A year of blogging every week almost

Screencaps from some of this year's blogs

"Never talk about what you'll do, only talk about what you did."

I read that quote at the beginning of this year. It's from an article about the psychology of new year's resolutions. The article claimed that people who state what they plan to accomplish rarely follow through, while people who succeed at their resolutions only talk about them after they've accomplished them. It made sense to me. My new year's resolution was to up my creative output, so I decided I'd start a blog as a place to "talk about what I did".

Now, I had a blog. What I didn't have, was motivation. Then I heard about The Iron Blogger SF. It's a website where local bloggers can sign up to blog once a week. If they miss a week, they owe 5 bucks. Miss 6 weeks and you're out. Motivation: check! I signed up, and I promised myself I'd only post blogs of substance. No blogging about what I ate for breakfast, the song I'm really into right now, or the sweet new pants I just bought.

I started blogging and loved it! It was fun to post a little project and talk about the concept or process. It started to get a bit challenging though, when my career took a bizarre left turn. I transitioned from modeling into hair simulations, then after Dreamworks shut down I moved out of film industry altogether and ended up in the tech industry as a generalist. Lots of learning, not a lot of time for new projects. A brutal crunch at work caused me to miss blogging for 5 weeks straight. That meant one more missed blog and I was out.

One cool thing about blogging was looking at the blog statistics. The most viewed blogs were about our weird family portraits, my wife's diet and the nightmare weekend I spent with a pool. The least popular were about my little Crabbot model and a Nanoloop song. 

So this is it! The last blog! I pulled it off! Now that it's done I can proudly say I accomplished my new years resolution of 2015! I'm super proud of my little motivation of a blog. If you've read any of my posts this year, thanks so much for being a part of it! I'm also crazy proud of the other bloggers who also managed an entire year of blogging once a week. You guys are incredibly inspirational!

Bags of worm poop

Here's a package design I did for my Dad over Christmas vacation. 

My Dad got into gardening in his early teens, while growing weed in the California wilderness. (Nothing motivates a hippie to learn gardening more than the promise of a healthy crop of buds) He got his life in order not long after that, but not before becoming an expert gardener. Now, decades later, he's honed his craft to the point that he grows delicious and comically large vegetables in the desert using nothing more than bark chips and worm castings he's carefully cultivated himself. (For the unfamiliar, worm castings are worm crap)

Serious, with bark chips in the desert!

His gardens are so successful that he started selling his worm castings online. I took a look at the presentation and nearly had an aesthetic heart attack!

Fistfuls of worm goop! BLUE COMIC SANS!!!

I figured I'd make him a package design for Christmas. I sat down with him and we talked about what he wanted in a design. He wanted to get across the idea that this was made by hand, with care. I figured an etching would get this idea across perfectly. Plus, I've been dying to do another one. For imagery, I suggested he try to avoid the idea that this was a form of manure and instead focus on the fact that this makes stuff grow like mad. "And please" I said,"No goofy worm mascot!" His idea was a hand holding dirt with a plant growing out of it. I liked it, so we checked to see if it'd been done before.

It had. A lot.

I kicked around the idea for a bit till I came up with a design that I felt got the idea across. Then I bucked down for a solid day of sketching and etching. By midnight my hand had cramped solid, but I'd finally made this.

I felt pretty good about it, or at least I was just happy to be done with it. Then it slowly dawned on me... when you stamp something, you flip it over... meaning the image is reversed... meaning you have to print text in reverse...

So I cut out the text and re-etched it all over again in reverse.

Done! Since it's a stamp he can stamp the design straight onto the bags. Hopefully this'll up the presentation. And hey, if you want a monster garden, I know a guy.

The Yogos pitch

I rarely ever draw in a professional capacity. I simply don't draw often enough to have the turnover and quality of a professional concept artist. Whenever I'm asked to do concepts I pass the request on to my longtime collaborator Don Flores. So, I felt pretty intimidated back in late 2008 when Laika's commercial department tapped me to do some concept art on a commercial spec pitch for something called Yogos. I was unfamiliar with the product, so they handed me a fistful of the hard, colorful candies. They were disgusting. They tasted like the leftover crust in an old strawberry yogurt container fished out of the trash, which is not surprising, because that's exactly what they were. Hardened yogurt balls.

I'd like a bag of old hardened yogurt balls please

The concept for the commercial was a cartoon of kids in space having a "Houston, we have a problem..." moment when they run out of Yogos. They wanted the drawings to look like they were done by kids, but not look cheap. My take on this was to make the drawings simple and use ink and watercolor washes for the backgrounds.

We didn't end up winning the bid and the product was discontinued shortly after that. Possibly because they didn't choose us for their marketing. Or possibly because they were selling bags of crusty yogurt balls.

Moldy Oldies

My mom recently found an old portfolio of mine from highschool. I was ecstatic! I'd thought all my drawings from that period were lost. It was so much fun digging through the old drawings. There are lots of memories tied up with these, and it's cool to see the drawings transitioning from sucking to... well, sucking slightly less.

It's seen some stuff

My dear old friend Nicole

   

 An adorable mis-application of 3 point perspective. Keep at it buddy, you'll get it.

My old dog "Patchy". A universally loved sweetheart.

I have no idea who this is, but I hope her eyes aren't weird in real life.

Ladies and gentlemen... the tortured artist. 

So moody. So misunderstood. So ART!!!

The discovery of the portfolio was bittersweet. In my Senior year I entered a city-wide high-school art competition. I created two horrifically pretentious mixed media pieces for it. They took grand prize and honorable mention respectively. At the time I thought I won due to the quality of the work. In retrospect, it was probably because the concepts were comically obtuse so they seemed like "ART". I was hoping the smaller of the two would be disassembled and crammed in my old portfolio. Unfortunately, it was not. Both were probably discarded during a move or in a fit of "uncluttering". I still have the award ribbons though.

That said, the portfolio did contain some drawings that represented a seminal moment in my life. They'll get their own blog post next week.

Since I'm digging up old stuff, here are some REALLY old drawings I re-discovered a few months back.

 

Early teens. Lots of drawing from life

At about 13 years old I made an epic comic book about a light-saber wielding pilot squirrel

At about 9 years old I made several comics featuring "flat noes and fred"

They revolved around characters falling down and tooting.

The oldest drawing I have. I REALLY liked megaman.

It's not far off from the original cover art.

Better actually...

Nanoloop

Apps have come and gone on my phone. There's only one app that I've played with nonstop for years.

 Nanoloop.

I was introduced to it by Doctor Popular one night over dinner. I was instantly hooked. It's an ingeniously simple chiptune program. The thing I love about this program is that you have to make every sample by hand. It even allows you to work so granular as to make each note a unique sound. This program and a pair of headphones has been responsible for countless extended bathroom breaks.

A video posted by Jason Baldwin (@jasonsbaldwin) on Nov 19, 2015 at 10:57pm PST

One of my nanoloop tracks

It was originally designed for the gameboy and gameboy advance, so the interface and graphics are extremely sparse. The first time I looked at was like looking at Sanskrit; a bunch of abstract symbols with no context. Add to that the fact that each sound has to be created from scratch, it means the initial sessions can be daunting. A buddy of mine put it best,"...how you manage to make anything that doesn't sound like sonar bloops and pack-man noises using Nanoloop is a mystery to me."

But once you get the hang of it, it's incredibly intuitive. I love it so much that I finally gave in and bought a gameboy advance and a proper nanoloop cartridge.

While nanoloop on the iphone simulates chiptune sounds, nanoloop on the gameboy uses the gameboy sound chip to create sounds. The result is a much clearer, crisper, nostalgic sound. The downside is that you're introduced to all the hardware limitations of the 8 bit era and a brand new learning curve. After my first session with it, I solemnly placed the gameboy in my junk drawer. I'll get back to it someday...

Edit: After posting this, Doctor Popular sent me the nanoloop file of a song he'd made from some middleschooler's vocal samples (see comments). I made this quick remix and had a blast doing it!

The original song and blog post is HERE.

every indie film ever

Figure Drawing

The amazing Randal

Christina Linskey as Catwoman

That time I maybe joined a cult...

A friend handed me a blank, white credit card and said, "I don't want to say anything else about this except that its... well, it's just cool. You'll get an email in a couple of days.".

A few days later I received a cryptic email saying I'd been sponsored for the Latitude Society. It asked me to input a time and date I'd be available to be at a specific address. Once I input them, it played a short video of scanning the card I'd just received through a card reader outside some ornate, unmarked doors. A few weeks later I found myself outside those same ornate, unmarked doors located somewhere in the heart of San Francisco's mission District. I slid the blank credit card through the nearby card reader and the doors unlocked. I opened them and walked inside, through dark curtains. I was confronted by a classic Alice and wonderland rabbit hole:

It was a narrow room with pulsating lights and a droning soundscape. In front of me was an ornate fireplace with a polished hardwood slide instead of a firepit. The slide went into complete darkness. This was the point of no return. I took a deep breath then slid in, getting knocked from left to right as the slide descended in the dark.

I was unceremoniously chucked out into a dark blue room. There was a ticket taker sitting unmoving behind frosted glass and three doors on my left. I stood up and tried the doors but they were locked. Suddenly, a secret panel opened in the wall. I was presented with a box where I had to place my phone, wallet and any other personal items. Unable to go back or proceed, I had no choice, so I placed what I had in the box and closed the door. When the panel locked shut, I heard a noise and the first of the three doors unlocked. I opened it to be confronted again with darkness. I walked into the dark a few yards before I felt the roof closing in on me. I could only navigate by touch, so I put my hands on the ceiling as it lowered while I walked forward.  Eventually I was crawling on my hands and knees through a space roughly 2.5 feet square. The tunnel turned and climbed hills and valleys till I finally tumbled out into the next space.

 ...A sacred library. 

This library contained an incredible, self-reading one-page book that narrated it's story to me. Once the book had completed it's story, it directed me onward. 

The next hour or so was incredible. Here are a few of the highlights:

-Secret speakeasy with creepy holographic imagery

-mystery bellhop

-tracking locations by ornate copper plates secretly embedded into San Francisco city streets

-a wordless handoff with a stranger in a local bar for a silver coin.

-a hidden arcade where a sentient IA tested my worth.

I came out of the experience baffled. What just happened to me, and who the hell is running something so expensive and extravagant in complete secrecy? 

Well, early this week, the mystery came to an end. Like most amazing ideas that come out of San Francisco, it died once it failed to turn a profit. Apparently such an ornate secret organization takes about 3 thousand dollars a day to maintain, and the inherent problem with a secret society: it can't make cash by advertising. 

The genius and ultimate failure was in the execution. Once someone completed the experience, they were given the option of joining the organization and buying credit cards to give to others. It allowed people, for 30 bucks, to gift someone a singularly unique experience rather than, say, a giftcard that'll probably get used for groceries and instantly forgotten.

So, hat's off to you Latitude Society. You made me feel like a kid again, imagining crazy adventures and exploring secret worlds hidden just under mundane skin of everyday life. You crazy knuckleheads created something truly amazing.

Though very little info about this is available, it being a secret society and all, you can read a bit about it HERE.

SHE LOST HER PREGNANCY WEIGHT WITH THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW TRAINERS HATE HER!!!

My wife lost all her pregnancy weight using this one weird trick.

She didn't over eat.

She didn't starve herself, or liquify her food or lose 10 lbs in a week with a cleanse. She didn't even cut out any foods.

Handy toxin reference chart

She did start eating healthier foods, but only in service of freeing up enough calories to have an ice cream sandwich at the end of the day.

She started working out, but only to free up enough calories for a bonus ice cream sandwich.

I'm not saying it was easy... here's a picture I once took of her figuring out if she had enough calories left for another slice of pizza.

She didn't

She and I got inspired by Eric Lyman's fantastic post on practical weightloss. We downloaded MyFitnessPal and True Weight on our phones and set about our practical eating habits. My willpower lasted 2 weeks before I reverted to my standby routine of excess and regret. Meanwhile Janna kept at it, losing a doctor recommended 1-2 lbs a week. She never went hungry, or without an ice cream sandwich.

While I'm profoundly proud of her, this presents a small problem. There's a comfort in being as overweight as your spouse. It's like, your hotness stays on an equal level. But now, she's all fit, and I'm still packing a winter layer. We've got a Flintstone's thing going on...

Knowhattamean?

So I've got no choice but to get serious about tracking my calories.

...or convince her that a 3rd ice cream sandwich won't hurt. Calories are a lie. Butter and bacon are superfoods.