Practice, practice, and, wow, this is the truest adage in the world, but egggggh

For a random story, when I was kid I was forced to do sheets and sheets of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems. At the bottom of each page there was also this cute little raccoon who would more or less cheer me on with random sayings to keep working. The most common adage the raccoon had was, of course, "Practice, practice, practice!"

Those math problems ended up being the bane of my nine year old life and, in extension, so was that raccoon. Now whenever I hear "practice, practice, practice" I have the weirdest urge to get on my feet and do something randomly violent like flip a table or make some roaring animal noise or something. If I look at another sheet of subtraction problems again, it'll still be too soon.

Haha, weirdness aside, been practicing a lot lately.

I tried out an interesting website app called Atarichan Drawer where the program would randomly give you a body perspective made up of only circles and lines. It was pretty nice, but there were several moments where I had to randomize to another body when I could not tell what in the world a particular chaotic bunch of sphere and lines were. I also wondered here and there if some proportions were off when following the guidelines, but then I'm not so great on that either so who knows. 

I also experimented with the 3D tool in Illustrator and holy moly, I wish I knew about this thing earlier because it's super, super cool. I had so much fun learning this and I definitely have ideas now to use this for some other future projects here and there.

This was my second attempt because I was curious if I could use the 3D tool on handwritten words. The answer is a yes, but it's also pretty illegible with script so I gave up halfway. Still, I learned another option for the 3D tool, a bit of live trace shenanigans, and a bit of no-no's to work around for next practice.

I learned from this guide here, so if you didn't know about this either, try it out! 

Heeeey, look, more concept sketches for that thing-I'm-working-on-but-I-can't-reveal-yet. On another note, head masks and capes are super fun to draw, oh man.

And lastly, this portfolio box/cover I made. It's a temporary container, but it does the job in covering my portfolio and looking nice at the same time. I basically used a shipping box that my prints came in  with and covered the outside and inside with wrapping paper. I encountered a surprising amount of issues trying to make this simple case and most of them were because I kept calculating the inside of the box wrong over and over again. The red wrapping kept warping and wrinkling and, wow, wrapping paper is as scratch resistent as a cat cheerfully shredding curtains. 

Still, I'm happy how it turned out and if I can get a few uses out of it, then I'm pretty swell.