Progress and Just Gross

in many ways i feel like i've majorly lucked out. i still can't believe i escaped that labyrinth of unhappy cubicles and the micro-managing mr. poopants, and managed to walk right into a doodling gig. i mean, i literally can't believe it. it's like when i first moved to san francisco, i would have to walk through downtown-- acting a total tourist with eyes at the tops of the buildings-- re-amazing myself with how lucky i was to live in this city.

the team, the pay, the free wacom, and the overall enthusiasm of this project has me stupid-happy. and i'm getting really good with the tablet and adobe illustrator-- which feels good considering the beginning.

but here's the downside: the initial job is to draw just six emotions (decided by the team), and four "personas" (i.e. hipsters, superheroes.) it's not the number of drawings-- there's a good chance i'll draw extras with my spare time-- it's having to research some of the personas.

see, for emotions, i just spend about an hour making faces and taking pictures via photobooth. then i draw them into the dragon. it worked for bill waterson and i've heard it's not as unusual as it feels. it's not always helpful considering i don't look enough like a dragon-- but usually it's a great aide and also a good chance to act six years-old again.

but, when it comes to drawing the four personas, i almost always have to look it up online.

and it was all fun and great until the team decided i ought to draw the dragon as a guido-- hanging out with snooki. i don't watch tv-- and if i did watch tv i would not watch jersey shore-- so i don't know a whole lot about the new dysfunctional fools on whichever new show.

it worries me that other countries will look at our tv shows and base some assumptions of american culture entirely on the situation.

so for the next day or so, i will be staring at snooki's fat orange head in attempts to find the best way to draw her in cartoon form without vomiting on the new wacom tablet. i'm tempted to just draw a lumpy potato with a fake tan and call it quits.

i mean this is digusting. but i'll manage.

on a related note, did you know that some companies actually gift snooki their competitors' products just to lower the competition? yeah. she's so universally accepted as the armpit of our gene-pool that having your product even loosely associated with her is bad news.

anyway, wish me luck. the rest of the personas are a lot more fun-- just need to get it over with this squashed oompa loompa and move on.