One Full Year of Berp

Leonie’s small blog island says hullo! (:
WOW. It’s been a year of this official weekly blog thing, hasn’t it?

Australian summer baking heat finally hits Melbourne too!
Stay cool for the last day of the Melbournian heatwave, especially those with no or lack of air con (like myself). I’ve scarily somewhat kind of gotten used to the state of being a melting, tired blob inside and out in the sun and moments of ultra cold when I was working on PV at AIE.

In this post: Reflecting on a whole year of regular blogging!
I guess it proves that I’m one of those crazily weird ones. Cool.

Note there’s not much visuals this update!

Let’s go celebrate! Journal Time.

Didn’t bother looking for a candle for my muffin prop. Wait. Who is this derp. Get off my blog.

Avert yer eyes from my embarrassing face!

• PV team: renders and polish were being worked out by the rest of the hardworking team, especially Victor, while I was researching into submission paperwork stuff (I frequently find myself doing the organisation kind of tasks). 
• PV matte painting done: one more quick one for the film’s consistency!
• PV illustration: Drawing it from scratch continues as I sort out a new composition. Finally get into painting and rendering it up. Haven’t worked at such a huge size before…taking much longer to paint it up. Deadline’s looming!! (Apologies, I can’t show anyone aside from my team.)
• Researched into proper sitting posture & arm strain; exercising and stretching can only do so much. Training oneself to sit with proper posture in the first place is key along with exercise and taking care of yourself. It’s not easy as it’s a constant conscious choice to sit properly. So tricky; bad habits are hard to kill. I’m starting to enjoy walking and mild exercising more as I’m starting to see progress now. But I might have strained myself a bit…? Still waiting for my left hand strain to go away completely. Well…I need to stop injuring myself.
• Train drawing adventuuures: okay it’s not the train. Just some brain dumps and drawing from observation when I was out and about.

Ignore the maths worksheet side of the page. Vending machine full of expensive drinks! Water is just fine for me though.

Other Adventures: 

• Magic School Bus: The Human Body (watched overview): Um, I played this during my childhood and loved/hated it then. The memories…they come back…I remember…getting stuck and frustrated in the game. 
• Phillips CD-i Link’s The Faces of Evil (watched overview): Horrible game as expected! Nothing to do with Zelda at all aside from the vague memes that resulted from the cut scenes.
• Peggle 2 (watching): looking at the challenge extra stages
• Assassin’s Creed 4 Black Flag (watching):  more death speeches and cyclones, croc skin…?
• Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 (snippet): Um…aside from the hilarious jiggle physics, it’s just an “eye candy” tedious game. The “butt battle” was amusing when the people playing it started doing it for real.
• Woodcutter Simulator 2013 (snippet): erm you cut trees…? I don’t know; I got bored somewhere.
• Putt Putt games (watched snippet): dear me. I used to play the parade and the moon ones mindlessly and stubbornly at that. The loopy and creepy animations somehow kept me entertained at the time. Now looking back I see it’s terrible gameplay and how plain weird it is. Eh, was part of my childhood (…which probably explains a lot).
• Hatoful Boyfriend (watched overview): a dating sim/interactive novel where as a human girl, you have to successfully find a pigeon boyfriend or else you actually die and game over. What. 
• Airport Simulator 2014 (watched snippet): terribly boring as a game as you simply transport things from A to B with enough time for you to leave the game running as you eat out, watch something else…actually you could just simply quit the game to save yourself the time.
• DarkSeed & sequel (watched): Creepy Giger art to the brim and a really hard point and click adventure. The second one was weirder and less serious than the first.
• DayZ, Minecraft and Diablo 2 multiplayer (watched): no clue what’s going on (okay I sort of do but not the intricacies of the experience)…just a lot of yelling, screaming, strategy talk and the mourning of team mates’ deaths.
• WWE2K14 (snippet): wow, the three way match was painfully dragged on as no one wanted to lose. Otherwise, pretty boring to someone who’s not into wrestling.
• IDGA meetup: Extremely hot day (heatwave temperatures!) but I found myself with a team and got sponsored (to get more females into the industry; not due to merit so it’s unfortunately not impressive) to do the Global Game Jam Melbourne chapter. 

Wasn’t expecting to get it as I thought more people would have applied? I am assuming though as I have no clue how many applied and how they choose the recipients.

Haven’t done a game jam before and feeling unprepared so…I hope it doesn’t go too bad! Let’s see how I do for my first one! Otherwise the meetup itself was good as I sighted a few new and familiar faces. I’m not good at this social thing though! I’m no “life of the party” but my “I’m just going to relax and see what happens” approach didn’t fare too bad?

• Disaster: Day of Crisis (watching): flood warning, Old Snake look-a-like dies, saving a Dalmatian from a wave of fierce floods as it stands on top of a car…and then a huge bus merely misses you in the process. More shooting random SURGE guys protecting their nukes…just waiting to see how crazy this gets with all the different natural disasters.
• I have no Mouth and I must Scream (watching): up to Ellen’s part of the game and her sass is duly noted despite her 109 years of torture and the colour yellow.

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Reflection for the Week 

Phoar. A whole year! Reflecting things over…

Officially one year that I’ve been documenting my art learning.

Oddly enough, I’m not surprised that I’ve gone this far. Instead, I’m confident that I can keep blogging regularly (weekly or biweekly or whatever it may be). It’s not that I’m overly optimistic/overconfident but because I know that this is how I best work. 

I enjoy typing, sharing, documenting, learning and reflecting so finding myself dedicated to blogging all about this suits me perfectly, funnily enough. Many prefer to simply look and post art alone and that’s perfectly fine, smart and definitely saves heaps of time. I spend time on blogging a little bit each day which is time consuming to most but I’ve personally found value in this.

I’ve been enjoying my journey much more as I think about my progress everyday, am able to stay positive, made plenty of mistakes, have not given up thus far, I’ve grown to become less reserved and mute/loss for words than I used to be (well I’m improving at the least!) and I could keep going, even if no one bats an eyelid at this blog. (So I’m especially grateful that a few wonderful readers do!)

This approach is definitely not for most people as this is a huge commitment of time and energy. It just somehow works for me and I enjoy it! It’s not as if I am talkative anyway in person (contrary to all this typing I do online). Naturally I tend to listen more than I speak though I do ask questions when I’m curious and fast enough to be able to fit it into the conversation. As always, I am going to keep getting used to social events and small talk at my own pace. Regardless, it looks like I shall keep documenting my journey here.

Plan for coming month: finish up PV as a project and get it off the ground, get back on the Art Camp, PD1 and many other areas soon, get going on my personal projects and try not to strain myself doing newbie push ups ever again. Not much to show in this week’s update as I’ve been busy with PV…but then again, I’m always busy with something. (:

Here’s to another year of improvement for all!
Terribly corny, squirm-worthy and cheesy but I’m still going to say it; let’s do our best together! 

Thanks for reading & feel free to comment below! (:

Until next time, Leonie
(UUUinfinity/TripleUinfinity)