Inspiration and awakening | August 5th, 2010

I woke up this morning and as I was driving in the morning sun, I was struck by a random bout of inspiration. I love these moments, because you can just ‘see’ images and scenes impossible in real life in your head…and sometimes it just looks and sounds so cool it HAS to be drawn. It’s bizarre but really fun and I wrote a whole heap of stuff down for what I might turn to later for inspiration, though I probably have to thank the sleeping flowers and polluted city scapes for the epiphanous moment too.

I have in fact been feeling pretty inspired lately…..actually probably ever since I read more about them crabs. They are seriously amazing. If only everything in this world were as marvellous as those creatures. I think the inspiration has gone a bit to my head because I had THE awesomest, wackiest dream last night.

It involved driving to a random unmarked town fenced off with barbed wire. I suppose it was like a family trip thing because everyone was there, and I remember staring out the window feeling very “bored and despondent”. Suddenly there are huge, gigantic, ENORMOUS buildings that tower over us in our small little rustbucket, and we’re all like wooahhh. These buildings- they’re massive. Like warehouse massive. They are also very futuristic and chrome like and there’s funnels and chutes and pipes coming from all of them at different angles and shapes. Smoke is coming out from chimneys on a few of them – its like we drove straight into a deserted alien town or something. Or perhaps even Area 51. Only it was out in the desert, it was daytime, and there seemed to be no people around but US. It was very odd.

Anyhow, we stop the car and start wandering around. We enter a building and inside it looks like a rundown hotel lobby. It comes to my attention that the entire ‘town’ of buildings are abandoned, and possibly haunted by strange aliens or beings. Wandering around the building felt supernatural-ish. I remember walking over crumbled tiles and looking out windows from high above in the towers, and my brothers voices get farther and farther away, til I realize I am completely alone.

I go to a window and look out to the horizon, and I just see endless desert. Just sand, and blue sky. I begin to wonder how the buildings disappeared, and then I sense a force behind…or around me…and then I wake up to the sound of my alarm. It was weird. Actually, it’s weird that I remember all of this now because when I woke up I didn’t really think much of it. But in retrospect, I think it was a pretty weird dream.

Probably will come back to that in the future when I’m stuck for ideas!

Anyway, I’ve basically finished A layout for this site, but I’m still kind of undecided about it. You know that feeling when it feels like it may be missing something? Or a lot of things? That’s the vibe I’m getting at the moment, the only problem is I don’t really know what to change. It is hard. Though on a landmark note, it IS one of the first layouts I have done 99% of in Illustrator. I just really wanted EVERYTHING to be 100% original; not from some free stock background or brush or pattern, especially since this is a site mainly showcasing MY work…so in that sense I guess I kind of did what I set out to do. In fact, I’m looking at it right now and thinking- the perspective in it is ALL WRONG. I may put it up later when I have time and see what I think about it then.

I had this really cool idea for another layout though, which involves the horizontal scrolly thing happening again, but I may put up the newer one first before making another one because it will probably take a lonngg time to figure out. It involves seamless timelines, horseshoe crabs, wires and plants. Lots and lots of plants. I’ve got it all mapped out in my head, I just need to find a way to translate it onto screen. If I do manage to finish it it will probably end up being layout of the century for me.

…Seriously.

A seamless horizontal layout was actually something I was going for in the current layout, but because things stuffed up and photoshop was just way too slow, I made little panels instead. And I found out, my site actually does work on my iphone! So yay!

Either way, both of the possible upcoming layouts involve horseshoe crabs.

Yeah, yeah I am obsessed with them. Whatever.

The other day I drew a horseshoe crab, just coz I thought they looked cool:

It’s still actually in progress still so I’ll probably add more highlights and stuff later when I have more time. The colours a bit off and this is why: the colour profiles on my mac are retarded and the color profiles seem to change at random. I constantly have this problem with photoshop too – like it doesn’t save colours correctly coz the profiles/settings are different. I didn’t think it’d happen in illustrator as well, but it did, and thankfully there’s an option to saturate colours so I just did that and saved it normally. I dunno. It’s annoying. I should probably synchronize it all through Bridge but I really can’t be bothered right now.

On a site related note, I updated most of the thumbnails for everything….and that’s about it. I kind of need to organize files on my computer and hosting server at the moment because everything is a huge, huge mess and its causing me to lose files and forget where things are then I end up accidentally deleting them which causes me to lose original files which SUCKS because I don’t have enough space on my hard drive to make a complete backup and I seem to have lost my USB stick which had all my old old work and stuff on it.

Ugh. Anyway I seem to have ranted on for quite a bit and I don’t really know how but I did just want to write down that dream sequence so I wouldn’t forget it in the future!

Look out for the new layout- it’s coming! Soon. I know I keep saying that but I’m definitely hopefully probably going to do it tomorrow.

Or today, rather. Uh….in about 20 hours or so.

0:-)

Jakki posted @ 1:21 am

Awe-inspiring | August 2nd, 2010

This is kind of to do with this site…but it’s mostly just me talking about how amazing horseshoe crabs are.

Did you know they are the one of the oldest known living creatures in the world? They existed way back before humans were even around. Around the time visible life was just appearing.

And in that 250 million years, they have hardly evolved.

The T-rex’s and Trilobites are gone but the horseshoe crab is STILL HERE.

They look dangerous but they are really just harmless (unless you’re attacking it of course!)

They contain blue blood, which some claim is medicinal (but that may be just as true as eating tiger penises). One horseshoe crab only contains a few mL’s of blue blood, so you can imagine how incredibly expensive the crabs and their blood is!

In fact, the horseshoe crab’s eyes and blood is so similar to humans, scientists are still researching its blood and visual features.

I just thought I’d share that with everyone because it’s keeping me inspired today and that’s ALWAYS a good thing.

Jakki posted @ 5:55 pm

Finally. | August 2nd, 2010

I’ve been busy organizing stuff the past week, and I’ve made *some* progress.

I realize this site is a huge HUGE mess- some images don’t work….the comic page doesn’t work AT ALL….some things just look plain horrible…yeah.

I know.

It’s because when I ported all my folio stuff from elusionerie.com I was lazy and didn’t change all the hyperlinks and image urls. And now that elusionerie.com has expired, it’s not exactly up and running to host all the pretty pictures and whatnot.

I need to do a biiiggg overhaul of this site, starting from the ground up. It sounds totally fun right? ~_~

Anywho. I scanned some stuff that needs to be edited and cropped and compressed, and I also finished my door illustration! Yeah. I KNOW. The one I started all the way back in March of 2009. When I was in Singapore. Yes. THAT illustration.

I opened it up and decided I’d better finish it before the file becomes corrupted from being unfinished for so long. Thing is…I’d kinda forgotten what I had drawn. I’d left some notes in there but I kinda like the concept of this drawing. It’s simple….but I like it that way.

Well…hope you like it:

Uhhh yeah. It’s kinda rough actually. I wasn’t going for the perfect line-age and honestly it could do with a lot more detail, but that may be for later….I am just really rusty with digitization…especially illustrator and photoshop. Thinking bout using this for my blog. Maybe.

Also, thank god I have copies of my stuff on this site because I’ve lost a whole bunch of stuff on my hdd. Like my drawing of the flying pig..and the improved heart dichotomy…stuff like that. Crappy backups and me being stupid being the reason why.

Ugh. Anyway, I’ll get onto the new layout and updatation and removing dead links and replacing image urls soon. VERY SOON! I’m even getting annoyed at myself for taking so long to update this site.

Jakki posted @ 1:47 am