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I am a homeschooled graduate trying to figure out how the world works and continuing to find out that no. It doesn't run the way I want it too.

Friday, February 28, 2014

February Report Card End of the Month

What I wanted to do:

  • Finish a Movie Review: I did! The Desolation of Smaug...
  • Draw some Orcs: No, but I did draw the bunker in our village and the portrait of noone in particular in Krita.
  • Write between 30,000 and 60,000 words on my NaNoWrMo Story: Almost not but I cleared the goal with 30,548 (fistpump) and there are still a few hours in the day... Maybe a couple hundred more? (*laughes* maybe not...)
  • Finish Sketch of Norwegien Buildings: No... But did I mention I drew other things?
  • Progress through School: Yup pretty much.
  • Do at least on Construction Project with Dad: Built shelves. Fun fun!
What I also did:
  • Recorded Radioactive by Imagine Dragons with Nicole (You can give it a listen here: https://soundcloud.com/nicolem-4/radioactive-cover )
  • I did a couple of other things this month... I'm sure I did... But story writing took up most of my creative time. 

Thursday, February 13, 2014

New Drawing Program

At the Oslo Maker Faire last month I met a digital artist name Christina, (You can check out her website here ) In the course of our conversation I happened to ask what software she was useing. Turns out it's a free program that works a lot like Photoshop except it's more artist oriented. It's called Krita (Check it out on the main website

So over the course of the past week I've downloaded the program and started checking it out. 

Cool features that are immediately apparent:

It's free: Hard to believe once you start looking at the program but true.

Mirror canvas feature. Handy for mapping out a face, or anything else you want to be the same on either side of the middle line. You can turn it on and off at will and the program only mirrors what you are currently painting. Really nice.

A variety of brushes and a handy dandy colour selector. The brushes are SO COOL! It's like a cross between Corel Painter with realistic brushes and Photoshop with easy to use colour selector.

Can save to a variety of formats: Handy because I can just save my files as Photoshop files and touch them up until I know how to do that in Krita.

Shortcuts to resizeing brushes and colour pallete: Saves some time, pretty handy.

Layers: these are just like in Photoshop and just as handy

Less handy features: 

There is no dedicated blur tool. I love pencils so I also love blur and smudging but I haven't found a computer program that does it really nicely yet. But you can set up some brushes to blur, how exactly I'm not sure but just like in photoshop the blurring causes some laggyness.

The program is prone to lag a bit more than Photoshop even when all you're doing is some simple painting.

When you first get in and you click on say, the eyedropper tool it can be confusing to find out how to get back into brush mode. (turns out it's the squiggly icon in the toolbar) I spent my first hour or so saving my file, closing and reopening the program to get back into brush mode before I figured that little tidbit out.

So anyway, that's my program review and here is the first painting I did: 

So, over all, I'm pretty impressed with Krita. I think I'll still be using Photoshop a bit, but Krita is setting itself up to be my new favourite thing to do on the computer.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

The Desolation of Smaug: Review

Well, to start off with I did only see this movie once so my opinion isn’t quite fully formed yet. Also I went in prepared for the worst. And lastly, I saw it about two months ago.
 But that said, here we go.

I guess I’m falling into the habit of bad things first, so that’s where we’ll start.

First off, as I’m sure the avid Tolkien fans already noticed from the trailer, The Desolation of Smaug isn’t exactly sticking to the book. There are a lot of glaring changes to the story that, while providing some nice screen time for certain dwarves, really don’t fit with the story Tolkien told. And you know open barrels that are repeatedly dunked underwater? Yeah, they usually fill with water and sink. Apparently this rule is invalid when dwarves are riding in said barrels.
Smaug,while he is a pretty awesome dragon, makes some decidedly odd decisions for an angry dragon, I’ll spare you the spoilers, but those of you who are into motivations and such will have some trouble with this one. Another slightly more technical flaw is the fact that by the end of the film we are following 3 or 4 different story lines depending on how you count. Needless to say the constant jumping back and forth takes a lot of the wind out of the proverbial sails. 
The biggest problem though, is once you’re starting to recover from the sheer awesomeness of the film you start to wonder what the point was. While a tonne of stuff happened and a lot of distance was covered there wasn’t a whole lot that actually had to do with the main plot (That whole ‘reclaim the homeland slay a dragon’ thing?). And while you could argue that this is the same as the Two Towers I must point out that in the Two Towers at least contains the saving of a country.

However, the bad stuff dealt with, I loved this movie. The fun characters seen in the first film are most definitely carried through with the better developed dwarves all getting a chance to flaunt their style. And on the subject of characters, while I was highly skeptical of Legolas having a love interest, Tauriel ended up being one of my favourite characters. Another object of my skepticism was Beorn; I just couldn’t picture how they would get that right. But may I just say; they got it right, even the transformation was cool. 
The overall CGI in this film seemed better than the first, with a couple of elements being downright well done. Smaug looked fantastic and was overall a pretty well written dragon except for what I already mentioned. While the story is pretty segmented with a good deal of time spent where it doesn't need to be the pace of the action was much improved from the first movie; I hardly noticed three hours go by in the Desolation, unlike the Unexpected Journey, which had me tapping my foot twenty minutes into it even the first time around.

Just a side note; since I watched the Desolation in Turkish I have no idea what was said in the subtitles. All those moments in elvish or black speech, yeah I can guess, but I can’t quote it…


So, in conclusion, this was a good movie and I would recommend it as definitely better than the first one. And I'd like to see it again, what are those elvses and orcses saying anyway?

ON THE SECOND WATCH:
So I watched it again and I just want to say that Kili is tall for a dwarf but no less ugly.
And there is also a bad CGI Legolas. A 'really' bad CGI Legolas on horseback. It would be impressive on a video game, but this is a blockbuster film we're talking about here. 

Monday, February 3, 2014

February Report Card

So here I am, three days late. Ahem,To do this Month:

Finish a movie review. Seriously, this is getting ridiculous.

Draw some orcs. Because orcs are fun to draw.

Write between 30 and 60 thousand words on my NaNoWriMo story. Because I want to get this done.

Finish the sketch of Norweigian buildings. Started this last month and then abandoned it.

Progress through school. Because I'm not aiming to finish anything until the end of March...

EDIT:
Do at least on Construction project with Dad. Fun!

Yup. 

Nicole's list is here.

Have a nice month.