Category: Webdesign

Emotional Breakdowns, Webdesign

New Domain Name!

mary v.

I’m feeling a little emotional over having switched domain names once and for all today. I just shifted over the whole RE portion of the site, and that was long after I quickly got Dreaming in Color up and running. With the exception of the cute thumbnail images for my entries. ): Trying to decide if I should go through EVERY SINGLE MEDIA ITEM and associate it with their respective blog entries, or if that’s just silly. (Then again, from that perspective, this whole thing is just silly)

Anyway, I’ve been contemplating switching out of OMS for a long time, but it still feels weird to actually have done it. But it came with the revelation that if I publish I’ll go under the penname M. Elizabeth Stewart. My dad and I thought it had a good ring to it and my mom said that it’s fine as long as I give her some of the money I make (as her name is Elizabeth Stewart and I’d be “stealing it”).

But now I’m thinking of My Mental Breakdown and how I’ve never really liked the layout since I made it so I should use this as an opportunity to start that from scratch AGAIN. Possibly with a less image-heavy layout because although I always wanted a large image in my layouts, I think I sling-shot to an unpleasant extreme with that last layout, haha.

Art!, Webdesign

WHAT’S WEBDESIGN?!

mary v.

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.

andrew-unface
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.

abas
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?

Art!, Webdesign, Writing Journey, Writing!

this place about to —

mary v.

blo-o-o-o-o-oh-oh-ohhwww.

Haha — I can’t help it, Ke$ha’s songs are freaking catchy.

Anyway…I am so desperately itchy to work on a new project! Given the fact that I’m sending C my revisions basically in three days, this could be a major problem if, say, it totally distracted me from putting in the last of my redlining. And I will admit that it has sort of distracted me, haha. But I’ve only got another 120 pages to get through! 😀 … D:

So when I started working on “My Mental Breakdown,” it got me a little bit excited about a lot of my completed projects. Also, when I visited the FOCI glassblowing studio a few weeks ago, it got me hyped up a little bit about “Catcher” — I just think Andrew and Karoh are a really strong team. I watched “Tangled” today, which got me hyped about writing a sequel to “Sun-Walking.” And summer makes me think of “Farewell, Fairytale.” Lastly, drawing the page illustration for “…Whispered the River” got me talking about that story with Margaret, which got me thinking about that story, and how much potential it has, and how amaaaaaazingly visual it is. So I was suddenly pretty certain I wanted to redo the story — as a manga. It’s so summery (it takes place along a river and in a forest, and everyone wears shorts and t-shirts and swimsuits and even though it’s all a bunch of lines, I can feel the warmth), and when I finished school on Monday I was suddenly faced with a HUGE void with nothing to fill it with, and it sounded nice.

But I’ve been looking at …WtR a lot, and I just don’t think I’ve come far enough artistically since I wrote it to justify writing it again. Yes, I could easily put the story back in order, and really push the appearances of the characters so that each one could be identified easily (as it stands, everyone pretty much has the same face, hair, and body type). But that’s about all. I love the chemistry between the cast and I’m not sure I’ve done it that well since then. This story really shows the tumultuous things I was going through my senior year of high school, haha. Like, omgangrywomen and wow, that girl is so obstinate and hey you I will resent you until I die.

mash

So, in other news…shoot! I was going to talk about something else, but now it’s left my mind. ):

Webdesign

D:

mary v.

WHYYY DO I COME UP WITH AMBITIOUS IDEAS AT THE *END* OF BREAK.

I figured out how to translate my gallery into that fancy flashy (it’s actually Javascript) thing that I’ve seen floating around on art sites. Thing is, it doesn’t work with frames. So I just spent (read: wasted) like four hours trying to salvage some of OMS’ current design for a DIV layout instead…yeah, no. Never that easy. D: But I really want to do it, so I was like hm, I guess it’d mean I wait on the script or I just make a whole new layout. The latter is tempting, but oh so ill advised on Friday when I haven’t done 75% of my homework that’s due on Monday. =/

Poop.

(ed. at 11:20pm)

I so would. Yes. I did make a whole new (essentially) DIV layout to support the gallery script.
Yes. I have done virtually nothing else all day.
Am I satisfied? …We’ll see how I feel when I’ve gained back all the LIFE THAT THIS LEECHED FROM ME.
o_______O; *twitch*