Sneak Peak: "Out the Other Side {dot} com"

So it should probably come as no surprise that I have been (as always) a very busy girl this past week while on "vacation". Check out the evidence below:

Recently, I have been hard at work designing the layout for what will eventually be "Out the Other Side's" official website. It's taken me a several re-designs and a good bit of time, but I think that I'm finally getting around to developing a look for the official site that's really.....me. :)

There's still a hell of a lot of work to be done (including the tedious tweaking of the navigation on the interior pages). However, I'm pretty happy with how the buttons on my opening page are turning out (which is what you are seeing above). I ultimately wanted something splashy, colorful, graphical and fun that showcases some of my strange little characters. I believe that I am well on my way towards meeting all of that critieria thus far. ;)

In any case, I'm getting pretty excited about the fact that "Out the Other Side {dot} Com" could actually look.....well....professional!

Me? Professional? Who would have thunk it? ;)

Seriously, my ultimate goal with the layout is to give off a professional and polished vibe while still leaving some of my own funkiness and personality intact . I want to show off my craft in a way that also showcases my technical skill, some level of professionalism and (as always) my ever present kookiness. It's a fine line to walk but I'm hoping that my design (to date) is beginning to reflect a little bit of my own controlled chaos.

Counting My Blessings....

As I close in on graduating college during a massive economic crisis, I would be lying if I said that this year hasn't been quite a challenging one for me (as well as millions of other Americians). However, despite this having been one of the most emotionally trying semesters of my college career, I certainly have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.

Above all else, I am thankful to have a roof over my head and to have some the most genuine, creative and beautiful (inside and out) people in my life. I am fortunate enough to have a motley crew of fabulous friends (who also double as my surrogate family for the most part). They love me, put up with me and keep me from thinking too highly of myself. ;)

I love them all madly. <3

I also have two wonderful parents who love me (despite the fact that I turned out to be a nutty artist ;).

Here are some other things that I am thankful for:

- My Macbook Pro / child

- Adobe CS4 (in particular -- Illustrator, Photoshop and

After Effects ;)

- Twitter

- Prince, Peter Gabriel, The Who, and Mathieu Chedid

-Hagen Das Coffee ice cream

-"Just My Size" clothing (for keeping me truly "fluffy n' fabulous" ;)

- My infamous rainbow converse

- Hot tea with cream and sugar

- Memories of seeing Sydney Australia from an airplane

- Funky music

- My own tendency to pursue the ambitious,

innovative and eclectic in my art

- Chris Milk, Mark Romanek, Spike Jonze and any

other music video director who inspires me with their craft).

- A certain foxy, ginger-haired angel :)

- Fake eyelashes (the longer, the better )

- Jaco Pastorious with the lights turned down

- L'Oreal Feria Hair color in Ruby Rush

- Conan O'brien and his fabulous hair

- My little blue ipod nano / window to my soul

- Ruby red lipstick

- 'House MD'

- Being able to dig my way out of a depressed funk

- Having my creative fire back

And last but not least....

I'm thankful for each and every one of you guys who read "Out the Other Side". Being the author of this blog has given me an amazing opportunity to network with so many incredibly talented, creative, and insanely wonderful people. I am happy to give you guys a little piece of me with every post that I write and I am incredibly thankful for all of the positive response and all of the kind comments that you all send me. You are all a wonderful audience for my madness and I look forward to continuing to bring you entertaining and thoughtful content for a very long time to come. :)

Thank you all for all of your support and once agan, have a fantastic Thanksgiving! :)

Kreativ Blogger Award

So this is incredibly belated, but about a month ago "Out the Other Side" was graciously awarded it's first blog award!

I honestly feel horrible that it has taken me so long to acknowledge this but think it's safe to say that other commitments have distracted me from properly mentioning my "Kreative Blogger Award".

To that end, I must send a big shout out and sincere thank you to my fabulous fashionista friend and fellow creative, Ciara. She is the beauty, brains and brilliance behind StyleFuss (which you should totally check out ASAP). She is also the wonderful lady who gave me this award. I cannot thank her enough for giving me this recognition and for just being an incredible friend in general. It makes me feel pretty good to think that maybe I'm doing something half way right over here! :)

Here's how the award works :

1. Tell 7 things that you don't already know about me

2. Name 7 other blogs to receive this award

3. Leave a comment on each of the blogs I nominated

4. Thank the person who gave you the award

Things you may (or may not) know about me: Christy of "Out the Other Side"

1. I've always been a little...um....different. ;)

2. I am the proud owner of naturally curly/frizzy hair that occasionally has a mind/zip code of it's own.

3. I secretly want to be a jazz singer/rock star who happens to design stuff. I used to sing a lot at talent shows, bad karaoke nights and college open mic nights. However, I gave it up after it was brought to my attention that I'm probably a better artist than I am a singer. I still sing when no one's looking, though ;)

Here's a video of me randomly belting out Gershwin's "The Man I Love". :)

4. I studied abroad in Australia a couple of years ago. I lived there for six months and it was one of the most amazing and life changing experiences of my life. I would love to go back there for a longer engagement some day. :)

Here is my favorite of all of the many pictures I shot of the famous Sydney Opera House:

5. My mom is one of the most genuinely sweet people that you could ever meet (and it's beyond me how she puts up with/loves me despite how I turned out to be such a little monster in comparison ;).

My dad, on the other hand, is a big goofball just like his daughter. :)

6. Once upon a time, I met a man named Henry. Meeting Henry Rollins (Black Flag / Rollins Band) was seriously one of the coolest moments of my life. I gave him a copy of a poster that I made for him (see photo) and he even signed a copy for me. VERY COOL! :)

7. Miss. Amber of Ezriah Designs is my creative soul sister , my best friend and pretty much one of the few people who can decode the craziness that comes out of my mouth. ;)

I adore her, admire her and I miss her like you wouldn't believe! <3

....and there you have it! You now know entirely too much about me. :)

I would like to award "The Kreativ Blogger Award" to the following bloggers:

Jared at "Design Something"

Damion over at "Damion' Artwork"

Eamo at "Eamo's Knuckle Sandwich"

Chris at "Chris Wahl Art"

Deborah at "Everybody I Shot is Dead"

Jesse at "Raw Toast Design"

Patrick at "Patrick Freeman Illustration/Design Blog"

Lauren at "Nymphont"

(I know -- that's more than 7 blogs. However, I it's hard for me to pick just seven when there are so many amazing and exciting bloggers out there...so there. :)

I hope that everybody has a wonderful (and safe) Thanksgiving and thank you again, Miss. Ciara! ;)

Work in Progress: "Chelsea Interactive Dress-Up Doll"

First things first : go ahead and click on the clothes below and drag them over to Chelsea so she's not roamin' around in her underthings. ;)

After an amazing (and highly productive) weekend, it is with much excitement that I present my newest work in progress! However, before we get into the piece, here is a little aside:

Anyone with insight into my creative process can tell you that despite my ever growing proficiency with most things Adobe, Flash and I have had a particularly rocky relationship for some time now.

More specifically -- my relationship with Action-Script is a particularly difficult one.

I realize that in my last post that I said something similar about my working relationship with Adobe After Effects. This is slightly different though. After Effects and myself took a small break despite the fact that working with that program is generally joyful for me. Flash and I, on the other hand, have practically gotten restraining orders from each other and refuse to answer each other's phone calls.

Bottom line -- outside of being able to create some fun stuff involving roll overs and some stop-motion pieces (that could have just as well have been created in After Effects), my magical powers in regards to exploiting Flash's interactivity are painfully limited. :(

Recently -- I got really brave and decided to work towards changing that a little. :)

It has always been a big dream of mine to do something interactive with these bizarre little characters of mine. However, interactivity usually goes hand in hand with having a decent command of Action Script (at least....where Adobe Flash is concerned).

I am notoriously horrible when it comes to working with Action Script! I'm not even going to try and sugar-coat that fact.

I always manage to screw up little things in the code (which , if you have worked with Flash, you know that this isn't hard to do). My clumsiness with the code usually leads to a lot of tiny mistakes. This usually leads to a piece where nothing works and a good bit of irritation from yours truly. ;)

That brings us to the above piece -- The "Chelsea Interactive Dress-Up Doll" (in progress).

If you go and start dragging around the items of clothing on the piece, you will find that you can "dress" Chelsea in several different configurations of clothes.

Conceptually, it's not much (and yes, I do realize that this is about the third or 4th time that 'Chelsea' has made an appearance in one of my little experiments. What can I say.....I dig her;).

However -- I am beyond proud of the fact that (with the help of one of my professors and a Flash tutorial book) I managed to figure out enough Action Script to make all of those clothes drag around the screen. That's a pretty big technical milestone for me if you really think about it.

I could not be happier that I've managed to pull this simple effect off. It makes me kind of excited about how far I can go with Flash in the future. :)

In the meantime, feel free to click, drag, and explore the "Chelsea Interactive Dress-up Doll". It is my sincere hope that this piece is the beginning of many more exciting things to come! :)

Original Motion Content -- "Breathe and Bleed"

So after a long 7 month hiatus from creating any time based art, I decided to kiss and make up with Adobe After Effects and invest some time into a little experimentation.

If you happen to recall my very first post here on "Out the Other Side" (which you can find HERE ;) , I talked at length about my "Memories and Hallucinations" project (which has yet to have it's official debut on this blog). That particular project is approximately 5 minutes long, completely drawn/digially illustrated by hand and took around 4 months to complete.

I carefully and painstakingly fussed over every detail of "Memories" and to say that it was an ambitious undertaking is a gross understatement.

It was such an ambitious undertaking that I kind of didn't want to touch After Effects for a very long time after that. :/

Don't get me wrong -- motion graphics are definitely among my many artistic passions. However, I believe that after 4 months of working on the same thing....I just got a little burnt out. It happens, I suppose.

"Breathe and Bleed " is no where near as technically ambitious (and can honestly use a little more fine tuning), but it is very loose and experimental. More than that - it's much shorter than most of my moving creations. Anyone who has seen some of my motion work can tell you that this is a pretty big breakthrough for me. I really tried to challenge myself to visually say what I needed to in a minute or less. I'm kind of proud of myself for actually self editing for time and am quite pleased with how I managed to shape this into a somewhat compelling piece on a very tight work schedule.

I'll admit, self editing my work is a skill that I need to spend a little more time on. Artistically, I tend to thrive on eclectic extravagance, but it's pretty amazing what you can do when you give yourself certain limits. With time and practice I hope to one day get better at setting those creative boundaries for myself.

As for the concept behind "Breathe and Bleed" -- I'm just going to leave that up to all of you to interpret it. It's a pretty open ended piece and I have my own thoughts about were I was at personally and mentally when I was working on it. However, I don't really want to get into all of that now. I just hope that everybody has a good time watching it. :)

In Progress - " Kelly Tries to Catch a Freddie"

The above image is a rough digital idea "sketch" of the newest addition to my "Kelly and Freddie" screen-print series.

More than that, this is also a good example of how leaving me with an entertaining concept and a request to "digitally enhance" certain body parts can get hilariously out of hand in a hurry.

That's right...Kelly wanted her illustrated alter ego to have bigger boobs, and bigger boobs are what she got.

Seriously -- be careful what you wish for.

In any case, this particular look into Kelly and Freddie Mercury's imaginary love life is currently in it's infancy. I seriously cannot wait to develop this as a full color screen-print in the near future. However, this digital version made me giggle so much that I just had to share it with you all. :)

Now, let's watch Mr. Mercury himself rub some funk on the stage in this show stopping live performance of "Another One Bites the Dust". :)