Holli Rausch

If you’re observant, you might have noticed that when you came to milesrausch.com/holli, you got redirected. All is thanks to Miles, as he bought the domain name and hosting as a gift. There will be a redesign, soon. No worries, your RSS feeds, links, and permalinks should all redirect to the new URLs. Even if you linked to a specific post; again, thanks to Miles.

Here are my last two paintings for my Painting class. This course was…to say the least…miserable. I don’t want to go into details, but nearly the whole class, if not the whole class, has lost all respect for the professor. In any case, I’m proud of these two pieces. But don’t get me wrong, I am very aware that I am not a painter. I love painting rooms and it seems as though that’s the extent of my emotion.

Our final project had to have at least one dimension matching or close to our height. Mine is about 5′ x 3.5′. You can see in the background a classmate, who is 6′, if that helps you with the dimensions. I can’t even fit it in my car, so if I’m going to keep it, I have to walk it home or find someone with a big enough vehicle.

The painting before our final project was a still life, and I wanted to keep some sort of theme, so I brought some of my demo Mary Kay products. These last two paintings had to be in the style of an existing artist, and I chose Paul Cezanne. Several of his paintings had the black outline look, with a large emphasis on high contrast values.

The next project I’ll be posting about will be my character animation. I should be finishing that up today in class. Sincerely, holligregg.com

I wrote this once and something went bonkos with the internet, so here’s the summed up version.  If you want to watch my graduation speech on Sunday, go to www.dsu.edu on that day and there will be a link to a live streaming video of the commencement.  The link will be there for two weeks following the ceremony, if you miss it on Sunday.  The speech is a collaborative effort, with most credit going to Miles and his splendid writing skillz.

And to answer the question you all are asking yourselves: No, we aren’t streaming a video of our wedding online.  Nice try, nerds.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks making a baby. A few surprising things I’ve found out while on this miraculous journey:

• It takes patience
• Sometimes, the result isn’t exactly what you imagined
• It’s really, really hard work
• They don’t come with diapers, by default
• Another person involved is really just in the way
• Pacifiers are a God-send

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I have made a 3D model of a baby. I’m really happy with the model; which is a rare occasion, considering I’m a bit of a perfectionist and my own worst critic. I don’t often like my projects when I’m done with them. Of course, there are things I’d like to change, but I’m not dwelling on them because I like it overall. Next, we’ll add a skeleton and animate our models, (many people chose to model aliens, and I find that….weird interesting). This animation may be our final project, considering the time it takes to model and animate anything. And just figuring out how to animate a biped will take much time in itself. So, here’s hoping we don’t have another project for our final.

So this is basically my first post about the wedding since we got engaged. Next week, we’ll be three months away. And that’s a little crazy. Out of the weekends in the near future, it looks like the only one that is available is the weekend before I graduate. It makes me stressed out. I wouldn’t say that I get stressed out easily, I just have enough going on in my life all the time that I’m stressed often. I know a lot of this will pass in a couple weeks, because I’ll be motivated again, once the middle of the semester has passed.
Here are a few examples of how I know the stress is settling in:

• I’m getting zits on my cheeks
• When I think of a big project I need to do, I feel like sleeping
• More nights than not, I have a nightmare about the wedding going wrong or it comes up so fast that we don’t have everything ready
• Feeling self-conscious
• I would rather work ahead in class than work on wedding projects
• I make a checklist of little things (like, “think about such and such design”) just so that I can cross it off when I do that and feel like I accomplished something

I am very excited for the wedding. We have some great things planned, and are still planning some great things.  I just need a little more time in each day.

I introduce you to Farley, the character I modeled from a tutorial, named by a combination of two reader suggestions: Farlie and Harley. (Thanks, Miles and Christina!) He’s not superb, but he’s not bad. I had a lot of fun making him, so I hope you all enjoy him. I don’t know if we’ll be animating Farley, or moving right on to making our own characters and animating them. (I’ve already sketched my idea out…I’m such a modeling nerd.)

One thing is for sure, we need to put skeletons in them before we can animate realistic movement. Also, adding a skeleton makes it much easier to animate than without one. I’m quite excited and hope we get started ASAP. I’d like to include it in my portfolio by the end of the month (at least the model…the animation probably isn’t realistic).

I didn’t achieve it, mostly because of time, but I wanted his hair to look like the emo character that Chris blogged about long ago. I figure I would have needed at least an extra day to really get the hair even close.

Did you know that in The Little Mermaid, Ariel’s hair was the hardest thing for them to animate? And in Ratatouille, the hair (on the rats) was probably the most impressive part.

Let’s just say, there likely are people whose job it is to model the hair of a character and other people whose job it is to animate it. At least, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were that specific.