christina's journal

Sketched in Photoshop, traced in Illustrator. No comments in the istock critique forum after a dozen people had looked at it (the wonders of server stats). Guess that tells me what I need to know.

Advice from the istock critique forum was not to use a trace for my vector contributor submission. I’m working on my drawing skills therefore, and these latest pieces are exercises from The Big Book of Cartooning by Bruce Blitz. This style is a lot looser (and easier) than manga. Quite interesting too. Here’s another.

Manual trace from one of my photos.

I had an email from PayPal today, to say that I may soon have to prove my bona fides under legislation designed to inhibit money laundering and terrorist activities. Seems that I’m doing rather well from istock, what with them paying me $100 recently, and about $170 several months ago, and some threshold has been triggered. Or is all this regulation designed to boost employment? Next the government will be wanting to tax me on my income, despite having made a huge loss by the time I take expenses into account. Or doesn’t that count?

I’ve been watching a few Harry Potter movies lately, and they affect me deeply. Quite apart from the plot, the settings are all too familiar. I went to boarding school for six years, from age 11. And I felt very alienated at home, to the extent that I never looked forward to the holidays. I had the occasional friend who I played chess with, but was mostly on my own. The teachers weren’t too different either from Hogwarts teachers either, except that I wasn’t held in such high esteem as Harry was. Otherwise, very familiar scene, actually.

I’ve been working almost non-stop for the past few days on getting my head around MS Access. Despite reasonable efforts I was totally under-prepared for my class on Thursday morning, the tutorials we were meant to be doing were just far too dense. So I found a good book in the RMIT bookshop and have been working through it ever since. I did learn Access in 2001 but haven’t used it since. It’s a bit idiosyncratic, and I generally prefer command line tools (or web interface) to a database anyway. Tomorrow I have to write the assignment, at least I’ll be reasonably prepared for it. I hope I’ll be teaching this again sometime or else it’s a huge effort for little outcome.

There’s a good chance I’ll be offered an ongoing position after this year. I approached Graham about it after he asked if I’d undertake another substantial unpaid course development job, and he seemed to think it would go through as a matter of course. Apparently no one mentioned to the heads of school that the annual contract policy that has been applied for some time was ‘only temporary’, and all those refusals in recent years were a ‘misunderstanding’. I did need to ask though. I wasn’t offered an ongoing position this year, despite the situation being clarified last year.

Three hundred downloads that is. A small milestone, I’ll be counting in hundreds from now on. I think one of my cheaper lenses has been paid for by now.