I got to hold a tarantula (though a small one) and two hissing cockroaches, but no millipede! I might have to add that to my 101 Things. Handle a millipede. Simply because I think they’re awesome and I’d imagine it would feel quite orgasmic to have all their little legs crawl on my arms.

/creepy

I have just two more pieces to make for my portfolio. Here are some of the most recent ones I’ve finished:

Daft Punk: 100% gradient mesh, done in Illustrator.  I don’t think I ever want to do gradient mesh again.

Wall Cop: Photoshop. Yes, that is Robocop and Wall-E looking ever so…attracted to each other?

Book of Dwight Schrute’s Greatest Quotes: It’s fake, but boy do I wish it was real. Photoshop too.

Now for some worthy plugs, if you haven’t yet, visit AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com.

It’s so great that I made my whole Illustrator class visit the website at the same time, including the professor.

And last, your business card is CRAP:

I feel like posting some of the work that I’ve been doing for this class, so here goes it:

I made a mock Wired Magazine cover using my self-portrait. Some people thought it was real! (I wish…)

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I started this one yesterday and finished the same day.  The model’s name is Raquel Reed and she kind of reminds me of the 80′s cartoon character Jem, hence the Jem-like illustration below. Ever since I found her Myspace, before she became a professional model, I’ve been using her photos for a lot of my work for the past four years.  She has an overwhelming number of photos that are just incredibly great to work with.

Dear lorday! the FUNNEST one of all (notice the sargasm), the epic yet terribly incomplete Daft Punk.  It took me a grand total of 12 hours to make this one and I’m still, clearly, not even done.  Both of their ears are nothing but absolute bitches and skanks to make.  Regardless, I’m actually quite proud of what has come out so far.  This is all done in gradient mesh, the first time I tried the gradient mesh tool was last week, on a photo of an apple, so to create something like this for my second attempt is enough for me to pat myself on the back…while half of the class stared in awkward silence.

First, I completed my first ever thing on 101 Things, which is to “help out a church.” I know, kind of random of me, but it’s one of the things I really wanted to do just to see if I can break out of my comfort zone. A week ago, I read in a bulletin that one of the churches nearby my house was holding a Hawaii themed fashion show to which I (nervously) volunteered as a model.  The fashion show took place last Saturday and I had a blast.

99% of the audience were women of 55 years and older, and I gotta tell you guys, the only kind of people I actually like showing off to is older ladies, because they can really make you feel like you’re the greatest gift to humanity; anything you do in front of them is quite possibly the most amazing thing they have ever seen in their entire lives. When I was eight I did a half-assed cartwheel in front of grandma once and she nearly had a heart attack, the good kind, since she told me I should’ve tried out for the Olympics as a gymnast. Thanks grandma.

As I was weaving through the tables, strutting my conservative-spring-like-Hawaii outfits for the audience, most of the little ol’ ladies were just in absolute awe.  It was quite flattering and adorable.

Second, I found a really neat museum in Santa Ana.  There were two houses and two separate gardens, and apparently nothing’s been changed since the Victorian era. Their gardens are breathtaking. The first one was rather small, half of it was a rose garden and the other half held rows of orange trees.

The second “garden” was huge that I don’t think it should be even called a garden. It had a lot of little hills which was mostly covered in a field of small sunflowers. As you walk deeper into the hills, there’s an area that looks much like a forest, and what’s amazing about this particular spot is it looked like it was snowing. I don’t know what it was, but the air was laden with either pieces of white bird feathers (there were a lot of plucked bird feathers on the ground it was really creepy) or those little dandelion fluffs.

Unfortunately my camera was not able to capture them, but I did get the sunflower fields:

And last but certainly not least, after the fashion show, Jules and I headed to a Street Fighter tribute art show and tournament called Jab Strong Fierce (thanks to Matt who I didn’t get a chance to see that night lol).

They had a really fun costume play contest. Each character had to introduce themselves to the crowd by demonstrating insane fight moves. One of the Chun-Lis though came out and just stood there and only said, “Hi, I’m Chun-Li and this is my outfit!” and spun around to show the rest of her costume. BOOOOOOO! While the rest of the Chun-Lis, the more thick and curvaceous ones, came out with a boom, they yelled shit like, “HIYA!”, power kicked and power punched the air and showed us what Chun-Li truly looked like. And the two who were tied had to fight it out for second place haha it was great.

Before the tournament you were allowed to play for fun and whatever you were playing was projected to a much bigger screen so that everyone else in the art exhibit could watch. Besides playing the original Street Fighter in first grade I’ve never really played it before, so I was not planning to play at all in front of a live audience, until the guy who lost the last round stood up and suggested that I take the controller. The guy who I was suppose to play against (mind you he’s in the tournament and he’s suppose to be really good) looked at me and pointed to the empty seat that was next to him.

“No..n-n-no,” I tried to put the controller back, “I’ve never played this before.” Jules, from behind, shoved me into the seat and I found myself playing SF for the first time with a SF tournament competitor while the world was watching (at least it felt like it). I told him to go easy on me so we started every round with his health only a quarter full while mine was completely full. I lost once, and wanted to facepalm in real life (photo below).

As for the actual tournament, it was very entertaining and is probably one of the most intense games I had ever witnessed in my 21 years of being on this earth.  I had fun.

This year, yesterday, to be exact, I skipped portfolio class to check out his new material at the Brea Improv.  Man, he really is hilarious, and most importantly, at the end of the show, I manned up and told him that his new material was awesome, took pictures with him and told him that he was tall (yeah, i don’t know, that’s all I could think of at the given moment).

Also, my monster is complete!

I am probably going to make a layout out of it soon, so watch out for that. I kind of need a new layout anyway because I noticed that I tend to blog more often when the layout is fresh. The older my website layout gets, the less I write. Haha, and I don’t know why.

Update: New layout! Hurrah!

My friends and I went there last night.  We ate, we drank, and played Dirty Minds which is a board game I’m not very good at because my mind is usually in the gutter and it can never really get out unless somebody explains it to me.

We also took pictures.  It took us about fifty shots to get one good photo where all of our faces were kept straight and oh so serious (we wanted to imitate those really old creepy photos where no one ever smiles), but even my face in there was a complete joke that Matt thought I was trying to hold in my farts.

On to school, remember that Vietnamese class I was talking about? Well I have a white man sitting next to me, probably in his mid-late forties.  He refers me as “em” which is in Vietnamese, can be used as a term of endearment or correct me if I’m wrong, it can also be used generally for younger people, right? He also told me I was naughty in Vietnamese once.  Yeah, I uh…have no idea where that came from, but I thought that was a little weird.

I also made a new friend in that class, and she’s pretty cool so far.  She can’t see red colors because she’s partially colorblind.  The last time I had class with her, she wore a red long sleeve shirt, so I informed her, “You know you’re wearing green right?” LOLZ.

I guess it’s time for a trim?

I have a portfolio design class and the point of the class is to build your art portfolio by coming up with designs that the professors throws at you and…that’s basically it. She assumes we already got our Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign shit down, so she’d usually give us these wonderfully short lectures which lasts no longer than ten minutes, and then we’re all on our own. I love it.

We just sit there, designing awesome shit, and making conversation with our classmates if we wanted to. Most of my classmates are pretty awesome too, well at least the two guys I sit in between. They get my jokes. The guy on the left started playing one of my current obsessions that is Left 4 Dead, and the one on the right is currently reading World War Z. Oh yes, could this be fate unraveling right before our eyes to construct the absolute zombie-genocidest squad?

As for the assignment, we have to redesign the whole look of the animal cracker box. It sounds boring at first, but since the professor isn’t the kind of person to stifle our creativity, we can do whatever we want. Here’s what I have so far:

Suggestions are always welcome!

Another class I’m taking is Beginning Vietnamese. What’s funny about this one is that there are two different types of people that make up this class:

Asian chicks and White older men…

Asian chicks and White older men. Look, I’m not insinuating anything. Ok, well maybe I am. We all want one thing…and that is to learn the Vietnamese language. Amirite?

You can check out the actual video here . I can be seen at: 0:40, 4:22, 4:29, 4:35 (which is a pretty good closeup of me).

Here’s a screenshot of it:

I recently did this cool photoshop trick where you can clone yourself as much as you want.  It was really fun to take the pictures, I actually have a lot of photos where there’s a whole of bunch of Tiff in it, but I like this one the most. I love it! And I thought it’d be good enough to post here:

And last, Helga posted an entry on pink outfits and items to rock for Breast Cancer Awareness month.  One of those items that attracted me was a Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS pink camera! I loved it so much, that I bought the camera on Amazon, five minutes later…literally.

I don’t really think before I buy, I just act on impulse.

This can’t be good.

I was inspired by a really cool Obey t-shirt I had.  The t-shirt was pink (favorite color btw!), and it had a drawing of a bear’s mouth in the center of the shirt, and around that mouth, has grizzly bears surrounding it. It was the coolest looking print I’ve ever seen.  It called to me and told me to paint it on my wall.  Haha

My friend Hai has been helping me paint my new mural, and I’m so thankful for that. After showing it to my other friends via Myspace, they wanted in on the painting fun, so now, I’m going to have more people come over to help make my mural look even more epic. My other friends are also very talented painters, so I’d like to call it a collaboration piece. haha

So yeah, it’s not completed yet.  We’re planning to paint some grizzly bears in there.  I cant wait for the finish look!

The top photo was our first day, and the bottom photo is our second day of painting. And if you ask me, I’m more than satisfied with it.

From looking at the rest of my work, it’s an alright transformation, definitely not as convincing as my zombie photo though.

Photoshop, oh photoshop…oh how I love thee!