Screenshots of my Secret Base

Thank you all for your support :) I ended up closing everything that didn’t feel right anymore, resized the Hall of Changes into a two-page collective and started working on Particles. Right now I’m visiting my parents with Jacopo so I can’t really work, though :< then I’ll have to bring my stuff into the new house and play The Sims LIVE so I’ll see next week I guess

There was a time in which my imagination kept me awake at night, and when I fell asleep, it was from exhaustion. When I was a little girl, I felt like every day was a chapter of a story and I couldn’t wait for it to be written by a new morning. I felt like everything was my playground, and that I could have reached the sky if that was what I wanted. As I find myself overwhelmed once again by the raging stream of beauty in my head, I realize that this is all I ever wanted from life. I cannot waste my time waiting for the sky to come closer or for the right time to jump. This is not about taking risks, this is about taking measures so that I will succeed.

And the first thing is to break free from anything that is dragging me down.

So, I realize that other people’s paths can never be mine. I can admire the feats of other people without having to put my face on their bodies. Putting metaphors aside for a while, I’m talking about derivative works. A few years ago, all I could ever draw was fan art; whenever I wanted to draw, a Pokémon popped out by default. I eventually got over it, and I can now understand the many ways in which it hindered my creativity’s growth. I just used those characters as sockpuppets to draw and draw and draw in a neurotic fashion - it was artistic masturbation, so to speak.

That’s not to say that I don’t want to make fan art ever again and that fan artists will go to hell, it’s that I feel like every piece of fan art should be meant as a heartfelt tribute. I started to think about it a few months ago, when I was working on the Xivilai. I made it because I wanted to thank Bethesda Softworks for creating my favorite videogame. When I sent the finished piece to the developers and they featured it on their blog, I was exstatic. There are still so many awesome games I’d like to make fan art for as a way to celebrate them, understand the work of the minds which generated them and challenge myself into bending my style in different ways.

This also got me to think about my fan sites. Should I be spending time and effort making and remaking sites which, in the end, are nothing but webdesigning and writing exercises? I don’t even see the point of making fanlistings anymore. If I want to make a tribute to something, I want it to be a challenge, not a formulaic copy-paste. The weasels fanlisting is probably one of the most interesting websites I’ve ever made, but when I look at it I feel like it doesn’t need a fanlisting attached to it and that it could stand on its own legs. Same for the tribute side of the Fearow fanlisting.
Spark Needle, on the other side, feels like the most solid fan site I’ve ever made, since it was created as a divertissement and to connect with other fans - things which it does very well. I loved making it and having to update it from time to time doesn’t interrupt my workflow. It follows a fixed formula only on the surface. It sounds weird even to me, but it’s true - that’s one site I’m not ashamed to run.

At this point, what I really need is a creative outlet which will allow me to play with different subjects and different media while creating original content which makes sense. I think I have it figured out: a website whose every page is a different project. Could be a full-page illustration, an article, a series of screenshots or an infographic, you never know what’s next. The only rule is that all pages have to be actual web pages, so I’m going to use the new @font-face property introduced in CSS3 to obtain typography-rich pages with no background images. This website could also demonstrate how you can have a creative approach to webdesigning and a semantically pure coding at the same time.

I’ve just had a talk with Jacopo about this whole idea and he named the project Particles and I don’t think I can improve on that.

What about my fan sites, then? I think that I’ll be closing off all fanlistings and leaving only Spark Needle, Lithovore and Dark Claws. I don’t really know about Dark Claws, though. I should remake that site, but I really don’t want to. I’ll see.
I think that at this point I will have to resize the Hall of Changes into a single- or double-page collective, too.

I still have two months before classes start over. I will have to work on the new domain index, on Particles and on reorganizing my other stuff, and then I should take some time to build a proper online portfolio too; after this, everything I have on the web will finally make sense.

either I drew this or I would have imploded for not drawing for so long
(rectification: he can remove his tubes, but he’d rather not)

one thing that I despise: having ideas at late night and no one to share them with 8|

GUESS (warning: PHOTOS)

tagged by KateRayearth: ten red things which I love

1. Blood
   Not in the freaky way, though - I just happen to think that being filled with a dark red liquid is totally awesome. Besides, I think everyone will agree with me that blood is the only bodily fluid which doesn’t look gross.
2. Foxes
   I SAW A FOX YESTERDAY! she was so adorable, jumping on the side of the road. :D
3. Lower Brinstar
   My favorite zone in Super Metroid. You are exploring upper Brinstar’s alien jungle when you find a door; as you step through, the lush vegetation is suddenly replaced by a pulsating abyss of crimson sands. Suffocating in the depths of the planet, you can barely remember how it’s like to have a sky above your head. It’s there that you realize that you’re truly alone.
   This is the music that plays in that area and this is the Prime 2: Echoes version. One of the most beautiful (and unsettling) videogame soundtracks ever composed.
4. Poké Balls
   and by extension, the Pokéwalker
5. Cierra from Riviera: The Promised Land
   I KNOW SHE’S NOT A “THING” BUT I LOVE HER SO MUCH
   to be fair I love more or less all characters from that game, but Cierra is just adorable. She’s an awesome witch with awesome powers, but she’s also clueless and clumsy XD there’s one part of the game where she’s supposed to guide the group into a forest which she claims to have visited a lot of times but she still ends up losing the direction. SO ADORABLE
6. Red hair
   Whichever the fandom, I’m bound to fall in love with one or all red-haired characters. I don’t even do it on purpose, it’s just that most characters I like also happen to have red hair. I don’t know what’s up with that.
7. Stark apples
   Snow White’s apple minus the poison!
8. Red accents in clothing and accessories
   Whenever possible, I always get stuff which is black with some red. I mostly wear black, but I own two red bags. My laptop is black with a red cover. My MP3 player is black with a red button. And so on. I like the way red things looks against the black.
9. Red sand
   Like in those breathtaking photos of the desert at night.
10. Fire
    I was one of those kids who’d consume a whole box of matches just to stare at the flame.

(if you want to do this meme: comment to this entry and I’ll give you a color!)

1. three little girls not older than four talking about Pokémon in a videogame store
   one of them pointed at a Platinum box and said GIRATINA
   awwwwww
2. my new keychain is a tiny Totoro
   

planning a new layout for the domain index, the idea was to have a very complex illustration of a city in the sky as a full-screen background with some parts in the picture which, when clicked, will cause the page to scroll down to the section you were looking for

the illustration will be a watercolor, which means that I need to use a very large support and comp all the scans to get a good image quality

I just realized that, to achieve what I want, I have to make a painting which will be 29.7 centimeters long
and 84 centimeters tall

…

I’M UP FOR THE CHALLENGE

I’m working on this as soon as I get in the new house in September
(I’ll also get something to hang on the wall for free)

okay so I did have half an intention to change the layout since all that Georgia Italic was starting to get on my nerves
but I had no intention whatsoever to do it while I’m supposed to be ON VACATION

though, this was made in the span of a few days and I only worked on it when I had nothing better to do, so I guess this works as an excuse

just finished rescanning some stuff, which means that I can finally launch

it’s better than the old site!

just this, now I can go offline again