Friday 20 June 2008

suit me to a tee

I think my perfect job would be as a vectorer.

There is no such job (well, I don't think there is anyway), but if it existed, it would vector tracing imagery. What the imagery was wouldn't really matter, but I find vectoring things to be really very enjoyable.

It's like this recent piece of artwork I did for my company. The timeframes were ridiculously short and so I ended up working my arse off and am now a bit knackered, but despite that I still enjoyed it a great deal. I also ended up with a real sense of satisfaction.

Also, the part of walling I enjoy the most is vectoring the character images. And nowadays I always vector them - even if, really, there's actually no need. Partly, I do this because I like the clean look it gives (which also really suits anime), but mainly I just enjoy it.

I mean, it can get tedious at times. Hair on anime characters (well, girls) is often the worst, with loads of lines going back and forth and swooshing this way and that and twirling up at the ends, but even then there's a lot of satisfaction in looking at the results once you've completed it.

I think what it is I enjoy about vectoring is it's, well, if not imposing order on chaos, then certainly it's tidying up the bedroom floor of chaos and organising everything into nice neat piles. I quite like that.

Shame there's no such job :).

Thursday 19 June 2008

Sandwich rule

I've always been fascinated by how sandwiches pretty much conform to the rule "You get what you pay for."

Which isn't to say that sandwiches aren't over-priced - they are - but just that if you pay £1.00 for a sandwich you get about a fifth as good a sandwich as if you pay £5.00 for a sandwich.

I've also always been fascinated by expressions such as the above - you get what you pay for. I mean, that's a fairly innocuous and obvious one, but generally I love expressions and try to shoe-horn them into any conversation I'm having.

Not much of a blog entry, but I've been kinda busy this last couple of days. It's been kinda fun - I've been doing what I call "reprographics" which is basically the company is attending a roadshow in the near future and we need a big logo for the board as well as some "letterhead" type paper and name badges and stuff and I've been making them up.

We're not really that sort of a company so it's taken probably five times as long for me to do it in photoshop, rather than a proper design program, but as I say, we're not that sort of company so we don't tend to have those sorts of programs hanging around. Still, kinda fun.

I've always said there were only ever two things I wanted to do in life. The first was sing and the other was draw comic books.

I can't do either, unfortunately, as I don't have either vocal or drawing talent; however, through seer bloody mindedness I have sorta ended up with a few basic skills with the old photoshop, so it's fun to flex them every so often.

Tuesday 17 June 2008

those little tubes of cancer

I could be a smoker.

I mean, I am a smoker, I guess, but not a proper smoker. Currently I get through an average of around 5 cigarettes a week - so basically a pack of 20 lasts me a month. I used to smoke as a 'social smoker,' which basically means I smoked when I drank, but--partly due to the ban on smoking in public spaces--I don't really do that any more.

However, something I've found is that one of the most enjoyable things in the world is smoking while writing.

It's difficult to explain quite why it is, but for some reason the two activities just seem to go well together. While you're thinking of the next bit, you can take a draw on the cancer tube - it just seems to work.

So perhaps it's a good thing that I'm such a flake when it comes to getting things done - otherwise I might be on 20 a day!

Monday 16 June 2008

New mags

The new animedia, animage and newtype were waiting for me when I got back from work last Friday (yet more stuff to scan - *eek*).

They're definitely much better this month than the last couple of months, although animedia seems to be doing a lot of polls just recently. I think it's some kind of anniversary for them, but they're a bit of a pain the poll issues. I mean, they can be okay when you get a new spread froa classic series, but normally they just fill the pages with small, random screenshot type images which are a bit rubbish. I guess if I knew what they were saying it would be better, but still.

ADV's tailspin of doom seems to be continuing apace, with the replacement to NewType US going tits up after only the fourth issue - ANN article. It's a bit sad really, as whatever you may think about any one anime company and its releases (for the record I like ADV) the fundamental fact remains that the more western anime distributors there are, the better.

Speaking of which, I'd better try the whole Gonzo digital releases thing (assuming it's still going) when I get around to watching some 'mu. Good on them for trying, but the actual shows they're doing it for don't look all that great if I'm honest. I hope that doesn't affect things, as it would be a real shame to see something like this die at the first hurdle.

Not that I'm a big fan of purely digital copies of things, if I'm honest, but if that's the way it needs to go then so be it.