An Abrupt Return to "Real Life." Whatever that is.

So, many of you know that my family took a two week vacation out West. We visited such places at The Black Hills in South Dakota, the Tetons in Idaho, and of course Yellowstone in Wyoming. Thankfully, the plan (mostly) worked out without a problem. We did run into some car trouble and had to spend a day in Mitchell, South Dakota when our van's radiator burnt out.
Some of our adventures included: spelunking, horseback riding, hiking, and visiting such things a Crazy Horse and Mt. Rushmore. In addition to all of these things, I also managed to get some quite time alone and use this vacation to further my relationship with my Lord.

Here's a pic from when we were in the Tetons:

Since we got back... let me see... 5:30 a.m. on Sunday (August 23rd) our hose has gone rather mad. You see, we had a little less than a week to finish our summer long deck construction project before my younger sister's graduation open house. Because of this, I've spent very nearly every waking moment this week out in my back yard working on our deck. Finally, at about 11:30 last night my dad and I ran out of decking to put down and were forced to halt. Even though we can't actually finish the deck before the party, we made some pretty incredible progress and for the most part it is done. (Yay.)

But since I spent most of this week on the deck, I've had precious little time to prepare for school. To say nothing of the fact that the 3D packages I ordered along with my new computer haven't come yet. Next Monday (Thank God I don't have classes until Tuesday!) is going to be pretty crazy.

What else is new? Oh yes. I've been trying to get more active with my church this year, now that I've gotten in the swing of things with college and all (haha.) So on Monday nights I'm going to be attending a Men's Theology Group, which should be really cool. The group consists of 9 guys, with a pretty wide range of ages... I I'm probably going to be the second youngest guy in the group. Anyhoo, I think it will be a really cool group of guys and I'm really looking forward to it.

On top of that, I was asked to help lead a Jr. High boys small group on Wednesday nights at my church. I have to say right off the bat that something like this is WAY out of my comfort zone. However, I feel like this is where God is leading me, so I said "yes."

All in all, this is shaping up to be one of the busiest semesters of all time. I was already planning on dealing with a killer class schedule, but pack in everything else and I don't know if I'll sleep until Christmas.

I think that's all for now. I'll leave you guys with a picture my dad took of me that I thought turned out pretty sweet. (I'm sitting and looking at "Fairy Falls" in Yellowstone National Park.) Here you go:

New Computer

I'll be honest here.  I haven't done a lick of work on the website since my last blog post.  Awful, I know.  Life has been feeling too much its self recently to allow me the extra time (or energy necessary) to work on DM2.

Over the last couple weeks I've been able to work for much greater lengths of time that I had previously.  I'm really glad that it has turned out like that because I sure need all the $$$ I can get.  (Who doesn't?)

This last month has also managed to be one of the all time worst points in my life, if not the worst.  I'm not going into gory details, but sufficed to say, my girlfriend and I had to work some stuff out between us.  That was one extremely distracting week.

My family has also been putting vast amounts of time into tearing out and refurbishing our deck.  Being the eldest son, I have had to play my part in the deconstruction and reconstruction of said deck.  It is a lot of work to say the least, but after all these weeks of toil it is finally starting to come together.  (Yay, we can actually walk on part of it now!)

This week has been crazy.  We (my family) is taking a vacation (possibly the last that we'll all be able to do together) out to Yellowstone.  Also about a billion places in between.  We're going to be gone for two whole weeks, which I have to say, will be the longest vacation I've ever taken.  It will be interesting to see how cramming 6 people and their possessions into a mini-van for several consecutive days works, but I hope that by the end we will all still have the vestiges of our sanity remaining and can enjoy the rest of the trip.
Oh, did I mention that my sister is having her open house the weekend after we get back?  Well she is, and we have been getting ready for that on top of everything else.

The spot of light among all of this and the reason that I'm making this update in the first place is because I got a new computer!  Finally.  This is the first computer I've ever owned.  Last Wednesday I finally came to the conclusion that God was okay with me spending that much of my savings and that I wasn't being a fool to do so.  I then proceeded to the Apple store at Woodland mall and bought my self a brand (flippin') new iMac, along with the educational CS4 Creative Suite.  To top it all off, I got a free iTouch because I was a student.

So, since I'm going to need 3D stuff for school I decided to purchase and educational version of Autodesk's Softimage and Pixologic's zBrush.  Those should be waiting for me when I return home.  I'm so excited to get into them!  (Though I'll have to run Softimage through either BootCamp or Parallels.)

Here are some pics:  (He's named Jeeves, btw.)

Website Update and the Aftermath of Summer Classes

 I'm still chugging away on "Mark II."  I've had a lot of real (IE: Paid) work this week, so I haven't been able to put as much time in as I'd like in nailing out the last bits of the layout.  On top of that it's been trying time for me when it comes to relationships.  All in all, I haven't been much in the head-space for web design this last week.  What I have done is get a simple portfolio layout set up and decide that I need to rework my entire navigation system... so yeah.  Fun stuff.  I hope I finish it soon. Like tomorrow.

We all have our hopes and dreams.

Additionally, I offered to help a friend of mine come up with a design for his website, so I'm planning on throwing some of my time at that too.  How come I always get crazy busy when I offer to do something like this?  Ah well.  It should look good in my portfolio.

Since my website is coming so slowly, and I don't have any pretty pictures to show for it, I figured that I'd post some of the drawings that I did for my summer classe.

The self portrait I did as a final project.  Done with black and white prismacolor pencils against grey paper.

My second to last project.  Done with charcoal in about 8 hours.

One of my earlier drawings.  We were practicing contour drawing.  This was done over two or three class periods.

My Resume is Hot Off the Press!

I can hardly believe how long it took me to put together such a simple document.

Blasted distractions...

Anyway, I finally have it ready to go.

Dark Marble 2.0 Layout

So, for the last week or so I've been spending a lot of time setting up the foundations of my new Dark Marble website. Now that I have a good base to build off of in Flash, I've decided to finalize the actual layout/design of the website. It has been a bit of a hassle (because I couldn't decide what resolution at which I wanted to build it and kept changing my mind) but I'm pretty pleased with the results so far.

Obviously, there will be more to it than these sample pages, but this should give a pretty good idea of what the final product will look like.

The layout design for the home page:

The layout design for the portfolio page:

The layout design for the origin page:

The layout design for the downloads page:

The layout design for the resume page:

The layout design for the contact page:

As happy as I am with how DM2 is turning out, I still have oodles of work to do. I need to get together all the items for my portfolio, put together a resume, put together a demo reel, organize my downloadable assets and put together a tutorial. (No, I haven't actually done one yet, but I know what I'm going to do for it and I'd like to do more in the future.)

That's all for now! Hopefully I'll have another update soon.

Summer Rush

The weeks of summer are raging by me in a mad rush... Or am I raging through them? It's been hectic, it's been awesome, it's been tough and rough. It's been beautiful.

I finished up one summer class just over a week ago. (Geography of World Regions.) And this week I'll be finishing my last three days of my Drawing 1 class. I've got to say, this has been one of my favorite classes ever. By far the best class I've taken at GRCC. The Geography class wasn't bad, but... yeah. It wasn't exactly fun either. It was just a class.

Though I hasn't haven't been able to do a lot of work on top of school, I've been able to get in some hours this last week. Hopefully that will continue. And hopefully I'll get some freelance work later this summer, too.

In yet another attempt to earn some money I've been trying to get my portfolio together to apply so sell vector illustrations and photography on iStockPhoto. Unfortunately they haven't passed any of my stuff yet. I'll just keep at it until I get through.

After this week, I'm just going to focus on work and getting ready for classes this fall.

Figuring out Blogger

Well, it took long enough, but I finally got blogger to link to Darkmarble.com.  Now for the rest of the website....

I do hope to have it fully functioning by the end of the summer.  Once I get some free time it really shouldn't take all too long to set up.  I guess we'll just have to see how things go.

Yay for summer classes and homework.