KDramarama

In between watching my scripts run and obsessively refreshing the messages tab to check the errors, I heaved a sigh and figured life is only as interesting as I make it to be. In short, I'm bored and out of things to do to break the seemingly dragging routine that is my day to day (night to night to be exact) job.

Source: viki.com

After Descendants of the Sun, I didn't know what to do to keep the fleeting feeling the show has brought me, I figured it's mostly because I adore Joong-Ki so I watched Innocent Man, if only to satiate my craving to see him more.

Source: marnelfundales.wordpress.com

Then, just like any series, it ended, and again, I didn't know what to do. But here I realized it wasn't really Joong-Ki, but Song-Song's overall chemistry that I've come to admire, so I learned I was just really looking for kilig. Seeing that there's no other Song-Song series out there. I decided to ignore my feelings for Joong-Ki and watch another high-rated drama as suggested by KissAsian.

Source: dramafever.com

Cheese in the Trap definitely goes to my favorite KDrama list. The story is engaging, stressful at times, and I hated the lead guy so much 'cos he's manipulative, creepy, mysterious, and is borderline psychotic. That's why the second guy syndrome (when you prefer the other guy more than the lead guy) is so strong with this one! Anyway, when it ended, I didn't feel the need to watch anymore dramas cos work was getting more demanding.

Then my life suddenly went to a stall. When did I become so heavily glued to watching KDramas that my entire life literally stops when my mind isn't in anyeong mode? For a while I was even trying to learn to write in Korean. FTR, I learned to write Korea in Korean! That's as far as it goes haha.

Anyway, after a while (one week and counting) of not watching any drama, I've managed to put my mind to another diversion, my favorite of all... DRAWING! K. Will be posting an art dump soon (or not cos I may be tamad).

Happy weekend goyz!

What's on my desk?

One of the Skillshare classes I'm taking is Kate Bingaman-Burt's Drawing Collections: Illustrating Stories through Taxonomy. In her class we are to produce a collection of illustrations that tell a story about ourselves. We are to make two sets; this is the first I came up with just by watching the first couple of videos and browsing the completed projects.

Finished output

In terms of following instructions, this output is totally wrong, but nevertheless let me take you to the process hehe

The collection I decided to draw was the stuff on my office desk, you're supposed to draw each item on a big sheet, add labels, color it using whatever medium, scan it, and post process it using Photoshop. After doing all those, you can combine and layout all of the items in a single large canvas and marvel at the story you've made a bunch of things convey.

Sadly, here's what I did: I drew them all together on a postcard sized pad and colored the items using watercolor. Then I took a picture of it and edited using whatever app my tablet has. I forgot about the labels cos there isn't any space left.

Pencil outlines

Colored in using watercolor

Outlined digitally

I'm happy with the output, for one, it took me of out the creative slump I've always planned to escape from but never really got the motivation to. And also, I'm less afraid of watercolor now lol.

But then, I should have been more patient and watched all the videos before turning in an output.

Another thing,

There should be no shame in digital post processing, I know. But my finished work was more digital than traditional and sometimes I'm afraid of putting it out 'cos I would be ashamed to show the less stellar but original version. I don't know, but enhancing artworks using Photoshop feels like a stab to my creativity. Do models feel this way when their bodies are shopped for magazine covers?

I was very reluctant to apply filters and adjust brightness and contrast because I thought I will lose the integrity of the piece. But then I realized I was more afraid of screwing the piece by trying to enhance everything manually because there's no undo. :P

Case in point: I shouldn't care less

Virtual users

Ten minutes to go before we resume training. But this time, I'm not the one being trained. I'm posing as an understudy so I can take on tomorrow's class. Amazing. I never thought this day would come, not that I dream of it, that my role in the team is stepping up to not just minding my own business but teaching potential teammates too.

It's quite a deal for me, not big, but a deal nonetheless. If anything, I want to tick off bullet after bullet on that friggin' competency framework chuchu the management invented to make it harder (or easier, haven't checked) for us to get promoted. It's pretty stressful, but if I don't make myself cut out for the next step by next year, well, there's jobstreet and the end of my bond. If you know what I mean ;)

Virtual users is just one of the terms we're teaching on this class.

Bids

While waiting for my script to run long enough without throwing up errors, let me waste some time here. This week, I was busy struggling to balance my work and life. Work being my daily QA job, and life -- watching Song Joong-Ki. Hm.

Joong-Ki is pretty much what my life is about for a week now. If I'm not obsessing about the actresses he's been linked to, I'm actively waiting for the next episode of Descendants of the Sun -- by watching his other dramas (right now: Innocent Man).

I know this'll die over time. See, I grew tired of thinking about Tom Wlaschiha after Season 2 of Game of Thrones. On his return to Season 5, I thought my obsession would come back but no. No sparks took off. Oh well, the man has brought good feelings and a girl is grateful.

My record of obsessions says a lot about me, I've learned. One is that absence makes my heart grow farther, and the other is that I'm not one to wait.

To be honest, I'm feeling bored and pathetic. 11 minutes and counting for the script I'm running. This needs to hold for at least 15 minutes before I can confidently march out of this frkn office and face the unbelievably scorching 8am sun. I hate the summer heat.

I don't even have the strength to think of happy thoughts for this week's Happy List. That's why I'm feeling pathetic. Didn't anything nice happen this week? Oh sure there are, but at the risk of oversharing I'll just keep them to myself and God. Oh God, aren't you tired of the mundane things I keep yapping about.

Not to be totally random, the script I'm running has something to do with creating bids, hence the title.

Yosh, 16 mins. Let's abort the script and go.

The Happy List (vol. 1)

Since I hardly publish on a Friday let's just plain call this the happy list.

1. Got my copy of Reese Lansangan's album, Arigato, Internet
2. Got my hair colored (light golden brown) at L'Oreal's free hair color application at Landmark Trinoma (which is now permanently installed at the mall)
3. Mr. Kimbob's Gimbap
4. Coco Milk Tea's Salty Cream Milk Tea + Pudding <3
5. Daddy briefly taught me to drive atras abante while waiting for mommy to finish her appointment. ORAAAYT!
6. Bought a super long pillow for the bed, and a new pillow for the office (to cover my tummy lol)
7. SM Cubao is now my top 2 favorite SM. Makati comes first.
8. Earned another free ride from Uber!
9. Watching Descendants of the Sun because Song Joong-ki! Best thing about this week!
10. Getting inspired to take classes at Skillshare (cos my almost free premium account is expiring in 2 months!)
The challenging thing about this list is not abandoning it on a week when nothing extraordinarily positive happened. It's nice having to look back and kindof force yourself to consider the little things just to finish this post. Looks like I did have a happy week! :D Thank you Lord! :D

The case of the overly inspired

You know when you were way too excited about creating something, but for some reason ended up producing nothing, because you were too busy getting motivated and collecting inspirational material instead of working? That's the case of me and my Skillshare Premium account.

When I heard about Skillshare offering 3 months premium membership for just $0.99, I joined in agad and eagerly browsed at the many classes offered by outstanding artists. A month into it and I realized I haven't finished a class, let alone sat down and started drawing anything. So disappointing. I wasted an entire month jumping from one class introduction to another, adoring the trailers, the project galleries, but never enrolling.

Now, I want to make sulit the remaining months I have into actually finishing a class and producing something of creative value. Naks haha. Earlier I took the liberty to enroll in all the classes that interest me, particularly within the arts and design category, and grabe lang the joooooy of watching the video trailers showing snippets of the gurus' design processes and project outputs! Sobrang nakaka-inspire! Aaaaargh!

I'm calling this phase inspiration hoarding.

To the uninitiated, Skillshare is an online learning community where you can learn a skill or share your skills. In there you can take online classes about design, technology, business, film, photography, etc. and engage in a streamlined learning process in order to complete a class project.

Here are the top 5 visual arts classes I'm most excited to start (in no particular order), but will most likely ignore for the majority of the week (or month) cos that's just how I roll (unfortunately).

1. Mastering Inking: Basic and Pro Techniques

by Yuko Shimizu
http://skl.sh/1MQEysJ

2. Paint a Portrait in Photoshop: Blank Canvas to Finished Illustration

by Gabrielle DeCesaris
http://skl.sh/1RWNrjx

3. Drawing Collections: Illustrating Stories through Taxonomies

by Kate Bingaman-Burt
http://skl.sh/1MQzXGY

4. The First Steps of Hand-Lettering: Concept to Sketch (Lettering I) 

by Mary Kate McDevitt
http://skl.sh/1Wanq3j

5. Perspective Drawing: Creating Illustrations with Dimension

by Matt Laskowski
http://skl.sh/1MQEucq

To be honest, if I hadn't spent time working on this post I could've finished a class already but who cares! We all know my time's gonna be spent somewhere else like my Pinterest boards or, oh right, my job. :P

Join me!

Let me get you in the same offer and let's marvel at all of the classes together. The truth is if you join by being my referral, I'll get a free month! Yay! And you will too if you join and refer. :)

$0.99 is roughly ₱50 for 3 months access to premium classes. Most classes run for an hour which is divided into multiple segments per topic. If you take at least one class per week, you'll be able to finish 12 classes and produce 12 creative outputs! And your monetary investment? ₱50 lang, bongga.

Here's the sign-up link: http://skl.sh/1R0xxpl

Or you can also comment your email address so I can invite you another way. :)

:)

[FALSE ALARM] Broken images

Blogger has gone really bonkers lately. All of my uploaded images hosted under https://2.bp.blogspot.com cannot be displayed.

When I tried updating the images by using the same photo I uploaded, I noticed some of them have changed URLs. From 2.bp, I see some with 1.bp or 4.bp. I have no idea what happened since my photos were never moved. :/

I read around and was relieved to know this isn't an isolated case. It seems like blogger's image host 2.bp.blogspot.com is really down.

It's quite a bummer really.

ETA: False alarm goys, apparently, http://2.bp.blogspot.com was blocked by the company (for some reason). So much for my silly rants. Props to the Blogger Forum for helping me discover the real issue and to those who responded to my twitter rage charot haha.

I posted this topic on the forum and an expert answered me about how blogger images have multiple mirrors you can access just by changing the first digit.

Look, all of these URLs point to the same image

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-hzibNSHzceDoVzQFdNhmfwlPSzWwrC5K6aJpxRDWi_OrP2YHNwk-MKGT07NJ03xxmyOXKWTAJG2vGtpSVsna2Bj1tCa25iQSPxs3GPrcjhGBeRoB575s6FSRWqcWu_p-w5E441deV_Y/s1600/DSC_1111.JPG
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-hzibNSHzceDoVzQFdNhmfwlPSzWwrC5K6aJpxRDWi_OrP2YHNwk-MKGT07NJ03xxmyOXKWTAJG2vGtpSVsna2Bj1tCa25iQSPxs3GPrcjhGBeRoB575s6FSRWqcWu_p-w5E441deV_Y/s1600/DSC_1111.JPG
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-hzibNSHzceDoVzQFdNhmfwlPSzWwrC5K6aJpxRDWi_OrP2YHNwk-MKGT07NJ03xxmyOXKWTAJG2vGtpSVsna2Bj1tCa25iQSPxs3GPrcjhGBeRoB575s6FSRWqcWu_p-w5E441deV_Y/s1600/DSC_1111.JPG
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-hzibNSHzceDoVzQFdNhmfwlPSzWwrC5K6aJpxRDWi_OrP2YHNwk-MKGT07NJ03xxmyOXKWTAJG2vGtpSVsna2Bj1tCa25iQSPxs3GPrcjhGBeRoB575s6FSRWqcWu_p-w5E441deV_Y/s1600/DSC_1111.JPG

Amaaaaazing thing I learned today! :D