This past weekend, I went to the East Coast Asian American Student Union (ECAASU) conference with several of my friends in the Asian American Association at TCNJ. I learned a lot, not only about Asian issues in the media, but also how I should think about the characters I create.

Lately, I’ve felt that they’ve been a bit two-dimensional and that their stories were not developed enough. I’ve realized they’ve lacked a “want”, something that drives them forward. If the character doesn’t have a drive, then why would the reader want to read about him or her? Thinking about that, I think I might go back and flesh out some of my old characters and figure out what exactly is going on with them.

Anyway, a lot of props to the guys running Secret Identities and the workshop they ran at ECAASU. I got momentarily inspired and had a lot of fun coming up with Asian American super heroes with people I didn’t know in the workshop.

I guess the reasoning behind me not updating this blog enough is because I’ve been working hard on buffing up my animation project from last semester so that I can send it out as my demo reel. The only problem is that I’m not satisfied with a lot of the tweening I did last semester because it didn’t look of high quality. So now I’m going over those old parts and drawing them frame by frame.

The Lesson: Drawing running cycles frame by frame is a pain, but it looks a billion times better than taking the tweening shortcut.

Sometimes I wish I had an actual class on traditional animation, but alas, it is not the case at TCNJ. I do have to admit though, it is a lot of fun modeling in 3D and the animation concepts there still apply to 2D.

I think I’ve finally settled on the site layout. It’s not exactly too fancy but it’s not the worst either. I think it’s a bit better than the one that was up before it. Maybe I’ll keep changing or adding to it as I learn a little bit more about PHP and mySQL from my Web II class.

One thing I started noticing when I came back to school is how statically charged I am all the time. I didn’t realize it completely until I started installing programs on the intel macs side of the lab, where all the keyboards are made of metal. So every time I went to type something, I’d always get shocked. After about the 20th time, it started to get really annoying and painful.

This is probably one of my woes because I love to knit and crochet, but I know they make me full of static. So perhaps my next quest is to find yarn that would not cause static, so I can finally make myself headgear for the cold winters in New Jersey. I wonder if there’s a good way to combine digital arts with fiber arts…

I’ve been meaning to start a new blog specifically for my arts and crafts for a long time, mostly as a way to show it to the public without all the mundane details of my personal blog. Trust me, there’s not much you’re missing except for the occasional shenanigans of college life.

Anyway, for a while, I’m going to upload what I believe is the best of my works and then the sketches and various other works will start flowing in.