Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Delayed Post: Goomba Amigurumi (Nerdigurumi)

My last delayed art post that I have pictures of currently.

A while ago I made a Goomba using the pattern on Nerdigurumi (also the banner at the bottom of my blog here).  It is FULL of catnip.  Stuffed.  I even bought a huge tub of the stuff to make sure I had enough to stuff the goomba with.

After getting some advice from MJ on how the felt and embroidery got destroyed by kitty attacks, I left them off completely and focused on making the toy as robust as possible.  I forget the colors I used, but all of the yarns were 100% cotton from brands on Nerdigurumi's higher rated yarn reviews.

Here are pictures I took of the goomba and of my cats (Sonic, the tabby, and Shadow, the black) enjoying their new toy for the first time~











Delayed Post: Shirts for Boyfriend!

This last summer and every summer for the past seven years or so, Kerry and I have visited each other.  This last summer in 2010 I got crafty and made him some shirts!  All shirts were given an inscription with fabric markers on the back-bottom-right of the shirt <3.

One I made as a Mario shirt.  Unfortunately in my first attempt I used up all the white matte paint stuff (that sticky kind of raised paint that the use on things like PE clothes or other school lettering), so I got to make a Dark Mario version.  I spread the paint as evenly and bestestly as I could.



Another I modeled after a black ink splat iron-on decal we found at the craft store:



We found a tiny but cute cat iron on patch that got a whole blue shirt all to itself!



Finally, I got some letters and an iron-on crab I thought was adorable.  In case you're not up on the World of Warcraft Blue Posters, Ghostcrawler was a very prominant Blizzard employee poster who fielded questions by the masses on the WoW forums.  Since making this shirt I think he quit or changed jobs (?) but I thought the shirt was an awesome idea anyway.


Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Delayed Post: Perler Bead Mic Kirby

Sometime late summer last year I wanted to try another larger sprite, something similar to the White Mage.  I went with one of my favorite sprites: rank three Mic Kirby.  I took some custom colors to his mohawk to make it look extra awesome.

He's currently mounted on cork (another experiment) at my cubicle.  Some people don't recognize him as Kirby at first, but I forgive them.  The bead-side faces out (the not-ironed-looking-side), and I cut off the clear bead border before mounting him.






Delayed Post: Gift for Aunt Denise

I had it in my head that I wanted to try Kanzashi (Japanese art of fabric-folding to make fabric origami hair ornaments) and made my aunt a pin using black and white fabrics she bought me long ago.

I also decided to spiffy up the presentation, namely hand-making a black and white themed card and (paper) origami box to hold the pin.  Here are the various parts and the final box package I gave her for her birthday last year in October.







Saturday, April 16, 2011

Graduating Senior and Grad Student

Since my last post, I've been entrenched in my senior game design project, Pattern.  You can check it out here: http://people.ucsc.edu/~agrow/pattern/

I have applied to the UCSC grad program in CS and got accepted.  Hurray!  We just finished our coming-out party into the big boy games club at the "Inventing the Future of Games" event.  Here are just some links to the media coverage:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/34140/Future_Of_Games_Driving_Gameplay_Innovation_With_Technology_Research.php
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/34144/Future_of_Games_Generating_Natural_Language_For_Game_Dialogue.php
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/34142/Future_of_Games_Emily_Short_Talks_Building_Interesting_Gameplay_Around_Dialogue.php

I am busy working hard on my project, and will probably turn this section into a blog about it.  And I'm immediately jumping into the UCSC PhD program.  My art, she is withering.