blarghleargle

I swear, this apartment is haunted by the ghost of insomnia past. Or maybe it's the transition from living in a house with three other people and a dog to just me and an exceptionally loud air conditioner.

Either way, can't sleep, so I decided to post a project I quite enjoyed from last semester's gd1 course. But because I did it in sixteen parts, I decided it was also time to learn how to make animated gifs in photoshop. Turns out: not too hard!

Lots of playing with the scanner and lightbulbs and cameras and stuff on this one. We were told to essentially pick our client: who would we most like to work for? And at first I was going to do Vibram (makers of a most excellent project) but anyone who's been in a critique with me these last couple of years knows that I pull most of my ideas from TED.com; I thought it was time to pay them a bit of respect via making stuff.

The main criticism I got from people was that the words are too dark (especially the ones in black) and I agreed then, but looking at them now with fresh eyes I can say that I SUPER agree. If I were to redo it, I'd probably make the smaller text in white or a lighter grey. I'd probably keep the red the same, though.

These were envisioned as a series of print ads of the sort you'd find in magazines, all glossy pages and interesting articles.

Some portraits!

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but here it is:

I. Love. Doing. Portraits.

And I got to do some today :)

These were actually done on white paper....but every light in this house is exceptionally yellow. They still look good, though, so I'm not mad, and I can always pop them into photoshop and whiten them up later (read: once I'm back in my apartment, where I keep photoshop)

I did these in several sessions to make sure my shoulder got plenty of rest. PT seems to be working in the fixing it category, mostly it just gets tired really fast. Progress, though! So I'm happy.

On Injuries

Traditionally, I'm not the sort of person that will go on and on about an injury. I know that sort of behavior can get to be pretty annoying and repetitive. However, as this has been brewing for nearly a year now, I've been meaning to make a post for quite a while. Besides, it'll be nice to have something to point people towards when I give people the simplest version of the story, which is: I hurt my rotator cuff because of painting.

Sounds pretty ridiculous, doesn't it?

At least, until you consider how much time I spend painting per week during the year, and the whole time my arm in the same position:

Whiiiiich, truthfully, doesn't look like that much of a problem, even to me. The problem is as follows:

Unlike most of the muscles that attach to the shoulder, the ones that comprise the rotator cuff aren't meant to be strong. They're for stability and are easily damaged and torn. This type of injury shows up a lot in swimmers, too, which, hey, guess what one of my favorite activities has always been?

The more I look back on it, the more I realize that nearly every class I took exacerbated the problem in some way.

Should have kept my major as physics freshman year. It would have been safer, apparently.

Anyway, if the symptoms had just been pain it probably would have been longer before I went to see anyone about it. There are, after all, deadlines to meet; who has time for doctor's visits? But things like this have a habit of....spreading

Some of these may not seem especially related, but believe me when I say that they are. (...maybe not the hip one, that one could be related to an ankle injury from high school that has a habit of flaring up now and again)

At this point in time, my shoulder joint is considered hypermobile, which really just means that it was super easy for the doctor to push it in and out of place. Like, disturbingly easy. I believe she said something along the lines of 'those pops you hear are the shoulder sliding in and out. Like a golf ball on the t being hit.'

So then she stuck a big needle in my shoulder, pumped the joint full of steroids to lessen the swelling, gave me some physical therapy to do, and sent me on my way. And maybe sometime in there I also almost passed out. It was a REALLY BIG NEEDLE, ok?

My shoulder is still sore a lot, but I can feel the PT working, and my little finger still tingles sometimes, but that should go away soon I hope.

Needless to say, I've pared way back on my painting and drawing recently (except for finishing my most recent comic, which will get its own, non-middle-of-the-night post)