Wheee, I’m home sick today, recovering from the light head cold that Rym has so kindly shared with me. I’ll probably finish the last story painting I have to do for Guns of Icarus (Take a look at the trailer here!), the steampunk-airship-sky-pirate-all-around-things-that-I-like PC game that me and the small team at Muse put together. For as little as we are, I think we did a pretty decent job.
On the train the other day, I wrote a script for a promotional comic which centered around Aya, a pilot who I would write about when I was a young teen. I went through this phase where I was obsessed with stories about youths who fly fighter planes in the desert to defend against the air pirates hordes, and Aya was an imagined character about whom I wrote quite a few stories back then. I think her arrival coincided directly with when I first saw the movie of Nausicaa, and I decided that weird airplanes were WHERE IT’S AT! or maybe before that when I was into The Rocketeer (one of my favorite movies of a kid). Anyway, Aya’s world and the Guns of Icarus setting are so similar that they’ve kind of become merged in my head, and the tomboy ace and the airship pilot from the game exist parallel in the same world. It’s one of the moments when I realize that “Wow, I’m making art for stories that I would have dreamed of making when I was young.” It’s a nice feeling.
In other news, I am one more older now. It was a pretty low key birthday - I went to work, finished a painting, and went out for noodles with Alex and Brian. By the time I got home my nose was running like crazy, and I took some allergy meds that made me all loopy and drunkish, but I managed to make a good dinner despite that. (I also found that throwing a left over spinach salad with mushrooms and bacon in chicken broth with onions and eggdrop makes a surprisingly decent batch of soup!) It seems that now I am officially an adult, not age wise but lifestyle-wise. I cooked my own birthday dinner, bought my own cheesecake from Eileen’s, and washed up the dishes afterwards, which seems a very adult thing to do. Scott and Rym were also over. Scott’s car had a dead battery about which he inconsolable, but he ate the proffered food and only whined quietly. All in all, hooray. (Well, except for the post-nasal drip.)
I’m looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. My building rocks, and I’m learning the Canal Street area as far as food goes. Lots of food for super cheap! Today I ate a fried Pork-chop and Rice with tea egg and cabbage, from a little place my co-worker showed us, for 5 dollars. It was delicious, but I had this horrible image of turning into a fat round ball and rolling down the street at the end of the year as a result of these lunch specials, so I think I’ll be taking food quite often to save cash and my tummy. I feel like doing tennis again today. Yesterday, when I played against Rym I was surprised I could still hit the gosh-darned ball, it’s been so long since I played. Tonight is a Geeknights night, so I should run on my own or something. Or animate maybe. Hey, don’t laugh, I actually worked on a new shot yesterday. When it’s cleaned up, I’ll post a vid here. I’m thinking that maybe this would be a good place to post miscellaneous drawings that I don’t put on my main page. Art dump! Whoo!
We packed up the office for our move today. The necessities are boxed, the random cords sorted, and the software FINALLY inventoried (all this time we had a copy of COMBUSTION? What?!) and with that, Our team is heading down to Soho for the forseeable future. Everybody is all excited about the prospect of all the food down there, because the pickings over by Penn Station are kinda slim, but it may be that we’re just spoiled New Yorkers who find a street with less than three Asian Fusion joints on it some-what bland. I will miss team meals in K-town, my Cafe Zaiya melon-pan in the morning, and the inevitable detours to the Bryant Park Kinokuniya on my way home, but I’ve got a good feeling about this business. I feel like I’m starting fresh, like it’s a new semester and I’ve got all new pencils in my pencil case. I’ve learned a lot in the two years I’ve been sitting at my desk in the one room office of this little game studio, and now I feel like when I sit down at my desk in Soho, it will be as a professional 3D artist, not a green-horn student with diploma in hand, trying to fool people into paying me for my art. (Although, first I may have study up bit. I realized that the people who are my awesome art interns are more experienced than I am, and have the mad 3D skillz.)
It’s weird,when we were cleaning, we found a piece of paper with stick figures on it. It basically was advertising a thousand bucks to the winner of a character design contest, and I remembered seeing this paper stuck up on the bulletin board on the eighth floor hallway at Tisch. I looked at the stick figures, thought “what kind of scam is this, here?” and proceeded to stay up late on my birthday drawing my entry. I didn’t get the thousand dollars. I did, however, end up somehow landing a job at this little start-up web company with a big dream. Now I make awesome air pirates for a awesome living with awesome people. Who would have thought a scrap of paper with stick figures on it would change my life? Thanks, guys. Now I need to stop being full of piss and vinegar when it comes to controvesial subjects, like Office 2008 and Harry Potter. Boss, just think of me as spunky!
