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 =)

The Blahs

I don't know what it is about getting a late start to the day that just throws everything totally off.  I woke up late, the kids only just barely made it to school.  Then I stopped to eat and wait for the bank to open since I got my first unemployment check over the weekend.  I came back home and haven't done much since.

With the recent absence of the 11 year old routine of getting up and going to work on the other side of the valley every morning, I've developed a new routine over the past 3 weeks.  By now I've had my tea, breakfast, the dishes washed, the bed made, emails checked, my Farmville farmed, and I've already been at Project Purge (and I know I still haven't explained, I was going to today but I really must get off the computer and get to the doing before the day is over) for at least a half hour.  But here it is, lunch time, my fiance will be home from work soon, and I haven't even had my morning tea yet.

I'm going to go ahead and blame it on this nutty wind we're having today...if for no other reason than because the display and lights, on my cable box and router were flashing and blinking in an extremely weird twitchy way when I got home from the bank.  Every thing else was ok but the tv said there was some sort of power outage.  I think I'm having a bit of a power outage today too...too bad I don't have a reboot procedure like they do.  Hmmmmn I wonder if I have the tea now, will it help?

Eh, tomorrow will be better. I hope.

Purple, just because...

BeneThese are the pictures from the last post that I finally got around to posting.

I had the impulse to play with makeup the other night, as I often do.  And I indulged the impulse, as I too often don't.  I felt like using some dark and vivid purple because I rarely have occasion to wear it.  Despite being a makeup addict, I am not now nor have I ever been, the type that goes out of her way to wear makeup every single day.  In fact, I haven't worn makeup daily since the late 90's.  I only wear it when I'm going out with my fiance, parties, special occasions, etc.  There have been months at a time where I went without anything other than chapstick haha.  Yet here I sit with a fairly massive collection of makeup...especially eyeshadow, my grand weakness.  It's so terribly hard to resist the magnetic pull of the colors.  All laid out so pretty and inviting, just waiting for you to swatch them on your wrist and realize you can't walk away without at least one. Uhhg, it's so that I literally can't go near one of my usual makeup haunts unless I've got a little spare cash or I've got empty eyeshadow pots to trade in for free stuff.

Anyways, back to the look of the day.  The pictures are not great.  I'm hardly a photographer and my camera is old by new tech standards.  I did this at night so the lighting was bad, and I was cooking dinner so I blurred the sweat off my face with Photoshop in the last 2 pictures haha.  It was prettier than it looks here since the colors are not all that distinguishable in the pictures.

In case any other makeup fiends, geeks, and addicts come across my humble little blog, and happen to be curious...the products used are 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
Base: MAC Greasepaint Stick B & NYX Jumbo ES Pencil in Milk
MAC Pigments: Heritage Rouge, Push the Edge, Cornflower Blue, Full Force Violet, and Grape
MAC ES: Manila Paper, Samoa Silk, and Off the Page
Urban Decay 24/7 eyeliners: Zero and Rockstar
Lashes: MAC Prep+Prime Lash, Blinc tube mascara, and a half set of (brand unknown) falsies applied with Duo darktone glue

Lips
Benefit lipstick: I do, I do, I do
MAC Lipglass: Gold Rebel

And that's it for makeup talk babble.  I have another regular update post but I will save it for tomorrow I thinkg and go do some more damage on Project Purge...will explain later =)

Still a little haunted

It's been 10 days now and I'm still not quite used to this.  Last night I had a weird dream that I was still sneaking into work.  I managed to hoard reports and things off my desk that I was responsible for, in a back store room.  Nobody knew I was in there and I was afraid to come out lest someone should see me and pity me.  And then suddenly I gathered my courage and ran out the door leaving it all behind.  It felt pretty liberating in the dream but when I woke up, I felt disturbed that I should still over a week later, be having dreams about it.  But then again, 11 years is a damned long time to work somewhere and there were several people I didn't get a chance to say goodbye to, so I guess it's not so abnormal that I haven't completely emotionally let go of that place or my former duties there.  And it's just weird altogether to be home and actually have time on my hands...I haven't taken a proper vacation in, ever.  I've had a week off to go visit family in Miami during the holidays before, but I don't count that because it's always with my parents, the kids, and about 10 times the stress I normally had staying home.  Plus, it's been like 4 years since the last time.  I've never been able to take off and just go somewhere pretty to disconnect for a week.  The closest I've come to that is ComicCon '07 & '08 and that's only because the kids didn't go with me.  This feels like I'm on maternity leave again but I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that I'm not going back in a couple months this time.  That and, I'm definitely not pregnant right now haha.

It's just odd and I'm trying to stay busy while struggling to get used to this abstract concept of "free time".  I'm wondering when the novelty will wear off.  Last week, I obsessively cleaned my kitchen and the boys' bedroom.  This week I plan on tackling some still unpacked boxes that I never got around to since my move in March, my fiance's stuff which I also still haven't gotten around to finding a place for since August, and my desk which is as always, a general disaster area.  I'm definitely taking some hard earned me time to sort out all the crap that I never got around to doing while I had a job, so that I can actually do the things I enjoy like reading, crafts, graphics, etc, guilt free.  It wasn't completely guilt free yet because there are many other things that still need doing before I'm satisfied with the state of my home but, I played with my make up last night and did a pretty dark purple look using mostly MAC pigments.  I took pictures but I don't have time to see if any of them are usable right now so that will be a post for later.

In the meantime, not much else of note has happened yet.  I received my first continued claim form...it's not to be mailed back until the 17th which means I probably won't see my first UI check till the end of next week, oh joy.  I still haven't received my severance check yet so I'll have to make a phone call if it doesn't come by tomorrow since the "...before the 8th day..." period since I signed the agreement has officially lapsed.  I did my mandatory registration with CalJobs and found a perfect graphic design internship but I don't meet the qualifications because even though I'm enrolled in Art School, I'm not currently taking any classes and I can't take any classes until I find out whether it puts my UI at risk or not to do so.  Plus, I'm familiar with Photoshop but Illustrator is still weird to me.  I have it but I haven't played with it much and the internship stated experience with it as a requirement...right now I'm not even all that confident in my Photoshop skills since I haven't touched it in 3 years.  I need to get this place cleaned up so I can give myself a thorough refresher on everything before claiming to have experience with any of it on an actual job/internship interview.

Aaaaaaaand that's it I think.  I'll be back to babble some more when something actually happens.  Or when I'm feeling chatty again, whichever comes first hehe.  I'll also finish setting up my blogger profile and arranging things as I have time...it's driving me nuts not having it all customized already haha.