My journal is, for many reasons, now partially friends-only. I'll still be posting drawings and memes and general frivolous nonsense publically, but anything substantial from now on will be locked. Add me if you wish, but if you want me to notice you're going to have to tell me ;)

I just had a guy come to the door with a suitcase and a folding drying rack and repeatedly try his key in the door. I had music blaring so I only noticed when the cat freaked out. I opened the door and went D: you don't live here, and he proceeded to argue with me and tell me he was SURE.

I'm quite sure I'd know if some random dude was moving in with me today, thank you sir!

( Gypsy in progress )

whooo for actually drawing things. With backgrounds! I am actually for reals going to colour it, too, eventually! I am still in the process of dicking about with line weights, haha. I never do anything clean.

Am tidying up and procrastinating mid-flow here. Feeling a bit better, though still physically shafted - went to the docs on Monday and now awaiting blood test results to see what's going on in there.

( Animated Movie Meme )

My first ever Threadless submission :D Please vote for me if you'd wear this on a t-shirt!

Back in third year at Uni we worked on a short film that was set in a decaying mansion. As part of our research we went to a load of abandoned locations, but most notably this long-empty hospital (I believe a psychiatric facility - Strathmartine Hospital, check this thread out for more info on it & pictures) out in the hills. This place was due to be torn down, but we took a load of pictures while we were in there & I figured I'd post some of the better ones!




Outside of it, there's a little cottage called 'Cuckoo's Nest'. An angry looking old man (apparently former caretaker) peered out of his window at us as we passed it. One of the other students happened to have family still living in the staff-housing, so we had keys for the entire place & we took the guard dogs for a walk with us.

( Pic spam )

I'd really like to go back there, but the girl who took us was barely an acquaintance at the time and I certainly haven't spoken to her since, alas! I dug these out for reference for horror-esque artwork/scenery - we got a decent selection of decaying textures and windows and things, so all in all not too bad considering we nearly had our asses handed to us for skipping a lecture to go.

Good times, good times.

Toasty and Ghosty is back on daily from today :D toastandaghost or at toastyandghosty.com... the ultimate bread/phantasm combo return!

Please tell ten friends to tell ten today!

The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on their site daily to meet their quota of donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman.

It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on 'donating a mammogram' -- for free (pink window in the middle). This does not cost you a thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate a mammogram in exchange for advertising.

Here's the web site! Please pass it along to people you know.

http://www.thebreastcancersite.com/

I'm rejigging my webcomic and posting it on livejoural!

Check out toastandaghost for all your daily bread/phantasm needs! Watch, join, pledge your owllegiance.

I've redrawn all the old strips, cut some things I didn't like and shuffled it. Some of the material is the same, some of it's new -- by the time we get into next week it will all be new :D tell your friends!

Going to get the kitten tomorrow -- right now am fervently trying to cat-proof the house, but I am sure no matter what I hide he will find things to have that I don't want him to have, haha. Am beginning to think it would be better to not cat-proof the house and let him have the lesser of many evils.

In the spirit of the occasion, have a cat macro:

Meme nicked from blowdry

* Post 3 things you've done in your lifetime that you don't think anybody else on your friends list has done.
* See if anybody else responds with "I've done that."
* Have your friends cut & paste this into their journal to see what unique things they've done in their life.

01. I superglued my trousers to my legs and my hand to my trousers, and then had to HACK MY WAY out of them with a pair of nail scissors and then sit in the bath with a scouring pad to free myself. Oh yes!

02. I took the wrong bus and ended up in England instead of at home... making an hour and a half journey into an eleven hour one

03. I once told my teachers my parents were getting a divorce to get out of being in trouble. It worked, until they called both my parents up for a separation meeting at the school... for a divorce they weren't actually having. :D

There's actually a load of random shit I could have put here that I'm pretty sure no one else would have done, or at least only the few who grew up with me, haha but it would mean admitting such things took place ;)

Well, here is is.... I get my final grade in t-minus four hours, but I'm more nervous about what you guys think of the film I've been banging on about for a year and a half ;) It's not perfect, but we learned plenty from working on it -- and I'm proud of what we managed to do as a group. Onwards and upwards I say!

The deadline for the film has been and gone -- I graduate in a month's time, and we get our results back a week today. Aaaah!

Last week was hectic, but hopefully well worth it -- the whole last month has been surreal, it hasn't sunk in yet that we're completely finished. There's no sense of closure or happiness yet, to us it was just like crossing one more thing off of the 'to do' list. We finished the film and handed it in with no drama or stress, it was just done, rendered, put on a dvd, and on the edit share all in one afternoon the week before the hand in. I think if we'd been flapping about the night before we might have felt it more, haha. Putting our folios together was more stressful than making the film -- kids, if you do an animation degree, start making your fucking folio at Christmas!

I put our 'Making Of' up on youtube, one of the many requirements of the degree was showing what everybody did on the film --



Music by Craig :D his myspace.

I'm not going to put the film on youtube or anything, I'll link to the degree show site when it goes up though so you can all see it and the others :)

Every year the University does a sort of press-release thing, written up by the exhibitions department -- I was one of the ones who was asked to do it. My phone wasn't working properly apparently, so I didn't actually get the message about it for weeks -- when five voicemails all arrived at once saying "Hi Laura, it's Jenny from the exhibitions department, I just need to set up an interview..." hahaha.

So I finally caught up with them, having given up trying to reach them on the phone ("Hi Jenny it's L, guess you're not in your office today either..." "Hi Laura it's Jenny..." "Hi Jenny it's L..." voicemail tag!) and spoke to them about the film, and this is what they actually released about it -- syntax theirs:

Along with classmates Mairi Steele, Shaun Gordon and Arthur Cook, Laura has produced a humorous, hand-drawn animation. The romantic story, entitled 'Chasin Tail' follows a street mutt with his eye on a glamorous lady. Slapstick antics occur as he traces her through the streets but there is a twist in the tale with a surprising finish. Laura hopes to become a concept artist, developing characters for others to use.

First of all, Arthur's last name is Crook, not Cook, and secondly... a street mutt?! I said he escapes from his garden to chase her, and one of the stills we gave them was a picture of the dog in a kennel! Hahahaha, never mind the grammar -- I guess they wanted it to be gritty, as well as... slapstick? Haha, you can see the full page of them here.

I should have more time now to take part in things like gear_shift and post drawings and ... stuff. Watch me not do it now, hahaha!

The film is finished! All we need to do now is render off a fully uncompressed version of it, which we're going to be doing tomorrow. Deadline is Monday at 12 :D

In other news, I got hired, whay! I'm going to be a jr artist at a games company in Dundee. This is good for many reasons, not least of all because it's full time/permanent :D. I'll be doing some concept stuff for an upcoming project which'll be fun, and probably loads of monkey work ;) but that's okay, money for doing things that aren't retail related!

The lj spellchecker seems think I've misspelled 'monkey'... I really don't think I did...