WHAT’S WEBDESIGN?!

That’s right! After a week-and-a-half long struggle with this awful layout, I have just now launched My Mental Breakdown, the stories portion of my website! I had to write the layout and draw each story illustration and make unique pages for Andrew, Micah and Danyil and that doesn’t sound like as much work as it felt like it was. I was working at really large sizes with each image to preserve the details, which I concluded was a good thing when I kept trying to use old images with this new layout only to find out I’d resized them all way too small to use. The index page with me and Micah, Andrew, Danyil, and Ingrid was a 100+MB file, which has GOT to be the biggest file I’ve ever worked with. It also took a good 6+ hours in total, and had ~40+ layers in Corel Painter. I edited each figure a number of times over and could still go back and do more.

In all, rather than my tendency to be slapdash, HOLY SHIT I WORKED MY ASS OFF. I only cheated on Catcher because it was the last one and I was so mad that the good picture from the last layout was too stinkin’ small to use, so I just stuck in Andrew’s face because you can’t really go wrong there.

I’m not even QUITE done — I plan on going back in and adding several more pictures here and there for each project. I’ve also got to figure out a sub-menu so that you can navigate within Micah, Danny and Andrew’s page.

The image that I came out most proud of out of all of them, except maybe the one with me in it (whew, that sounds way more vain than intended), is one I took like 5 minutes on tonight (figures) when I was finishing up the boys’ pages.

I’m finally ushering myself further into a period of experimental digital work. It started with the crazy lines I did with Lucas’ face, and then realizing that I can make my digital art sketchy, too, and then by integrating that with a painterly style of shading I’ve always seen and loved by never done to my satisfaction. My first time trying this was drawing Abas’ face at the coffee shop while he was making me proofread medical school apps.

It’s just…woo. So I’m glad I got My Mental Breakdown done now, because it’s really the last chance I’ll have to do it before I ship off to Auckland.

My only question now is, of course: Now what?