so. its been a while since i wrote an entry for my blog, its because school is taking up all my time and energy!!! it sucks!!! i don't have time for art!!! this is the last leg of my schooling before i transfer to art school. oh yeah, thats a thing, i'm going to Pacific Northwest College of Art! i'm SO unbelievably excited, which makes this semester extremely frustrating. i'm spending all of my time on school and not.....art.....the thing i'm doing for my career......
whatever. i guess i'll talk about what i've been doing since january.
i've still been drawing almost every day, per my new years resolution. i'm really enjoying how my style is developing. i've been practicing animation a lot more, its SO much fun. i think my brain is kind of perfect for it. i get really antsy and stagnant if i work on one drawing for a long time...BUT i can get around that by making a BUNCH of quick drawings of the same thing sequentially.
i've discovered that my favorite part of animating is smear frames. its pretty evident in my recent animations, because i try to put in as many as possible. if you don't already know, smear frames are basically a way to simulate live film motion blur with drawings. there's lots of ways to go about it, but generally, the object looks like its been "smeared" in the direction of the movement. it gives it a very snappy quality. its a bit of a cheat to span a large action over a small number of frames, (i really need to practice more subtle movements) but i really enjoy how objects morph in smears. i want to start collecting smear frames from things i watch because they kind of are art in themselves. in a single image, you can translate the direction of movement and velocity of an object. and depending on how you go about it, you can make some really fun shapes.

here are some from this animation i did last month. i included the original gif so you can see where the smears are used, but i honestly like them on their own too. its a bit absurd and uncanny, but you can kind of tell what its SUPPOSED to be. i just think its fun. :)
uh. the power in my house just went out so that is probably my cue to end this entry. talk soon!! buh bye!!!

i've been actually excited to make art lately, which is a great but strange difference to how i was last year. i dealt with a lot of burnout, and i questioned if i even liked making art in the first place, which scared me. art is the only thing i really know how to do! a lot of things changed. i have new friends i love, the looming dread of portfolio building is gone, im on new meds. for once, im excited to move forward.
so, i'm really happy now, but also frustrated since i have one more semester of community college to get through before i can go to art school. i'm antsy!

i found an archive of older versions of flash, and i think im going to teach myself how to use them. i've tried to use modern adobe animate, but it's so FUCKING complicated, i can't figure it out by myself. i've been re-reading a Certain Webcomic for nostalgia, and i've been really inspired by the flash animations. Even though i've only been using flash for a little bit, i've noticed several shortcuts and ways of hiding things in these animations. it makes me want to use them.
So far i've used Macromedia 5 and CS5.5. I had the easiest time with MM obviously, though it is limited. CS5.5 is going to take a bit more research for me to use fluently. both are LEAGUES easier than AA. I wonder if something in between MM and CS5.5 would be good for me, who knows.
here's an animation test i made in Macromedia 5.

i really enjoy the dithering effect, though i might adjust some things. assets were drawn in mspaint. i figured the easiest way to go about it would be to have each moving element as a seperate asset, then squash/stretch as needed in flash. i have no idea if this is the "correct" way to do it lol.

i say this constantly, but i owe my LIFE to digital archivists. some person decided to find every version of flash no longer supported by adobe, then release it to the world for everyone to use. thats punk as fuck imo. i love you archivists mwah mwah mwah.<3 <3 <3
speaking of, i'm writing more and more about my futuristic digital archivist character, (her name is officially Wendy) and i'm realizing her story would probably be best told as a game. which is a fun idea, but that means i have to learn how to make games. :( hopefully i'll be able to learn while im at college or something. programmers are legit wizards in my eyes. being able to write and understand glyphs and symbols to make the impossible possible. thats magic right there. i already feel like a wizard for teaching myself basic HTML and CSS, Python and C++ is like super advanced archane knowledge i would have to be cursed by an amulet in order to harness.
i'm getting off track. i guess to sum it up, i'm really excited for the future, maybe TOO excited. let me out!!! i don't wanna do political science homework i want to draw forever and ever and ever and ever!!!!

ever since deltarune chapter 2 came out, ive been getting back into undertale probably more than i ever have. undertale came out when i was 12 so i feel like i can parce my feelings about the game a bit better now lol.
so, i saw this post by the-meme-monarch and it really spiraled my thoughts cuz i never really considered that like. frisk is going to live and grow up in the normal world after this experience. (in neutral route, anyways. where frisk leaves the underground but the monsters are still trapped.)

i imagine that frisk as like a 5 year old heard about the legend of Mt. Ebott, and for whatever reason ran away from home to try and find it. they have the whole undertale adventure, cross the barrier, then are found the next day by their family. but...then what? i imagine when they try and tell anyone about their adventures, they brush it off as just this weird kids dream, and maybe as they get older they start to believe it as well.
i don't know about you, but i have a lot of very vauge memories that im not sure happened at all since it was so long ago, just weird remnants of my child-brain. I remember having lots of strange dreams, and some of them really really stuck with me. some of them i can recall so vividly its like i just had them. they were so impactful and memorable that i wish i could have that dream again just to experience that world again. i think frisk views the events of undertale like that, after being told that it was just a dream from such a young age. it's just an extremely vivid and impactful dream full of people they miss dearly, but think they aren't real.

maybe they go their whole life thinking that, or maybe they begin to question it. Mt.Ebott exists, does the world underground exist too? who are these people i love so much but have never met? what was that strange voice in my head guiding my actions that never came back when i left? i wish it would come back and make sense of everything again.
maybe its just me, but i think a lot of teenagers on the brink of their angst era long for some sort of escapism. frisk may sit in school and think about their dream, over and over again. how good it felt to know so many amazing and eclectic folks, how terrifying it was to traverse an unknown world and fight an unfathomable creature, how much they felt at home there.

i am really into the idea of frisk having some sort of physical remnant of their adventures, like a scar, which might encourage them to question their memories more. they've had this prominent scar ever since they were a kid, but where did it actually come from? their family doesn't know either. their only memory of something that could have caused it was their childhood dream.... hmmm...

im probably gonna think about this idea nonstop for about 3 months and then completely forget about it lol. im not a writer by any means, but maybe it would be a fun fanfiction to write. just their thought process as they try and piece everything together. this concludes my weekly ut/dr brainrot, thank you.

new year, new page for my webbed site!! i was inspired by my sibling to start a little blog, it looked like fun. i dont talk about my life much on other social sites, but this is my blog and i can do what ever i want, damn it. anyway. my new years resolution is to draw as much as possible. i struggled a lot with burnout last year, but im done with college applications which means i can draw whatever i want now!!! B) ive successfully drawn every day for the first 4 days of the year, but we will see what happens when school starts.

ive made a new character based around my recent obsession with computers. im not smart with computers at ALL, but i tend to romanticize them a lot. like. i think a lot about the connection between people and computers, they're extremely personal tools we use constantly. the internet kind of acts as an extension of ourselves and a way to directly link people in never-before-seen ways. computers are extremely loyal to a fault, following everything you tell them to do because thats the only thing they're made to do. its a bit sad to think about, but also comforting.
anyways. this yet-to-be-named character is a programmer from the future who has taken a liking to technology of our time. (from the 90s to 2010, roughly.) and is a bit of an outcast because of it. she works as a digital archivist, restoring old digital data to run on "modern" hardware. this stems from my recent obsession with digital archiving as well, which i might talk about another time.

this is already getting to be very long, ill end this here. happy 2023!!! :)