#finally made my last unicorn fan art after watching the movie like a fucking year ago

[opens-up-4-nobody]

:-P

[cassraven]

Tis the Season to Catch Up Fa La La La.

It’s December month now. How has the X-Mas Holidays month been for me so far? I finally recovered from a random cold-cold that hit me last week after Thanksgiving holiday week/weekend out of no where. (Strong herbal/berry mixed teas drinking, cold medication, dressing warm in bed, some Gatorade drinking, shitload of tissues, sleep, warm blankets sleeping nonstop, and chicken/veggies/tomato soups did the trick to finally destroy the cold of doom.)

So what else has been going on this holiday season for me? The following:

- Prior to the Thanksgiving November holidays that just had passed, I had gotten safely at my friend’s brother’s tattoo shop gotten my first ever tattooed inks on my arm. There will be a whole future post  with pictures ASAP explaining that fun adventure I had. The tattoos are still long term healing, feel great, and look fantastic fucking rad as hell awesome! XD

- I recently had subscribed to the mailing once a month box awesome-ness that is Cat Lady Box subscription where Cat Lady company sends cat moms/or owners of cats send Cat Moms or (Dads) a different themed box monthly of items for you the Cat Parent of various things like shirts, hoodies, home decor or office decor Cat themed items and your Cats items like toys catnip wise or other things for their kitty needs. Money you pay for their box monthly or one time box subscription goes to helping Cats of Cat Animal Rescue organizations and other positive charities for homeless Cats/Kittens. A win in my book, This holiday month, my girls Enid and Ziggy got cute holiday catnip toys that they love so far, and I got some great things, among them AN AWESOME COMFORTABLE CAT LADY/CAT MOM! HOODIE! It’s awesome!!!! And feels so nice and warm and comfy wearing it around the house.

- Sweatpant leggings goth or black cat themed wise with sweaters, hoodies, and socks have kept me warm so far with cold autumn into winter insane weather we’ve had lately in my end of California...Teas too! I’ve become more addicted to drinking hot herbal and fruit berry citrus teas lately. Yummy.

- Finishing penning up some cute animal holiday cards I’ll be safely this week social distancing/mask wearing dropping off at the post office to mail out to family, friends, loved ones, fellow Sailor Moon “Moonies” and Hannibal “Fannibal” friends.

- Finishing handmade gifts for my boyfriend’s Mother (A knitted inspired like Molly Weasley family themed yarn collage blanket for her armchair to snuggle with), sewn gifts for my guy’s niece (a collage galaxy purples and dogs/cats/unicorn fabric quilt blanket for her dolls to have.)

- Waiting for online ordered gifts for other family members I had ordered as gifts for them to arrive here at the house so I can start wrapping and in some gifts cases after wrapping, getting ready to be shipped out snail mail to them at the post office, to get to them in their various states home away from home since some family due to Covid-19, travel issues, quarantine, etc. can’t come home for the holidays.

- I’ve been experimenting in baking and cooking dishes in the kitchen prior to that cold attack. For the small number holiday at home gathering, I’m likely going to be making some homemade apple butter, and berry mixed bread pudding baked to gift to family.

- One of my favorite teachers from my grade school years childhood Emily is currently going through fighting breast cancer with rounds of chemo. I’ll be unknowingly to her be sending her in the mail this week separately  besides a holiday card for her and her family she only thinks I’m sending to her, be sending her some goodies of hair bandana scarves in her favorite colors, some herbal ginger tea packets, and a small embroidery hoop art I had made of Baby Groot of GotG since she’s a Groot and Marvel fan like I am. I can’t wait for her to get it and open the envelope package I’ll be sending her, she’s a tough cookie and we’re all of her loved ones, fellow teachers, and current/former students are rooting for her.

- Christmas is just going to be me with my boyfriend and his family and my sisters spending it together safely in quarantine not-large gathering for meals and gift exchanging gifts, watching holiday movies, making a cookie house with my guy’s and my niece, chilling with the cats and face time video calling my parents and other relatives/friends. (My folks have been for months in Florida spending the holidays safely with my nephew who’s in the military stationed out there and his daughter when he gets her after Xmas Day, giving him moral support since his divorce from the cheating-ex control freak Karen of hell has been done court wise for their divorce and custody arrangement.)

- I’m between all this knitting, sewing, baking, holiday organizing things at home in quarantine and between having had that battle with the regular cold stuffy nose infection a week ago, have been working on fan fiction stories, so keep a look out for email alerts on both Ao3 and FF.Net to see stories updated or new stories by me ASAP. Promise!

Be safe out there everyone, Hope you all have a nice holiday with the holidays and your loved ones.

[diviinedogs]

❣️hoi, what was art school like? I'm planning to go myself (and my family is pretty passively aggressively turning me down), but I just want to know what skills do you learn? What is the experience? Thank u for your time! Ur blog and art are amazing btw

hI I think it really depends on the school but I can give like the idea of two of them since I went to another school for precollege to see if it was something I’d be interested in majoring in! C./C/A and I went to Ri/.ngli./.ng and my parents are actually letting me go back to school now so hopefully I’ll be back there in Fall c’: also thank you for liking my stuff!

this ask is gonna long because I know I’m gonna ramble so I’m gonna call the schools C and R so I don’t have to do the slashes all the time! C’s experience was a specific  1-2 month course so it’s nothing like actual college at R so feel free to skip down to it, I just thought it was important to add since it was my first experience at an art school

and after I talk about the schools I’ll say what stuff’s good to include in your portfolio, of course this is based on my experience but for the most part it helps in what you should try strengthening 

I did animation at C, which was 2D in the morning and 3D in the afternoon. I did precollege the summer before my senior year cuz it’s like the college experience before college so you do get the feel of how it is being on your own, and I wanted to see if I was good enough to pursue something art related. At this point, my parents were on the fence about the idea, so it would help them too. And C’s in California, so I had a bunch of relatives who could show me around and who I could stay with during the weekends

experience wise, the teachers and TAs I had were really nice, so in 2D it was stuff like learning Principles of Animation and the first thing we did was a flipbook animation I think? and then it went to looking at scenes from movies for inbetweens and character sheets and we all worked together reanimating a quick scene from a movie. In the end, we all chose a really short scene from an animated movie to study and reanimate for our final

while in 3D, it was just learning around Maya and doing animation exercises each day with it, eventually working your way up to a mini film (nothing’s completely rendered though! just models), other than that it was pretty much the same as 2D

so basically, I learned the basics and they were really helpful, but to be honest I felt a bit lost with how free it was, you basically had to learn everything on your own with the teachers just checking your work. I was really good at 3D but it... wasn’t fun for me lol so I decided that after this I’d want to stay in the 2D realm of things

now for R! My parents were worried about the starving artist myth and all that, so they would absolutely not let me do Illustration even though that’s what I really wanted, so I chose Game Design and I was like hey I’ll deal with it or like maybe I’ll like it. If not, I could always try convincing my parents to let me switch my major. 

the way things work at R is that all the majors are put into categories, so Computer Animation, Game Art, and Illustration are all the Media Arts majors. All Freshman take basically the same type of classes and things start breaking off around the second semester of freshman year. Eventually you like see no one outside your major lol

and lET ME TELL YOU........ R HAS A VERY HEAVY WORK LOAD, so you gotta be prepared for that. I think just about all art schools are like this, but R’s very strict on it.  Manage your time wisely, there’s a lot of times I’ve seen people pull all nighters just to finish all their assignments. I was really bad at managing my time too, so when I go back I need to be more strict on myself. It’s better to do things early and relax than relax until last minute and have anxiety hell. Not many of the teachers are about how much homework you have in other classes. Also, it’s good to not do things last minute because then you can relax earlier and scanners and place you go to take photos aren’t crowded.

and trust me, your teachers will know if you did something last minute, and they can tell whether effort was put into something or not. 

Now for classes, I’ll talk about just freshman year since that’s probably what’s most helpful to you right now and since I was made to drop out by my parents I’ll probably be repeating like the second semester of that rip.... anywAY

so, R starts you with foundation, so figures classes, 2D design, drawing (this one’s perspective! so important but rip everyone forgets everything after that semester so I should probably start studying perspective again)

the figure classes at R are sO GOOD............ you improve a lot with those, a few weeks into it I was thinking about the figures I had in my portfolio and was just like...... fuck these are so shitty how the hell did the school accept me.... of course the experience depends on the teacher, but I loved my figure drawing teacher he was really cool and good. He did demos at some point every class to where we would all just hover over his shoulder and watch him draw while he explained what he was doing. You i

2D design I hated because like...... abstract... it’s supposed to help you work with compositions and such but I really don’t understand abstract and execute it properly so that was a really difficult class for me 

drawing class is just doing still life and perspective exercises, you don’t really get to the fun part till second semester, I forget the other exercises but I remember that towards the end there was one where you designed a car (like a fun spin on it like.... I think mine was a firefly styled car? yeAH)

other classes were Film & Narrative (so studying films, it was cool) and Writing Studio, which is just like a writing class, they don’t really apply to skills/experience in art so I’ll skip over those

second semester, you still have Figure Drawing, but there’s more of a focus on stuff and you get to draw animals too (sadly no, no real animals come into the classroom. You work off of projections and then there’s a field trip to a big cat sanctuary)

drawing II gets fun because you finally get to use photoshop for your still life and assignments, the assignments get more fun like the Tro/./.ja./n Ho//rs/e assignment. Like you could either do the actual one or draw a similar scenario, I’m totally blanking out on what I did but one of the examples was like a giant wooden mouse with cheese and in the back were cats watching the actual mice. Anyway, it had even more of a focus on compositions and colors. 

Another assignment was designing a character’s room. It could be any character, but you couldn’t have anything that gave away their name. People had to be able to guess who the room belonged to just by looking at it. Sounds hard, but fun. If the character you chose had like a specific style from the concept art of where they’re from you’re free to use that too! I did Kida from Atlantis and one of my friends did Greg Universe’s room, so she got to imitate SU’s background style which was cool to see!

3/D desi/gn was............. super difficult to me, I almost failed that class >w>;;;; because it was woodshop type stuff and polymer clay depending on what you wanted. However, every assignment you did would lead up to the grunt assignment, which was like, you had three designs of things that would be possible grunt level monsters, and you essentially pitch a game idea to the class and they pick the best. SO again, modeling especially with actual clay is hard for me but it was a great experience when it came to designing and stuff. There’s more but I don’t want to get into all the assignments

3/.D design differs based on what major you’re in, and you only get it if you’re doing one of the Media Arts majors, but I’m pretty sure for the most part they’re the same?

if you major in Game Art or Animation, then you also take traditional animation, which was really fun but tbh...... I only knew how to do animation because of me being at precollege at C and then like learning stuff on my own, you were really left alone a lot, which is the same for some of the other classes. They’ll help you if you ask, but if you don’t then you can’t really get helpful feedback. Again, it depends on the teacher. The one I had was really nice and I frequently went to her for help.

so despite how some assignments/classes were hard for me, I really loved R and I’m excited at my parents giving me the option to go back, I just need to do a portfolio again >w>;;;; R’s a really good school with a lot of great resources. All of my issues came from problems with people (not teachers just other students) there and I’m not gonna get into those cuz personal lol

OKAY SO for portfolio tips

still life

figURES

ANIMALS, it makes you have a better understanding of anatomy and stuff

try to have a mix of media in there, like I mainly do digital but still have some traditional stuff to show that you know how to use those

I would keep figures realistic and not stylized so they can see that you have an understanding of them

depends on the school I think, but R strictly says in their guidelines to not do fantasy stuff like unicorns and dragons

NO FAN ART.......  you can have it but you need to be really, really vague? if that makes sense, like people shouldn’t be able to tell it’s fan art

have what you’re applying for in your portfolio, so like depending on what you want I’d add concept art stylized stuff or character designs 

you gotta have your best work in there, like some people like having okay/bad work to show how much they improved but that’s a bad idea, if you don’t think something’s good don’t put it in for colleges to see