I still have a copy of this piece (saved through progression from floppy to ZIP disc to email and USB). I know it’s not that great - it’s actually pretty cheesy and kind of screams "high school girl," but the fact that it was one of the first pieces I ever made on a computer, that it “nearly” won a contest, and the sheer earnestness of it all... I can’t help but have a certain affection for it.

Happy Earth Day Everyone!

#dailysketch: Remembering to Make Art

2010-01-16T23:43:00.042-05:00

The Internet is awesome.

I learn something new from it every day. I encounter new artists, authors, books, shows, media, movies, music... and seeing what other people are writing, making, and thinking gets me excited to learn and try things out for myself.

On New Year's Eve, Neil Gaiman posted a beautifully stated set of wishes on his blog, which included the following:

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books... don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself."

It got me thinking. How often do I "forget" to make art? How often does my impulse to draw, write, photograph, or sculpt get pushed aside and lost because I'm distracted or overwhelmed or simply too busy with everything else I have to do?

I realized that if I wanted to do creative things, I needed to force it into my schedule -- make a "want-to" into a "have-to". This is a model I'd seen work for people before, my favorite example being Jonathan Coulton's "Thing a Week" project, and he's even written about how forcing himself to work made the music happen...and how the desperate frenzy to make-it-happen had a role in sparking inspiration.

Around this time last year, Cory Doctorow noted the importance of maintaining a routine in an article that explained how he manages to write as much as he does, despite all the distractions. Since reading the article, the part that has stuck with me the most was his comment that "It's not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it's entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes." I've since learned that this is absolutely true. Using this approach has helped me power through things I've had to do for work and school... why not apply it to doing something I want do do?

As a result, #dailysketch was born.

The goal is simple: set aside (at least) 10 minutes every day to sketch, doodle, or draw something, anything. It doesn't have to be good, but it has to happen.

It's easy enough to find 10 minutes of time each day that would be wasted otherwise. And anything I draw, even if it's terrible, only serves to hone my abilities. Chuck Jones used to tell his students, "All of you have one hundred thousand bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone." If nothing else, this would help me get rid of my hundred thousand bad drawings.

Beyond this, #dailysketch is about getting things onto the page. It's too easy to avoid doing things out of fear that they won't come out right. In response, I've decided to steal Wil Wheaton's mantra:"It's okay to suck. Don't be afraid to suck. It's easier to fix a lame scene than fill up a blank page."

So that's it. 10 minutes, every day (or as close to every day as possible): The good, the bad, and the downright awful.

One week in and I think it's going well.

On Sunday, as a warm up, I did practice sketches using poses from a Doctor Who magazine.

On Monday, I drew a mad scientist riding a dinosaur down the street. The mad scientists would turn out to become a recurring theme, partially because they're fun and they amuse me, and partially because they're surprisingly easy to draw.

Tuesday brought a mad scientist girl greeting her robot minions. Note that all the robots are copies of "Eh" from the Robots of the Company prologue I illustrated. He's become my default for whenever I need to draw a robot.

Wednesday was a tribute to the domestic applications of mad science. I especially like the jar of olives/eyeballs in the background.

Thursday, I decided to expand my theme to superheroes, and wound up with a silly piece about Superman's inability to dress appropriately for a night out on the town. Not one of my better ones in concept or execution, I'll admit...

On Friday, I revisited the main character from "Bottom of the Barrel," who has always been my go-to character whenever I'm not sure what else to draw. Hopefully the use of two default characters in one piece aren't a sign of early fatigue!

And on Saturday, I attempted a 3-panel piece. Again, not one of my better efforts, but I think the first two panels came out much better than they had any right to be.

So, that's it so far.

With the new semester starting up in a few days, I can only hope that I'll be able to continue at this pace. But even if I don't, that's okay too.

So long this continues on a fairly regular basis, I'll be happy. Perhaps I'll change the parameters to once a week. Maybe I'll expand it to include writing, photos, or other projects... The rules don't really matter because at least I'll have remembered to make some art.

Thoughts, comments, suggestions, and requests are all welcome!

Holiday Roundup

2010-01-16T22:30:00.012-05:00

Happy New Year!

A new year is here, bringing with it a lot of other newness.

First of all, Santa was very good to me this year, bringing me a shiny new Nikon D5000. Hurrah!

Revel in the shininess!

And the weird meta-aspect of taking a photo of a camera...

Taking it on a brief trial-run, I quickly realized that there would be a considerable learning curve. So many buttons and settings!

It'll be a while before I'm able to do everything I'd like to do but with time, perusal of the shockingly thick guidebook, and slow weaning off of the automatic presets, I'm sure some really cool stuff will happen. Oh, the potential!

I took a few test shots of our totally awesome Christmas Tree but they don't really do it justice. It was hard to capture the aura which beckoned to us on the lot...

Our totally awesome Christmas tree

The holidays also brought along some new Sherlock Holmes goodness. No, not that Sherlock Holmes. This Sherlock Holmes: The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. Specifically, The Case of the Stalking Death. The Misadventures (or MOSH as the folks involved like to call it), is the brainchild of Victor Alpha and follows the good detective on some of his sillier adventures. I've been lucky enough to be involved with MOSH on several occasions, both behind the scenes and in an acting capacity. The Case of the Stalking Death is a particularly special episode because it's one of the few episodes I was ever-so-slightly more involved with. (Mostly, I was allowed to sit in on a couple of production meetings and shared my thoughts when asked.) Plus, I played Queen Victoria. In all fairness, it's probably the worst Queen Victoria ever, but how often does one get to be a Queen for Christmas?

It's been a very promising start to the new year and I look forward to seeing what comes of it. I am hopeful that this year will bring more opportunities to engage in art and creative endeavors amid the madness and demands of academic life. In an effort to make this happen, as a sort of belated New Year's resolution, I've challenged myself to find (at least) 10 minutes every day to sketch, doodle or draw something, anything. It doesn't have to be good, but it has to happen. More on this in the next post... Bring on 2010!

Trick or Treat! (Coulrophobics Beware)

2009-10-29T20:59:00.013-04:00

It's almost Halloween, so that means an extra-special holiday audio posting!

"Yuppo Knows" by MJ Cogburn & Robin Carlisle

A little background:
As much as I enjoy doing voice work, I don't often audition for things. This is because I know there are a great many actors out there who are better performers and better suited for the parts I'm eligible for. Quite honestly, I find it can be just as fun to listen to them perform (if not more so).

I am very lucky, however, to know some incredibly talented people who are occasionally willing to give me a little nudge and cast me in projects. MJ Cogburn is one of those people and "Yuppo Knows" is one of those projects.

"Yuppo Knows" was a somewhat scary prospect for me and not just because it was a Halloween story. My terror came from the number of departures it marked: It was the first time I'd recorded something for a group other that Dream Realm. It was the first time I'd played anything close to a main character (okay there are only five characters in the piece, but it was still a big deal for me!). On top of all, it was entirely out of my usual playground of sci-fi comedy, being dramatic and downright creepy. All this newness was well worth it, though - I think the final product came out quite well!

"Yuppo Knows" was released on October 18, 2007 by Brokensea Productions as part of their month of Halloween productions. The cast includes me as Bobby (an eight-year-old boy), Paul Mannering as Yuppo the Clown, MJ Cogburn as Olivia (Bobby's mother), Rick Rhoads as Newscaster Tom Alexander, and Jon Morss as Newscaster Michael Rosenbaum.

Fun fact: Google tells me that "Yuppo Knows" was nominated for a "Golden Icepick" award in 2008. I'm not really sure what that means, but it's nice to hear that it was nominated for something...

Sun, Still-Life, and San Diego

2009-06-24T11:04:00.020-04:00

Okay, enough with the robots. For now. It's hard to believe that it's already practically July. JULY. Where is the summer going? Between work and the weather (rainy and gray for most of the last couple of weeks), I have to remind myself that there can be a summertime that is shiny and sunny and which exists outdoors. I keep thinking about my recent trip to San Diego. Never mind that I went in April - the weather there was so relentlessly gorgeous and bright that it just had to be seen as summery. We just don't get sunshine quite like that in NYC.

Cabrillo Park

While I was out there, I spent a lot of time with a family friend who has become very involved in photography. His specialty: photographing flowers. As a result, I learned three things: 1. I seriously need a new camera. My previous one died a sad and soggy death involving drum corps and a tornado, and my loaner camera (a Sony pocket Cybershot) just isn't cutting it. 2. A disproportionately large amount of my time in San Diego would be spent in and around gardens.

Botanical Gardens at Balboa Park Self-Realization Fellowship Meditation Gardens

3. California has some of the wildest plant life I have ever seen.

An Alien Plant?

Since I was spending so much time at the gardens, I decided to try my hand at some still-life flora-based photography. I've not done much of this before - my subjects are usually people, typically people running around a football field with flags and large noisy instruments. All things considered, I'm pretty happy with the results.

And here's a picture from the trip which has absolutely nothing to do with flowers:

Children's Beach, La Jolla

Why? Because seals are awesome.

Bots, Books, and Beginnings

2009-06-18T23:24:00.012-04:00

For a while there were rumblings and rumors that DRE had notions of turning Robots of the Company into a book – a real book, a proper novel, even, with dialogue and descriptions and subplots and other such booky features. I’m not entirely sure where this idea originated but somehow the project wound up in the hands of my friend and frequent collaborator, Victor Alpha.

Victor is an incredibly talented writer who amazingly manages to juggle writing duties on a number of projects and audio series, including the wonderfully odd and silly Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. Plus, I am led to believe he is actually James Bond when he is not writing a half-dozen scripts at the demand of his Whiteboard Taskmaster or catering to the imperious whims of his cat.

I could not and cannot think of anyone better suited to writing the ROTC novel.

Much of the book would be written in the madness that was NaNoWriMo of 2007 and I would not get to see it until it was completed. However, I jumped at the chance for a sneak preview when I learned that Victor had already completed a prologue for the novel, a short standalone story written to set the tone.

Reading this prologue, I was utterly charmed by the tale of the lonely little robot and was quickly inspired to do some scribbly sketches to accompany the text.

Before I knew it, I was illustrating the whole prologue. It was just too much fun adding extra layers of absurdity!

I’m not ashamed to admit that I particularly enjoyed drawing the scene below. I mean, how often does one get to draw a robot talking to a plus-sized space-suited social worker, surrounded by a sky of flames?

Not nearly often enough, I say.

I especially like the pearls.

One day, I hope that this prologue and/or the full novel actually gets published.

Until then, I am perfectly happy to keep doing goofy drawings to go along with the work of a writer who always manages to make me laugh.

Thanks for the inspiration, Victor!

On Radio and Robots

2009-05-28T23:25:00.012-04:00

It would appear that my goal of updating this blog on a weekly basis was perhaps a bit overambitious.

Life-related craziness and technological fickleness seem to conspire against timely blogging. These last few weeks have been particularly marked by the demise of my main home computer – the machine on which I created and stored most of my projects from the last five years. Thankfully most if not all of my work has been backed up. However, thanks to the inexplicable way my computer area was set up, this now means that my scanner is inextricably hooked up to a large metal doorstop and will be inaccessible for the indeterminate future.

So, until things are back up and running, it looks like posts will have to be based on whatever I have saved to my laptop.

I suppose for now that means robots. People like robots, right?

Sometime around 2004-2005, I joined an online audio drama group called Dream Realm Enterprises. The flagship series for the group was a strange and silly science-fiction comedy program called Robotz of the Company, which was broadcast online and on a few independently-run radio stations in the U.S. and Canada. In the early days of the series (i.e. when I had more time), I wore many hats in the production process, acting as script editor and casting consultant, as well as occasionally penning an episode or voicing a character.

As the series wrapped up its second season, it seemed like it might be helpful for the writers and producers to have a shared mental image of what the different characters were like. Based on what I imagined from the performances, scripts, production notes, and chats with the production staff, I worked up some concept sketches for characters in the show (all robots) and ideas for other bots which might one day exist in the series’ universe.

These sketches include several miscellaneous designs, as well as ideas for featured characters and series regulars such as Boffin the cockney engineer, Maxi the walking, talking button of unknown purpose, Captain Jammer, and Shinwipe, the administrative bot.

In truth, no one ever asked for these drawings. I just wanted an excuse to doodle the characters.

Does it count as fan art if it’s based on a project you’re involved with?

More on these bots in future entries…

Fan Art Friday: Rent

2009-04-24T23:57:00.012-04:00

'To days of inspiration,
making something out of nothing,
the need to express,
to communicate…’
~La Vie Boheme, Rent

About a year ago, I went to an animation workshop lead by a storyboardist from Disney. I had a great time and learned a lot, both with regard to character design and the talent (good and bad) of students accepted into animation programs.

One of the things I learned was that professional storyboard artists often draw their storyboards in Sharpie. He explained that this was because Sharpies have a reasonably consistent flow and produce a very deep black which is hard to achieve with any other kind of marker. A simple little factoid, really, but to me it was a revelation!

It made so much sense!

You see, up to then I could never quite figure out what the artists used to achieve the expressive bold lines in the storyboards I had seen in books. I had guessed (and tried) a number of materials that I thought would achieve that effect, ranging from black colored pencils to charcoals, none of which I was particularly happy with.

But the idea of drawing in permanent marker seriously freaked me out. What if I made a mistake? I didn’t like the idea of having to redraw everything every time I made a careless stroke or smudge. It took me a little while to realize that the point was not to create a perfect drawing, just one that captures the moment and moves the story along. Story boards are far from the final product and will be redrawn and refined any number of times.

Energized by this session, I wanted to draw something…anything. The problem was, I was lazy and didn’t feel like coming up with anything new or original.

Fan art to the rescue!

Listening to my Broadway playlist on shuffle I found Tune Up #1, the opening narration to Rent playing: “December 24^th, 9PM, Eastern Standard Time….”

That would work – preexisting dialogue and narration that could easily be converted into some sort of storyboard or comic. A quick Google search brought up the full libretto, and the result of this experiment is below. I didn’t get any farther than this opening monologue but I was happy with how it came out and I ended up a lot more confident about playing with permanent markers.

The Writing on the Walls

2009-04-18T00:14:00.004-04:00

Up until it met its sad and somewhat soggy demise, my camera nearly never left my side. Yes, I was that girl, taking pictures of everything and nothing, just because I could or because something somehow caught my interest.

Among my favorite things to photograph were (and still are) graffiti and street art.

I’m not entirely sure why I find these things so fascinating – I think there’s just something fun about finding unexpected bits of color as I go about my daily routine. I don’t think too much on whether they count as art or defacement; I simply see them as part of the landscape.

Sometimes I like to puzzle over messages carefully scribbled or sprayed on walls and doorways.

Sometimes I’m stopped in my tracks by bold or striking imagery.

And sometimes, it’s just fun to share a laugh or a moment of silliness with the universe.

It makes my walks so much more interesting.

Photographing graffiti becomes a game, like looking for Easter eggs or playing “Pokémon Snap” - hunting City strangeness instead of anime critters.

Clearly, I am not alone in this interest: www.picturesofwalls.com.

What written weirdness have you encountered?

We Begin

2009-04-09T14:07:00.008-04:00

Let's start with something from the archives, shall we?

When I was fifteen or so, I decided that comedic science fiction was the best. thing. ever.

I was absolutely crazy about “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “Red Dwarf” and really wanted to create something that would follow on in that legacy. Heck, I would have been happy to have created something as campy and ridiculous as “Galaxy High”.

After a few false starts, I started work on a project I called “Bottom of the Barrel” which was, quite honestly, a not-very-good variation on the bottled sitcom-in-a-spaceship dynamic of “Red Dwarf”. I had a bunch of characters that couldn’t stand each other, a planet that was destroyed due to highly improbable means, and a spaceship that was fueled by stupidity (inspired by Harlan Ellison’s assertion that hydrogen and stupidity are the two most common elements in the universe). Beyond that, I didn’t have a clue.

Much like HHGTG, I found it hard to contain this project to one format. At various points, it has taken the form of a novella, a radio script, and (of course) a comic book...none of which quite made it to completion.

The comic book version especially caught my imagination and for some time I could usually be found working on panels between classes. At one point I even convinced the computer graphics teacher to let me use the then-newfangled scanning technology to upload the pages so I could try to ink and color them on Photoshop (5!) Sadly, most of the original scans were lost in the Great Computer Crash of 1999, but a few low-res panels remain:

Every now and again I still like to pull this project from the files and give it another try.

I can’t say I have a better idea now as to what it’s meant to be – as always, there are just the characters and the setting, and the characters simply do whatever they want.

It never gets finished, but it’s always fun and it’s always slightly different.

Greetings and Salutations

2009-04-01T23:36:00.024-04:00

Greetings, Internet!

Welcome to my art blog - the place where I post snippets my creative life which quite frequently goes ignored as I attempt to make my way through the twisty winding world of academia.

This is me:

I am Kae, a would-be cartoonist and writer and a sometimes-photographer, -voice actor and -sculptor in New York City. For the longest time, I wanted to get into animation or comic books, some of my major influences being Chuck Jones, Phil Foglio, Jeff Smith, and Mike Kunkel. Life has clearly led me down a different path, but I still like to indulge in creative endeavors whenever I can.

As you will see, I continue to draw, photograph, and sculpt when time permits and I can occasionally be found to contribute writing or voice work to the audio productions of Dream Realm Enterprises.

Thank you very much for visiting - I hope you enjoy what you find here and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Onward!
~Kae

***Ye Olde Disclaimer - This probably goes without saying, but unless specifically noted otherwise all artwork, photographs, etc. posted here are copyright (c) by me, all rights reserved. I am generally very happy to share my work - just be sure to ask first and give credit! Thanks!***