Page for Portfolio

Sketch for Wind-Up Bird Chronicles

Good Grief

Last night I was pretty excited to post some pictures up on here...until I accidently clicked the "don't save" button instead of the "save" button.  The utter frustration caused me to step away from the computer immediately, and try to calm down.  So I played Uncharted on PS3.  Upon which I started dying, increasing frustration.  So I finished reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.  Not a bright warm fuzzy feeling book, but an amazing and incredibly well written.  The imagery the author uses is amazing and inspired a sketch which I have not yet finished, and thus not yet posted.

Now that I have had a good 18 hours after my clumsy, data-erasing, life-wasting mistake, I can post pictures up.

The Cedar House

 Yes, the tree is finally inside the house.  And as basic as it is, it serves it's purpose.  Clean air for everyone that is rich and wants to feel environmentally better about themselves.

The walkway is a whole separate issue, and I need a landscaper to add flowers/gardens/etc.

 To give you an idea of how the tree gets light, and how the house saves energy, I put a hole on the roof.  Well, it's not a hole, it is a glass/plastic substitute.  Just like Cowboy Stadium, God can look down and watch his favorite football...err family.




Now for my favorite wasted effort:

The Kitchen/Pantry

This kitchen took me awhile to figure out.  I even made that oven, and the pantry in the back, the countertops...sigh.  I think I'll be able to do those pretty quickly though.  Plus, I still haven't decided on a color scheme for any of the furniture/paint/everything, as you can see by the stairs and rest of the inside of the first level of the house.

Tonight I will try to replace all these elements and more, and thanks to God, the NFL lockout ended, and the Cowboys are on Monday Night Football, so I can sketchup and watch football simultaneously.  Hopefully I'll be able to post the replacement pictures up tonight, but we'll see how far I manage to get.

Until next time,

Robert

Too much Tim Burton

Pictures!

Physics Park

Out of the blue today I got an urge to create a physics museum.  So I did.

The Cafe

Eye View

Pythagorean Wall

Entrance

Paradise Found

Cedar House Rules

A good weekend along with a mild cold (and procrastination) have preoccupied me over the past couple of days, but despite these distractions I have still managed to get some work done.  Especially on the Cedar House (as it is called for now). It is a bit modern, and too environmentally considerate for my taste.

Red Cedar



Front Door (at my height)

Most of the exterior work is done. I only need to add a back door on the second floor and maybe a couple more windows, but for now I'm starting to focus on the interior, or as I like to call it: a giant mess.  The roof is still something of a mystery requiring trial and error considering I have to figure out a way to let a tree grow inside of the house...

Power Outage

Bamboo Sketch

Candlelight Sketch

Laborless Weekend

This weekend, I had a few minutes to put some more stuff together on the Globe.  Although, I did spend most of the three day weekend watching reruns of Parks and Rec and mlb.tv while eating an assortment of good foods.  From what I did manage to get done: the second floor, aside from the paneling has been essentially completed.  Well, the structure itself is almost completed, because the third floor is almost a replica of the second floor.  But the massive amount of information that is now stored in this model has slowed my computer down when I try to work on it.  This also implies that all the big stuff is done, and so tedious details is probably the best description for most of what is left to be done.



In an effort to procrastinate these little complex details, I have started yet another project.  This time, it's a simple house.  Kind of...I wasn't going to put pictures up, but words are starting to fail me now :

The plan for this house was to have a Red Cedar exterior, and that still may or may not happen. The big thing that is unique here is that there is a tree/forest patch in the middle of the house.  Like an enclosed piece of land.  There is not going to be foundation in the square and will instead go straight through into the soil.  This may will cause chaos in the construction phase of a house, but that is not my problem at the moment.  The stairs will run adjacent to this indoor courtyard, and go up to the second floor, allowing the tree to get up to about 20' high.

Since it is hard for me to explain with words right now:

  The tree/forest patch will be in the middle of the house, and the height goes through the second floor.  The roof of this house will be interesting, and I have about 4 ideas running through my head on how to go about it.  But that is for a different day.  This project is an exercise  to flex my 'creativity', something that I really need to demonstrate in my portfolio.  My technical skills are good, but my artistic abilities need some tuning.  So in an effort to be more artistic, I have made two purchases:

Autodesk Sketchbook Pro

Bamboo Pad

From personal experience, I can assure myself that this will be extremely frustrating.  These bamboo pads have always both fascinated me, and made me want to throw things for not being able to use it well.  They both shipped out today from Amazon, and they will probably both be here next week sometime.  So I have time to finish the Globe and the house by the time these come.  At least, that's the goal.  Eye on the prize....right?

Thank God for Linear Arrays

Who knows how many more hours would have been wasted without them.

Three totally unrelated things

While waiting in my car today, I was searching through the android market, hoping I would finally find an app that I would use more than twice.  It turns out, I finally did find one.  If you have an iphone or android, I highly recommend this app called "Buildings".  It not only has thousands of buildings, but it has directions to them, and finds the history of a building near you.  It is really fun to browse, and I can finally spend (or waste if you prefer) my time doing something interesting while avoiding other people.  No more staring and flipping through my app screen to avoid social interactions at receptions and parties.  I will never look like a loser loner to the general public again!

Perhaps that is a nice venture into my next topic, which is only an update on the globe.  The Tudor-esque style on the outside of the globe has been completed....on most of the first floor.  I know the stair columns have to be completed, but I plan on doing that last, once everything is done.

The coloring process has indeed begun, but the only thing that is set in stone so far are the both the column color and the cow hair plaster on the outside of the building (yes...they used cow hair of all things).  The columns are all just one component that is copied and pasted over and over again.  So while creating the first one took awhile to figure out, the rest was just a tedious five minutes of copy, paste, move, rotate.  Repeat.

The second floor construction has begun and all the benches are in, but a lot more work needs to be done, and it will probably take more time than the first floor did.  For starters, I haven't decided how I want to do that railing yet, and creating the "special rooms" for the royals is a whole different post.

Today I went out and bought a pencil sharpener, pencils, a hi-polymer eraser, and sharpie pens to use on my sketchbook.  Hopefully I will have some sketches soon to post up.

Until tomorrow,

Fun With Templates