My Scion Rock Fest 2011 look & UD Eyeshadow Primer Potion Review/lovefest...

First of all, please forgive the HORRIBLE picture quality but I had to share this look because it looked so neat...it's too bad the picture didn't do it justice =/

This year, we went to the Scion Rock Fest in Pomona (aka Scion A/V Metal).  Never heard of it before but my fiance's brother really wanted to go so we decided to check it out.  I pretty much left my metal days behind in high school so I wasn't altogether looking forward to going but in the end, it was a fun time.  

Dressing up was definitely fun because I'd had a cut up Pantera t-shirt sitting in my closet for years and no place to wear it to until Saturday.  Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of the outfit and the makeup early BECAUSE I am the type of goober who always has a camera phone and a regular camera in her purse, but rarely remembers to use either of them.  I could kick myself too because I really wanted to get a pic of me and my hubby at the festival but I forgot to do that too, dumb.  The festival was an ALL day thing so by the time I got around to taking at least 1 picture, it was at 2am, with an iPhone, and literally about 5 minutes before I passed out into a mild coma.  And here it is...

I did what I could to bring out the colors but this is the best it's going to get for now. For anybody interested, the product list is as follows:

Face

Foundation: Bare Minerals 2G Golden Medium Matte
MAC Blush: Coppertone and Peaches
Highlight: NARS Illuminator in Orgasm
All over: MAC Fix+ Spray

Eyes
Primer: Urban Decay Eyeshadow Primer Potion
MAC Pigment:  Golden Lemon

MAC ES: Vanilla, Saddle, Goldenrod, Gesso, and Carbon

Urban Decay 24/7 eyeliners: Zero, Bourbon, and Honey

MAC Fluidline gel liner: Blacktrack

Lashes: MAC Prep+Prime Lash, Blinc tube mascara

Lips

Softlips Vanilla chapstick...which they made me throw away at the Fox Theatre so I'm glad I didn't bring anything expensive.

On to the review/lovefest.  Like I said at the beginning of the post, this picture was taken around 2am AFTER spending nearly the entire day outside, queueing in the sun and walking from venue to venue. Not to mention sweating inside the dank stuffy venues themselves.  I finsihed applying my makeup at noon and we didn't get home till after 1am.  Bad picture quality aside, there was little to no fading, no greasy creasing, and no smudging.  I was so exhausted I didn't even wash my face before bed (yuck I know), and most of the eyeshadow was still in place when I woke up late the next day.  If you need any more proof that Urban Decay's Eyeshadow Primer Potion is everything they claim it is, then I don't know what to tell you.  

I'm off, errands await.

Photoshop frenzy...

I'm definitely on a photoshop kick right now that I've decided to step back from the job search for a minute.  I had to, it was driving me out of my mind.  The money situation is not quite so desperate yet that I'm ready to just go find a minimum wage job wherever they'll take me...but I was feeling desperate enough to just have a job at all, that I almost did exactly that.  I'm not ready to resort to my last resort yet so I'm taking a break and clearing my head with some solid photoshop practice. 

Here's another tutorial I started last week and just got around to finishing yesterday.  Altogether, it didn't take very long at all but it was a busy weekend and then of course I got sidetracked with the road cone from the previous post.  Here's what I got by following the pshero tutorial:

Modern 3D Text Effect ...

It was one of the better written tutorials I've tried.  Clear, understandable, and very noob friendly. It's spot on DesignModo.com's  Fresh & Impressive Collection of Photoshop Tutorials, is well deserved.  And it gave me a chance to play with Illustrator a little bit as well which I've admittedly been a little intimidated by for a long time and often shied away from in the past.  I will master it eventually but I haven't had the best experiences with Illustrator tutorials in the past so I became pretty unmotivated to spend what little free time I had, searching for good ones.  Well the days still aren't long enough but I definitely have more time than I did while employed so consider me now motivated hehe.  Anyway, this link is definitely going in the Illustrator folder for further future reference.

I may or may not have another makeup look post later...it depends on how clear the picture came out.

A little facelift for my neglected domain...

I've had my domain for years though I've never done a thing with it. Well nothing outside of temporary storage and a little image hosting for a LiveJournal blog I haven't touched in years that is.  I had meant to just buy a domain name but didn't realize at the time that buying a hosting package with it, was not a requirement.  I found out otherwise not long after but since I wasn't doing anything with it, I never bothered to shop around for a better deal.  Until last Friday.

After 5 or so odd years of overpaying for a tiny amount of space, I've finally moved my site.    I decided to try out HostGator.com.  They charge about the same as I was paying before but now I have unlimited space as opposed to slightly under 1GB.  And the CPanel has a lot more noob friendly tools in it.  I'm sure it was only because I really didn't have a website to speak of that the move happened lighting fast.  They said it would take 24-48 hours but the switch was immediate as soon as I updated the nameservers and uploaded my sad little "under construction" index file haha.  I can't believe I neglected it so long...couldn't even bother to put up a proper temporary page, bad bad Mars.

Anyways, it was such a smooth and satisfying experience, I went ahead and registered another domain for my future (hopefully not fantasy) career in web/graphic design and/or animation production company.  I figured it would keep me motivated to keep practicing on my own till I can afford to go back to school, during this crappy time of rejection and let downs.  I guess it worked at least a little because as soon as the sites were up and running, I started creating a temporary page for both.

I found this pretty cool tutorial on PSD Tuts+ for a road cone.  It can be found at Illustrate a Traffic Cone Icon in Photoshop.  Apparently it was originally published in Czech so the translation is a tiny bit shaky at times but still pretty understandable.  And beginners beware...you definitely have to fill in a few blanks yourself to achieve some of the differences you'll notice in the screen caps between one step and the next that are not explained or even referred to at all.  But that turned out to be a good thing because it challenged me and I ended up learning some badass tricks I've never heard of before.

This is what I came up with...

And then here are screencaps of  the two SUPER quick temporary pages I literally threw together yesterday, showcasing my shiny new road cone...

 I was kind of in a hurry because it was getting close to the time I usually pick up my kids, so I just did some simple text with a drop shadow.  Then I did a basic gradient to chop and repeat vertically with CSS, and added a blueish back light that matched the text and background palette. It didn't make sense to me to use purple (or any other color that had nothing to do with the general design) like the tutorial had suggested, hence the blue.  Then I uploaded the separate parts, and coded them all back together again.  The screencaps are a bit on the wide side because I have a wide screen monitor and I prefer a maximized window for my browser.  I set the body's background color to match the light blue in the gradient so there would be a seamless background fill on maximized setups like mine... I hate empty whitespace around sites.

It's been a REALLY long time so I had to refer back to W3Schools for a couple syntax brain farts hehe ;).  And in retrospect, I probably should have reversed the gradient...at least I think so but only because of the gloss on the cone, but I just didn't like the way it looked that way when I tried it.  This is all temporary anyway, and MOST importantly, a learning experience.  I will get around to finding a comprehensive light source tutorial eventually, right now it's all about honing what I already know and challenging myself to take on the tools I have struggled with in the past, like the pen tool...you've bested me before punk, but it's on now ;).

That's all for now, the dishes and laundry await...oh joy of joys.

Well that didn't last long...

...keeping up with this blog I mean.  My hopes, plans, intentions for a new career and a fresh start, have been on hold due to circumstances and obstacles outside of my realm of control.  I have been on a roller coaster of stress, renewed optimism, hard let downs, weight gain, frantic desperation, lather-rinse-repeat for the last 5 months exactly today. As a result, I have not felt like blogging much of anything.  Can you blame me?

I've only just within this past week, begun to creep out from under my rock and do little things like check my months old twitter messages and maybe let one or two people know I'm still alive.  When things go wrong in my world, I tend to go on social lock-down.  It's sort of involuntary and difficult to break out of once in.  I log out of everything and just disappear for a while.  I guess it's my coping mechanism *shrugs*.

In the meantime, I've gotten quite tired of spending hours upon hours EVERY single morning combing job postings for jobs I don't-really-want-but-feel-desperate-enough-to-apply-for-despite-only-partially-fitting-the-qualifications, and do something conducive to my on-hold-indefinitely-but-still-not-given-up-entirely hopes of breaking into graphic/web design sometime in the next decade.  I've decided to hit the tutorials at least a couple times a week and take a break from my demoralizing and fruitless search.  If I don't, I'll go mad.

Today, I did a tutorial by graphic designer, Tyler Denis, listed by DesignModo.com as one of  many in a Fresh & Impressive Collection of Photoshop Tutorials.

Funky Retro Wavy Text Effect

I hadn't eaten breakfast yet and I was waiting for a call so I was too distracted to put my own spin on the text/design and just ended up following the directions word for word with the exception of the font (because I didn't feel like downloading it right then).  Here's what I came up with...

That's all for today.  I'll be back, whenever the hell I feel like it I suppose =)